As everyone else appears to have been posting about the ridiculous “Gender Analyzer” web site (which I refuse to provide a link to because it is clearly so bad) I decided to succumb and get myself “tested”. Despite my various posts about rugby and the like their system declared itself 95% certain that this blog was written by a woman. Being a suspicious type, I then fed it SF Awards Watch, for which my writing style is somewhat more formal. That, apparently, is 97% likely to have been written by a man. I rest my case.
4 thoughts on “Split Personality”
Comments are closed.
I did a similar test with that silly little tool, in the name of teaching university students that myths about gender differences in speaking and writing are just that – myths.
First, I entered a block of text from an advertising brochure for oil spill combating equipment which I wrote. Predictably, the tool believed I was male. Then I entered the first two pages of my novel-in-progress. And lo and behold, suddenly it thought I was female.
Cora:
That’s the best use of the stupid thing I have heard of so far.
With all that “male and female brains are fundamentally different” stuff regaining traction of late, we must do what we can to counter it. And since most of my students are future teachers, their excellent multiplicators.
Well there I must disagree, because it may well be the case that male and female brains are different. Other parts of male and female bodies are different, after all, and that’s very important because it can mean that men and women react differently to medication.
But just because men and women have different brains that doesn’t necessarily mean that the one is smarter than the other, or the one can only do math while the other can only do navigation. Male and female hips are different, but that doesn’t mean that women can walk on two legs while men can only walk on all-fours.
There are some differences between males and females that are biological, some differences that are a result of social conditioning, and some that are so small that the distribution curves overlap to a vast extent. So, for example, the average man is better at tennis than the average woman, but Serena Williams will whup the average man’s arse every time they play. Equally any half competent writer can learn to write “like a man” and “like a woman” sufficiently well to fool something like Gender Analyzer which appears to be based on ridiculous stereotypes.
Trying to deny biological facts because they happen to be politically inconvenient makes you no better than a Creationist. Encouraging children to deny biological facts because they don’t fit your prejudices is very wrong indeed.