Female vs Male Writing
 

I see that Robin has a poem on TDE which suggests that there is a difference between male and female writing.

Do you believe there is a difference?

I found this site:

http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

"Inspired by an article and a test in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author."

You just paste in a sample of text (about 500 words is required), and it tells you if the writer is male or female.

I tried four or five prose pieces of mine, and they all come back as "Male".

I tried a letter from Emily D. = "Female"

Another letter from Virginia W. = "Female"

Give it a try with your own samples, or just explain your opinion on the matter.

Whee, fun, Mark. Although it's a bit confusing.

I tried 3 poems, two blog entries and two prose pieces. Two of three poems came back male, both blog entries came back male and both prose peices came back female.

So my final score was 4 - male and 3 - female.

I'm pretty happy with that, to be honest. I couldn't tell you why, though, coz I don't know.

I gave it a 600-word batch of blog entries. It thinks I'm male, but just barely (871 to 837).

The algorithm seems to be looking only at the uses of particular words, and its patterns look crazy to me. "Is" and "are" are feminine words, but "was" is masculine?? Articles are feminine?? It's way too simplistic. There may well be differences in men's and women's writing styles generally, but I have my doubts that this little tool gets at them.

Interesting results, Lo and Maryann.

I just tried a Catherine Mansfield short story = "Female"

Everything I put in of mine = "Male" (by a long way)

But a short story from Joseph Conrad = "Female"

Weird.

Maryann, I don't think that it's just the presence of those key words, but the frequency with which they are used that determines the gender.

Anyway, the site was just a way into the discussion.

I saw this mentioned in a science magazine some time ago, and recall that the algorithm looks for words and phrases coded in English for interpersonal warmth, coziness, and casualness, and weights these as feminine. The male weighting is for less intimate locutions and 'drier' phraseology. Since reading that I have myself been guessing at the authorship of New York Times articles and other material. I've been right about 75% of the time I think, maybe better.

Allen

Well, my prose seems to read as pretty strongly male. As for three long, relatively recent poems, two read as male, while the third, the most wistful and presumably "lyrical" of the lot, came back as "female."

Quincy, you'll have to get a hair-cut, you big Jessie!

Seriously, I have put quite a few poems in - I paste a handful together so the sample is big enough, the small word-counts might not be enough to go on.

Here is the latest response:

Words: 976
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 689
Male Score: 1500

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

That's a big differential!

I am so BUTCH!!!

Well, this result might be of interest to Mary.

I put in six sizable random slabs of text from each one of six Shakespeare plays - here's the result:

Coriolanus:

1273 female
1110 male

= "Female"

Antony and Cleopatra:

1540 female
594 male

= "Female"

Macbeth:

614 female
616 male

= "Male" (but only just)

Hamlet:

1093 female
955 male

= "Female"

Othello:

1541 female
1076 male

= "Female"

Love's Labour Lost:

1281 female
934 male

= "Female"

So Mary, the gender genie agrees with you that Shakespeare was a woman!

Of course Shakespeare was written by a woman: Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke. Everyone knows that.

When I finished reading everything by Conrad, I said to myself, "Now, that's a man!" I think what I really meant, though, is that's a human. I loved his books.

Before you get too excited about the Shakespeare result, Mary, check this one:

Spenser's sonnets:

Female Score: 1137
Male Score: 283

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

VERY female indeed.

But I don't think anyone has claimed that a woman wrote the Amoretti.

Jeffers' writing, as Wendy once said, is very masculine, and the progam confirms this:

Robinson Jeffers

Female Score: 877
Male Score: 1212

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

But what about that great masculinist, sexist pig, Bertie Lawrence:

D.H. Lawrence

Female Score: 1741
Male Score: 1369

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

?????????????

Oh, Mark, you did have to go there...!

Results for the poem you mentioned, with lines by the following girlypoet dilettantes, artfully arranged into a rabid feminist poetics screed by yours truly:

E Bishop, Pink Dog (Rio de Janeiro): Naked, you trot across the avenue.
Suzanne Noguere, The Scribes: upon the page as if light filtered through

Mary Jo Salter, What Do Women Want?: stops short to raise two cones, one in each hand,
Carolyn Kizer, Three: In the expectation of glory: she writes like a man!


Suzanne Noguere, Whirling Round the Sun: Sometimes it seems almost beyond belief
Marilyn Hacker, Eight Days in April: I broke a glass, got bloodstains on the sheet.


Mary Kinzie, Ringing Words: "Forget," said the voice politic, "that place/
Suzanne Noguere, The Scribes: that is its usefulness. It is the space
Marilyn Taylor, II. Porter Powell's Wife: and slaps me, hard, three times across the face.

