The Gender Genie

There's a website, called The Gender Genie, that claims to be able to tell whether the author of a piece of prose is male or female. I decided to run Everyday Narcissism through the genie to test its accuracy. I figured that the notion of determining an author's sex or gender based on a computer program was suspect, so my assumption was that it would be right about half the time. (Which is what it would get by random chance.)

Everyday Narcissism has 72 blog posts. I excluded my list and quiz posts when I ran the genie. That leaves me with 61 posts to analyze. 24 of them came up as female, and 37 of them came up as male. This means that the genie was only correct 39% of the time. The genie actually did worse than random chance.

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to which posts came up as female and which posts came up as male. Jen posited that the computer was just guessing based on stereotypes, but that didn't seem to fit because the two posts I wrote about laundry came up as male, and the post I wrote about how much I hate shopping came up as female.

The funniest error was in the analysis of An Open Letter to the California Highway Patrol. In that post, I specifically stated that I'm a woman. The gender genie's result: male. At least the one where I talked about being vaccinated for cervical cancer came up female!

My results, in case you were wondering:

Female	Male The Gender Genie
Reevaluating First Impressions	Space Invaders
War against IRAC	Installation Wizard
The Stupid Agency	Legal Textbook Review
Bill of Rights	SCU Campus Food Review
Still Alive	Ironic Spam
Frugal Living	Business Writing Help
Some Things Just Bug Me	Pondering Pronouns
How to Motivate	Words You Don't Hear Every Day
I Had It Coming	NaNoWriMo
Short Thoughts	What's In a Name
A Public Service Announcement	The Jester Hat
A New Addition to the World	To PhD or not to PhD
AAA AAA AAA AAA!	My Love/Hate Relationship with Citation
The Extended Pain of Finals	Feline Alarm Clock
Un-Shopping	Short Thoughts, Volume 2
Au Revoir to My Long Hair	Nerdy Goodness
How the Cat Stole Christmas	The First Week of School
Karaoke	Freedom!
Out of Gas	I'm Still Alive Over Here (More or Less)
How to Make Your Own Charcoal	The Physicists at FedEx
Funny T-Shirts	Washing Machine Update
The Ten Commandments of Roommates	Dreams that Come True
My Other Job Involves Time Travel	Washing Machine Agitation
Welcome to Everyday Narcissism	Goodbye, Sunglasses
	Feeling Overwhelmed
	The Trials of Fake Post Offices
	Happy New Year!
	Grand Plans for Christmas Break
	Happy Thanksgiving
	Cleaning Disk Drives
	It's a Hardware Problem
	Law School Humor
	I Think I'm Going to Paint My Car
	An Open Letter to the California Highway Patrol
	Word of the Day
	Musical Instruments