Gendered Prose
March 6th, 2007 by 
Maureen McHugh
I found mention of this 
on the blog Making Light. I am quite delighted that my prose tends to skew male. Everyone should try. Stick 500 words or so of any piece of prose and it will calculate the writer’s gender.
Posted in Daily Life, Maureen, People, Writing | 
13 Comments »
March 6th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Well, hell. From when I was sitting in for GreyLion.
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Female Score: 707
Male Score: 363
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!
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They’s something wrong with this goddam thing. The batteries have run down, maybe.
March 6th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
No, you’re just obviously a lesbian in a man’s body…
March 6th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Oh, and I had one chunk of writing come back as female (my short story with a first person female protagonist) and my blog chunk come back as male.
I can live with that…
March 6th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Female Score: 564
Male Score: 700
Female Score: 660
Male Score: 523
So, using two different sections of my current book I flip-flop. I consider that pretty neutral, gender wise.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Oh, but it cannot predict Raphael Carter! ~_~
I mean, it can predict Raphael but it couldn’t get it right.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
My eleven-year-old is posting about Raphael Carter.
Hmmph.
March 6th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
So, Bulky Jones is a lesbian (hot lesbian babe, of course), and both Caroline and Steve are hermaphrodites.
It’s just amazing what you can learn from these on-line programs.
March 6th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Okay, pasting in 500 instances of the word “clitoris” resulted in a gender neutral reading.
March 6th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Gee, Steve, I’d have expected that to skew male.
March 6th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I took this over on Making Light. I’d expected that maybe The Stone War would have skewed male and the Sarah Tolerance books female, but no. I am male across the board.
Imagine how surprised my husband will be.
March 7th, 2007 at 12:55 am
This with a big ol’ long chunk of Canadian vacation, part 2; although not the part where I mention my new Harajuku Lovers purse. The results:
Words: 625
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)
Female Score: 588
Male Score: 868
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
AND the BBC brain sex quiz thinks I’m a guy too…
March 7th, 2007 at 4:34 am
I have a few thousand words here on this site that I could use (made it easy), and I’m apparently male. My wife will be happy to hear that.
March 7th, 2007 at 8:31 am
I tried it a few times, and it isn’t sure about me. I came ot male a little more often, but the margin always looked like an election in Florida…