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Sue Pelletier MeetingsNet Web editor, mad blogger, and editor of Association Meetings magazine...more

Just for fun: Gender genie

Sue Pelletier December 28th, 2006

I just ran across the Gender Genie, a site where you can plug in some text and it will tell you what gender it thinks the author might be. I must be sending mixed messages: When I put in text from this story I wrote for Medical Meetings, it came back strongly male. But when it analyzed this post from yesterday, it said I wrote like a woman for sure.

It’s interesting to see which words it considers masculine, and which it considers feminine. I wonder if speakers ever think about word choice in this way and try to match the perceived gender of their words to the gender of their audiences, if speaking to a mostly male or mostly female group? I doubt it, but it’d be interesting to see if changing “masculine” words to feminine would make the speaker better received among a group of women (or vice versa for a group of men)?

Update: And now I just ran across another interesting male/female thing: the gender brain quiz. It takes a few minutes to complete, but it’s interesting. I’m not sure if it says as much about gender as it does about thinking/learning styles and abilities in general, but it’s kind of cool. And it may just answer Professor Higgins’ question about “Why can’t a woman think more like a man?” (Kidding, just kidding.)