Well. When The Gender Genie was launched, no one here expected it to take off and make its way around the Internet. Thanks to everyone who linked to it, and hope you’re having fun taunting your friends with their results.
From reading various sites that link to it, I’ve noticed that many have taken issue with both its results and stats. It also seems like a lot of people are confusing gender with sex, so I thought I’d write up a post to explain the difference.
Sex, apart from the act of having it, refers to biological or physical traits that determine whether one is a man or a woman. We all know the difference between a penis and a vagina, right?
Gender refers to society’s classification of characteristics perceived to be particular to a certain sex. For example, think about humans as hunter-gatherers. Hunting connotes a masculine activity, so your brain might conjure up images of burly men carrying huge rifles and wearing orange vests. But not all hunters are men and a woman who hunts is still biologically a woman. In imagining her, however, you might assign her some masculine traits like being butch or wearing iron-toed boots.
I realize the above gender example leans heavily toward stereotyping, but it gets the point across. Biology determines sex while society assigns gender. To relate this back to The Gender Genie, a woman author whose passage comes up with a male result is seen by Koppel and Argamon’s algorithm as having a masculine quality to her writing because she’s writing more about specific things (using keywords like "the," "a," "some," numbers, and "it") than connections (using keywords like "with," possessives, possessive pronouns, "for," and "not").
The Gender Genie should really come up with results like "masculine" or "feminine" rather than "male" or "female." However, the former set of terms is highly subjective since gender can be assigned by either society as a whole or individual members of society. If a user puts in a passage by a man and gets "feminine" as a result, the user might think of that man as having feminine qualities and answer yes when asked if the result is correct.
The stats themselves are not to be taken at face value. Their near 50/50 results shows us that determining sex from a writing sample is hit or miss. Determining gender from writing, though, is another matter entirely.
As for all you men who think The Gender Genie is bunk because of your consistent female results, I suggest you stop fighting it and go buy a dress already.
