The Gender Genie: how the hell is this supposed to work? Does it work on you?

[Markxxx]

I am male

I did 12 things I wrote

3 blog → Male
3 Non Fiction → Male
3 Fiction → Male
3 Poems → Female

Hmmmm I wonder if it’s biased against rhymes

[Abby_Emma_Sasha]

Here’s the paragraph I put in first:
I’m wearing pink panties and I’m dreaming of George Clooney. Gosh, I wish I could be in a candyland of fluffy kittens and puppies. I am soooo excited about Prom.

Based on keywords beand and it concludes I’m female.

Here’s my second paragraph:

I have more pink panties that are as sexy as what I’m wearing now. George Clooney is who I want in them. If he’s around then I’ll be more inclined to want puppies and kittens. I’m more excited about Prom, because of what and who I can be around.

Now Genie thinks I am male because I used *around,*as,what,who and more.
Yeah, I know lots of guys like Clooney, puppies and kittens but pink panties? C’mon, I’m a girlie girl and even I don’t care for pink panties.

[FalconFinder]

Well, I entered in four things I’ve written (all letters) and I got a 50/50 split. 2 said female, 2 said male.

(I am female)

[Fish]

The logical test, of course, is to feed it this thread.

[tdn]

@Abby_Emma_Sasha

C’mon, I’m a girlie girl and even I don’t care for pink panties.

I LOVE pink panties! Just not, you know, on me.

[pulykamell]

@Abby_Emma_Sasha

Here’s the paragraph I put in first:
I’m wearing pink panties and I’m dreaming of George Clooney. Gosh, I wish I could be in a candyland of fluffy kittens and puppies. I am soooo excited about Prom.

Based on keywords beand and it concludes I’m female.

Here’s my second paragraph:

I have more pink panties that are as sexy as what I’m wearing now. George Clooney is who I want in them. If he’s around then I’ll be more inclined to want puppies and kittens. I’m more excited about Prom, because of what and who I can be around.

Now Genie thinks I am male because I used *around,*as,what,who and more.
Yeah, I know lots of guys like Clooney, puppies and kittens but pink panties? C’mon, I’m a girlie girl and even I don’t care for pink panties.

To be fair, the computer has no idea what you’re writing, it isn’t trying to parse or make sense of the text, but it just seems to be doing a statistical analysis of keywords. The keywords, I also presume, were not primarily hand-annotated but statistically derived by feeding the analysis program a large corpus of male-written fiction with a large corpus of female-written fiction and seeing what words, if any, correlate with gender. Presumably, a word like “panties” or “pink” didn’t show up enough to make a dent in the “scoring” of the text as male or female, or perhaps it didn’t correlate at all.

[JR_Brown]

@pulykamell

To be fair, the computer has no idea what you’re writing, it isn’t trying to parse or make sense of the text, but it just seems to be doing a statistical analysis of keywords. The keywords, I also presume, were not primarily hand-annotated but statistically derived by feeding the analysis program a large corpus of male-written fiction with a large corpus of female-written fiction and seeing what words, if any, correlate with gender. Presumably, a word like “panties” or “pink” didn’t show up enough to make a dent in the “scoring” of the text as male or female, or perhaps it didn’t correlate at all.

As far as I can tell, the algorithm uses ONLY the words I and Yllaria listed:

@JR_Brown

Male words (strongest to weakest): around, what, more, are, as, who, below, is, these, the, a, at, it, many, said, above, to.

Female words (ditto): with, if, not, where, be, when, your, her, we, should, she, and, me, myself, hers, was.

So no “pink”, no “panties”, in fact no nouns, adjectives, or verbs at all, just prepositions and pronouns.

[Anaamika]

@Fish

The logical test, of course, is to feed it this thread.

I did. Words: 6448

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 6126
Male Score: 7362

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

[Captain_Amazing]

@pulykamell

Presumably, a word like “panties” or “pink” didn’t show up enough to make a dent in the “scoring” of the text as male or female, or perhaps it didn’t correlate at all.

The original algorithm, at least, specifically ignored explicitly “male” and “female” words. So a word like “woman” or “man”, “penis” or “vagina”, wouldn’t affect it.