Time one: Female (am e-mail)
Time Two: Male (second e-mail)
Time Three: Male (third e-mail
Time Four: Female (Straight Dope post)
Time Five: Male (Straight Dope post)
Right three times, wrong two.
Well it incorrectly identified the following passage:
From this we may draw one of two conclusions:
-
It bases it’s responces based on the Analysis at the bottom of the page, using simple multiplication and addition. If the total is positave, the author is male, if negative, female. Or
-
The algorithm concludes that illogical writting was obviously written by a female:)
Ya’ll seem like a good-natured bunch. Please don’t hurt the newbie
Newbie? You’ve been here purt’near two years! <----Incorrectly identified as being written by a female.
Happy
From many, many years of writing things for other people, I can write female or male at the drop of a hat.
The more you hedge and qualify, the more you sound.
“I want to get my dick wet with some busty bombshell” sound fem because you are hoping, not assuming.
No no no no! Wait, I mean I can write masculine or feminine style. Not male or female. This is a gender genie. Not a sex genie.
I typed in “gearbox steel football playboy” and it thinks I’m female.
“I went to the boxing match in my monster truck and drank a six pack of beer. Then I scratched my balls and picked a fight with a bouncer.”
- female.
“Do you think I’m pretty? Let’s have a slumber party. teehee. I’m just a girl. I want a pony.”
- female.
So far everything I’ve tried has come up as female.
Have you checked your pants lately? 
One for female…
Two for female
One for male…
I guess I am female when I used the a lot… and male when its a short concise expalnation of an isolated event.
It’s 1:53. Do you know what your gender is?
yup…
said the author of the two lines of my preceeding post is male. The hubby is gonna be REAL surprised when he finds out!
Sorry, Krisfer, simult there. That was supposed to be tagged onto Happy’s.
It got one out of five of random quotes from a personal ad I submitted correct.
Methinks that at this point, it’d do better reversed.
Hrm…I ran a whole lot of excerpts from my writing, and here’s the results it came up with:
Excerpt from seminar paper on Henry VI: male
Program bio from production I’m working on: female
Excerpt from BA thesis on Richard II: male
Excerpt from MA thesis on Volpone: male
Excerpt from grad school application statement: female
Excerpt from review of The Fellowship of the Ring: female
Excerpt from seminar paper on Paradise Lost: male
Excerpt from seminar paper on the Kenilworth entertainments: male (excerpt from conference-length version of same paper yielded same result)
Description of the course objectives of the freshman comp section I’m teaching: female
Apparently, my academic writing is very masculine. Heh. 
Then, since I felt like wasting time, I decided to see what the Genie makes of famous Shakespeare speeches.
Feminine: Falstaff, Richard III (!!), Mark Antony, Juliet, Cleopatra, Iago (!), Richard II (okay, that’s not that surprising), Macbeth (!), Lady Macbeth, Lear, Prospero, Viola, Katherine (the Shrew), Henry IV (!), Coriolanus (!!)
Masculine: Henry V, Hamlet, Othello
I think that, basically, if you use a lot of first-person pronouns it tags you as feminine. Doesn’t explain why it interpreted Hamlet as masculine though…
The box marked “analysis” shows how it works things out.
“The” “a” “it” and numbers gain male points, and “with” “for”, possessives, possessive pronouns and negatives (n’t and not) gain female points. The words are differently weighted - “the” is the most heavily weighted term for maleness and “with” is the most heavily weighted term for femaleness.
I think the idea is that men write factual, dispassionate sentences about objects and numbers, whereas women write about togetherness and cooperation and human relations and general negativity.
Or some such idea.
Well, I put in a couple of paragraphs from my paper, and got male every time. I think Tansu’s onto something - I’m writing a paper - its got to be dispassionate, and numerate.
It’s not a question of me personally being “onto something” it’s a question of scrolling down on the page and observing how which words the authors of the test are looking for, and how they are weghted. A scienitific paper is certainly going to be heavy on “the”, “it”, “a” and numbers, and although it’ll contain some “with” and “for”, they probably won’t outweigh the instances of “the” and “a”. Instances of “his” “her” “mine” “yours” etc will be very low.
I put in text from a random email and it says that I am femail. However, the accuracy right now is:
More academic and general excerpts, in the spirit of Katisha’s experiment:
Statement of purpose from my Intro to Drama course syllabus: Female
Assignment from my freshman comp class: Male
Notes on a book called The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England: Female
Excerpt from my dissertation prospectus: Male
Excerpt from a male colleague’s prospectus: Male
Excerpt from a female colleague’s prospects (on a women’s studies-related topic): Male
Paragraph from a travel article I wrote about Alaska: Male
I’d say it’s right about fifty percent of the time.
I typed in my last post and it got it right.