826 Gender styles in blogging

Finding female bloggers for my links took a long time. But now I've got a good group. Today I found a "Gender Genie" that thinks most of my own blogs are written by a male! You copy and paste one of your own writing examples (fiction, non-fiction or blog) into a window for analysis. The results color code the key words for determining gender. Interestingly, frequent use of the word "the" throws this writer into the male column. I tested several of my blog entries. The one I wrote about my husband being locked out of the house rated me as a female; the one I wrote about bread pudding had me overwhelmingly in the male column. Go figure. The blog I wrote in April 2004 about the Festival of Writing also put me in the male column, as did the one about deer-car collisions on the trip to Illinois.

The designer of the test has about 60% accuracy, but if I keep submitting, I'll mess them up. If you try this, you need to be careful not to use as an example one in which you do a lot of quoting. Otherwise, it isn't checking on you--but that other guy.