Carolyn Kizer, Two (from Pro Femina): Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?
Molly Peacock, Anger Sweetened: we caught and candied it so it would stay
Marilyn Taylor, How Aunt Eudora Became a Post-Modern Poet: Remember, you're a girl. So write that way.

The results?...

Words: 98
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 90
Male Score: 165

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Q.E.D.
Robin

I haven't played the genie game yet, but you can find all kinds of literature these days on the differences between male and female writing (Writing a Woman's Life, by Carolyn Heilbrun, is a good example).

I have always been reluctant to believe in such differences, being of Coleridge's opinion that great minds are androgynous, but what can you do when you're up against science and computers?

PS: I suggest that someone with more time on his hands than I have feed the genie some selections from detective novels by men & women & see what comes back.

I am apparently "male". Guess that's why I go by my initials...

Sylvia Plath's Poetry

Female Score: 1139
Male Score: 1909

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Donne's Poetry

Female Score: 2333
Male Score: 1292

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Methinks the GG should shut up now and hop back into the lamp!

Hi

Shakespeare may be a woman....but our very own Kate Benedict and Rose Keheller are both men.

You never can tell.....

Alan

I've given some stuff for the GG to analyze. All of my poetry and fiction came back as female except for one out of about 10. The one that came back as male was one where I'd incorporated some dialogue of a transsexual who was living as a female but had been a man. Interesting.

I tested it on my blogs. Everything that was a personal diary-type entry came back as female and the pedantic journal-type entries came back as male. I bet all my papers from college will come back as male, but all of my academic papers are stuck on my messed up computer right now.

Seems that the GG reads personal things as female and more analytical things as male.

"Cherrylog Road" by James Dickey:

Words: 592

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 998
Male Score: 730

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Q
 

"Body Bags" by R. S. Gwynn

Words: 332

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 215
Male Score: 410

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Quien is mas macho?

As an aside to this: do any male poets here dabble (as I do from time to time) with trying to find a "female voice" (or, conversely, female poets a "male voice")?

Are there even such things, really?

If I had confidence in the algorithm underlying this little program it would be a useful test of success!

Some subjects demand to be written from a female perspective, I think.

Just a thought

Philip

I put in the whole of Being the Bad Guy (as fiction) and it came out male 2 to 1. I put in a piece of prose about Light Verse. Same result. I put in a poem where I am SUPPOSED to be a woman. No good. Still male though less so. So it works for me. Anyone tried Henry James? Or Jan Morris?

The poem I'm currently workshopping at TDE scores 474 female, 348 male.
I don't feel up to revising it until I've had a cup of tea and put on a little make-up.

Out of curiosity I entered six of my 14 by 14 sonnets and the result was almost two-to-one male.

Summing up all the responses here, I would have to say that the GG is absobloodylutely useless.

Mary thinks the GG has it right to identify Shakespeare as a woman, but it also identified Spenser and Donne as women, which is patently absurd.

So if a complex computer programme can't consistently pick the correct gender, can anything or anyone do it?

Is there really any discernible difference then between men's and women's writing?

Most good writers have a blend of reason and emotion that makes them very hard to fit into gender stereotypes. It is only stereotyping that assigns personality characteristics to a particular gender instead of recognizing the broad continuum in which the majority of people will fall somewhere in the center. Men's and women's writing may have some variations in content based on differences in their experiences; I have never noticed any predictable differences in their style.

Susan

Yes. I've tried to writein a man's voice before, but it was a sonnet, so it won't add up to 500 words.

"To speak of woe that is in marriage"
 

The GG nailed this one:

Who did Rabbie Lowell think he was fooling?

...

I will add that the Genie consistently identified my prose as male, and that this disappointed me, but that I think Mark gives it too much credit with his question about a 'complex computer programme.' Surely this silly website is not the be-all and end-all in gender identification technology. One day I hope we may develop the resources to prove that Sappho was really a man.

(Must I include a winkie guy? I'd rather not, but oh well, here goes) ;)

I don't think there's a difference. Style wise, but gender nah.

I did these a couple of years ago, they all came back the same then too.

I tried 6 poems, all scored "male".

Here's the last one:

Words: 521

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 664
Male Score: 871

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Ha! Snort, snort.

For what it's worth, I tried first an excerpt from one of my articles, then a combination of a couple of my poems. Both of them came back very male. Go figure.

Words: 1229
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 929
Male Score: 1798

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Words: 210
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 196
Male Score: 428

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Susan

So you're going to make it up now, are you?

James, James...

A coin flip could do just as well. I entered 8 poems. 4 came out female and 4 male.

I finally got around to playing this game, with diverse results.

On the basis of a selection of poems, the Genie identified me correctly as female.

On the basis of a passage of prose fiction, it concluded I was male.

Score: Genie 1, Reality 1.