Genre Gender.

This fascinating website uses an interesting mathematical algorithm to predict the likely gender of the writer.

Now, I’m not sure how I feel about my writing being “gendered” (presumably if an algorithm can predict such a thing with a fair degree of consistency, our own subconscious reading of the text might infer a gender as well, though perhaps with less accuracy). I think ideally, I’d like to be almost perfectly balanced between “masculine” and “feminine,” especially since I have always striven to balance both energies in my own personality.

The article accompanying the website breaks down the development of the algorithm and explains a bit how it works:

When the Israeli stylometricans, as they call themselves, study a text, they scrub it clean of everything that’s ”topic specific” — in other words, no ”gown,” no ”princess,” no ”keg,” no ”bullet-resistant.” This is how sophisticated language analysts work these days. They ignore the obvious stuff and concentrate instead on the seemingly unobtrusive little tics that the writer and reader barely notice.

What happens when you strip writing of “topic specific” words? You’re left with the basic grammatical structure of a text, how sentences are shaped and slung together with conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns and such. Before even reading the article, I’d begun to notice the algorithmic pattern that it describes:

Similarly, what the gender-identifying algorithm picks up on is that women are apparently far more likely than men to use personal pronouns — ”I,” ”you” and ‘’she” especially. Men, on the other hand, prefer so-called determiners — ”a,” ”the,” ”that,” ”these” — along with numbers and quantifiers like ”more” and ‘’some.” What this suggests, according to Moshe Koppel, an author of the Israeli project, is that women are more comfortable talking or thinking about people and relationships, while men prefer to contemplate things.

I’m not sure if I buy all that. Anyone who knows me knows I am absolutely obsessed with “contemplating things” (why the hell do I write poetry if not because it affords me the opportunity to focus an intense gaze on objects and events that might otherwise be overlooked?)… and yet it is the interconnection, the relationships, between things (and, by extension, between people) that makes things in themselves fascinating. Few people can write engagingly about pudding or void or anything homogeneous—complexity, i.e. a thing’s relationship to itself, as well as contrast make all “things” and people interesting and worth discussing. If anything, this algorithm might help lay bare the sexual stereotypes so embedded in our culture and upbringing, but as usual, I doubt very much if it reveals any biological necessity for such stark differences.

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Of course, I always have to be the stubborn one to shrug off the rules. I couldn’t help but play around with this “Gender Genie” for a little while, plugging in various examples of my work, seeing what results it returned. Eventually, I began to notice a very interesting pattern

As might be expected (by anyone except the writers of the aforementioned article, apparently), examples of my more formal essays and book reviews tended to be overwhelmingly “masculine” in their use of language, while less formal blog entries returned more balanced results, often just on the cusp, though still tending towards the work of a “male” writer. These results make sense to me, though—not only has my nonfiction writing always been very analytical and structured (something which the algorithm only picks up on ostensibly in terms of conjunctions), but whenever I am writing “about something” like a theory or a text, isn’t it inevitable that my language is bound to be more abstracted from “people and relationships”?

Next, I plugged in some examples of my poetry, and the results at first surprised me. For some reason, I expected my poems to be more “feminine,” because poetry has always provided me with a space inside which I could allow myself vulnerability and uncertainty, in which I could freely explore “people and relationships” in creative, intuitive ways. But instead, my poetry too came back as heavily masculine (especially, it seemed, when I was writing from a female’s perspective, either my own or a fictional character’s; however, in poems written from the perspective of “the Orphan,” a male character within a particular collection, the writing leaned more towards the feminine… in some ways, this pleased me, as I had been going for an intentional “role reversal” of stereotypical masculinity in this particular group of poems—it would appear I succeeded). On further consideration, I can understand why poetry may be more “masculine.” I have always been taught that poetry should be made up of intense, concise language, and eschew “weak” or wishy-washy words (especially unnecessary conjunctions and vague pronouns, which also happen to make up a large percentage of “feminine key words” the algorithm screens for). Because my poetry has always sought metaphors for “people and relationships” in the world of “things,” it may appear to a “topic blind” analysis to be masculine in nature.

Last but not least, I plugged in excerpts from my fiction and short stories. Lo and behold–finally, I am writing like a girl! (Should I be rejoicing?) My fiction scores for femininity were almost disconcertingly imbalanced (though perhaps this is partly due to the fact that my major work of fiction right now has almost an entirely female cast of characters, quite intentionally). But then, what is fiction, but the perfect genre for straight-forward explorations of “people and relationships”? Breaking down my long story into segments, often times when my main character, Kim, appeared alone, working at her art or contemplating recent events, the language veered towards the “masculine” again, while scenes involving multiple characters interacting with one another invariably registered as “feminine,” even when all the characters involved were male.

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So what does this mean? Seems to me that genre, much more than someone’s sex, is likely to influence the apparent “gender” of a text. (My god, that’s almost poetic!) Of course, the “Gender Genie” asks you to select what genre your work appears in (supposedly so that it can make the appropriate adjustments), but experimenting with the same text plugged in under varying options often returned very similar results. So perhaps the algorithm isn’t perfect just yet. Or perhaps it applies best to the kind of mass-produced magazine articles and serialized novels being written today, while more serious or creative or “transgenre” works slip through mathematical blind-spots.

What may be more interesting is to compare the algorithmic results with our ability to predict through “guess” or intuition the sex of the writer, and to explore how readers experience these differences, especially as they manifest as a “preference” for one kind of gendered writing or another. Do readers, male and female, appreciate “masculine” nonfiction but expect more “feminine” language in their fiction? Do males generally prefer masculine language and females feminine language regardless of the genre? Is there an appeal, to each sex, for writing with traits from the opposite gender? Many, many questions…. But o no, I’m afraid I’ve started “contemplating things” again! No wonder I can’t land a man.

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Postscript: In case you were curious, this blog post is rather “masculine,” with a score of 1903 (male) to 1571 (female).

~ by Ali on November 23, 2008.