When I submitted a blog entry I wrote, ranting about PMS, it told me I write like a male. However, when I submitted a sample of my fiction, told from the point of view of a teenage boy, it indicated the author as female.
Apparently both my characters and I have a bit of gender “alignment” issues. 
I guess I’m a closet female, 1248-951. The entry was a letter written to my sister and her husband after BIL ripped into my daughter over a (perceived) insult to my sister. The object of the exercise was to resolve a tense situation, while at the same time slipping in an emphatic “don’t ever do that again.” I suppose if I’d simply said “knock it off or I’ll punch your lights out,” it would have gotten the physical gender right; but now I suppose I have to go out and buy myself a new wardrobe in pink.
It said I was male (I am not) with the first sample. I’ll try a few more but it’ll probably get those wrong too.
Interesting. I spoke with a colleague who also writes short stories, and he said he didn’t know if he could write a story from the perspective of a female character. I said I wrote from both male and female perspectives and that maybe he was just overthinking things a bit. I don’t know.
I can speak to this question. In another forum, we had “show us your porn face” day, so I up up a (sfw) funny porn face i happened to have in my image server.
And forgot about it.
Now, as time went by, I began to notice I was getting way more unsolicited Boobies In Email than should be called normal–then, when I changed my image back to the real one, I got hate mail from all the lesbians telling me to delete their BIE.
Now, there’s more to this tale, because I also teach a full courseload of English writing classes. I can tell you that it is impossible to tell who is male, female, big, short, old, black, middle class, Chinese. . .
It is possible to tell gender in certain instances, but since I teach Discourse Pragmatics, the writer could be playing with me, so POV may not be a reliable indicator. It’s amazing what people know about convincing you they aren’t the gender they are.
I used to take a lot of direction from names, but now even last names like Chen or first names like Kenyata are no longer any use in determining things about the writer. And of course, since we are in the Deep South, the names Shirley and Gayle could as easily belong to males as Jimmy or Bobby, unless they are spelled Jimmye or Bobbye.
Twice I got male, once female, all from blog posts.
I’m a girl.
The Gender Genie misidentified me as a male from three different prose samples. I’ve often had this problem online, too, even when I chose a username that sounded distinctly female. Once I was even accused on a messageboard of being a man posing as a woman. Puzzles the heck out of me, but I doubt that there is anything I can do about it.
When I submitted an erotic poem to the Gender Genie, it identified me as female. That makes me feel a little better.
1st try:
Female Score: 524
Male Score: 533
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
2nd try:
Female Score: 1012
Male Score: 1234
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
The gender genie correctly identified me as male.
Female Score: 1206
Male Score: 2199
Words: 1163
Yeah, I’d like to know a little about that algorithm too. Both the male and female score are higher than the total number of words?
First I tried a blog post - it came out right. They predicted male, which I am.
Female Score: 403
Male Score: 491
Of course, that means I’m mostly almost equal. That was with a 450 word post.
I submitted part of my term paper about Gilgamesh from World Lit. - 1112 words of pure guy.
Female Score: 831
Male Score: 2050
Maybe that says something for my academic writing - it identifies me well.
Brendon Small
I just put in the intro paragraph from my last assignment. Called it male - wrong again, genie!
Female Score: 158
Male Score: 196
Anyone else notice how the words “her” and “she” make it female, but there is no male equivalent to the other side?
Overwhelmingly male on every sample I pasted. It is a simple matter, really – women think in terms of people, men in terms of ideas/actions. It is emotional vs logical. I have always been more logical than emotional, so I wasn’t in the leat surprised to be seen as male. Besides that, I have always been mistaken for being male on messageboards and in chat rooms unless and until I make my gender known.
It’s really a good tool, although of course, it makes the more logical women a bit self-concious and the more sensitive men the same. My husband would undoubtedly be seen as female, since he thinks more in terms of emotional/people things.
What I find interesting is how many women take offense at being seen as male through their writings.
I am not surprised that many of the women who post to the SDMB are misidentified as male – speaks volumes about the level of intellect/logic to be found here.
I just entered my ex’s old blog entry. He’s kind of effeminate/sensitive/annoyingly emotional. The results:
Female Score: 622
Male Score: 360
figures.
For try number 1:
Female Score: 2110
Male Score: 1347
Try number 2:
Female Score: 967
Male Score: 968
I seem to be a female, or reaaallly androgynous.
It correctly pegged me as female with my third and fourth writing samples, which were stories that featured female characters and their p.o.v.
The first one, which it pegged as male-written, was written in a more objective p.o.v. but centered on a male soldier.
Hmm.
I just entered a post that I’d written in a GQ thread on evolution and ginger hair. The results:
“Female Score: 174
Male Score: 470
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!”
The Gender Genie thinks incorrectly.
It guessed me correctly as a male.
For fun I submitted Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut and it came back as:
"Words: 2232
Female Score: 2596
Male Score: 2593
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!"
For the latest Straight Dope article by Cecil Adams I got:
"Words: 801
Female Score: 804
Male Score: 1075
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!"
A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner got:
"Words: 3736
Female Score: 5759
Male Score: 4818
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!"
In conclusion, either Cecil Adams is a manlier writer than Faulkner and Vonnegut, or this device is full of it.
I still have all my high school junior/senior papers as well as my college freshman works. The English papers were individually very close but nearly all of them pegged me as a woman. The rest made it say, correctly, that I was male, which makes sense I suppose since they were more analytical and dealt with subjects like science and history.
Since the scores were so close otherwise maybe that means I’ve mastered the neutral stance. Uh, yeah, that’s it…
Despite feeding it text which included the word “daahhlinks”, it correctly offered a wheelbarrow for my testicles.
Elephantiasis is a bitch
Yeah OK. I was asking for that one.