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Making Light offerred a delicious distraction this morning in the form of a link to Gender Genie, program that promises to tell you the gender of an author based on an analysis of his or her writing (minimum sample size 500 words for optinum results). There was no question that this beat writing 'congratulations on your job performance letters', so I spent a happy 15 minutes plugging in samples from this journal of fanfic, geek commentary and political musings, which was when the trouble started.
Gender Genie correctly identified my gender from my fic and my comments on Battlestar Galactica meta and comic books. However, when I wrote about politics, Gender Genie consistently misidentified me as male. That got me to wondering about the nature of the algorithm that runs Gender Genie. According to the The Guardian, the Israeli scientists who developed the original algorithm (Gender Genie uses a simplified version) conducted an exhaustive study of language use by male and female writers, focusing on small details like the number of personal pronouns and articles used in a piece of writing to distinguish between genders. They concluded that the use of personal pronouns typified female writing because women tend to think in relationships whereas the use of articles typified male writing because men tend to think in terms of objects. Based on the number of male and female key words in a given sample, the algorithm determines whether the author is male or female.
According to The Guardian and other reports, Gender Genie gets it right about 70 to 80 per cent of the time, which is pretty good for any computer program - especially since Microsoft can't make an operating system that will reliably keep my PC from crashing whenever I'm working on an unsaved document. And, in the beginning, it was sort of nice to meet an algorithm that acknowledged my femininity - those "Is Your Brain Male or Female" memes always tell me that I'm a man and a particularly macho, manly-man at that! After a while, that kind of negative reinforcement wears on a girl.
At the same time, I was curious to see if I could push the algorithm's limits; I started to plug in some of my longer monologues on politics and selections of the documents I write for the office. But as Gender Genie again and again announced that these pieces where written by a male author, this game began to lose its appeal.
I wasn't the only one concerned. Alexander Chancellor, who reviewed Gender Genie for The Guardian, found that the algorithm uniformly identified Guardina columns written by both male and female journalists as the product of male authors - unless the male journalist was writing about personal experiences, like Chancellor's new puppy, in which case, Gender Genie identified the columnist as female. Chancellor notes that, while the algorithm's authors conducted impartial research, "their algorithm seems nevertheless to be constructed around the idea that women are characterised more than men by a self-centred obsession with personal relationships" and that troubles me.
Moreover, that 20-30 per cent failure rate also seems to imply that the language of written argumentation itself is categorically "male" and, by extension, rational thought has a particularly "male" character.
Perhaps I'm building a mountain out of a molehill - after all, Gender Genie is meant to be a bit of harmless fun. At the same time, the belief that women were biologically less able than men to reason existed within living memory in our society. And it was not until my own lifetime that woman began to see meaningful progress in dismantling the societal and systemic barriers to their enrolment in professions such as engineering, law, medicine, science not to mention the military and law enforcement. Then something like Gender Genie comes along and reminds me that a significant gap continues to exist between how men and women are viewed in our society and that however much progress we think we've made towards sexual parity the old assumptions and stereotypes remain, hiding just below the surface.
FWIW, Gender Genie informs me that this post was also written by a man.
Gender Genie correctly identified my gender from my fic and my comments on Battlestar Galactica meta and comic books. However, when I wrote about politics, Gender Genie consistently misidentified me as male. That got me to wondering about the nature of the algorithm that runs Gender Genie. According to the The Guardian, the Israeli scientists who developed the original algorithm (Gender Genie uses a simplified version) conducted an exhaustive study of language use by male and female writers, focusing on small details like the number of personal pronouns and articles used in a piece of writing to distinguish between genders. They concluded that the use of personal pronouns typified female writing because women tend to think in relationships whereas the use of articles typified male writing because men tend to think in terms of objects. Based on the number of male and female key words in a given sample, the algorithm determines whether the author is male or female.
According to The Guardian and other reports, Gender Genie gets it right about 70 to 80 per cent of the time, which is pretty good for any computer program - especially since Microsoft can't make an operating system that will reliably keep my PC from crashing whenever I'm working on an unsaved document. And, in the beginning, it was sort of nice to meet an algorithm that acknowledged my femininity - those "Is Your Brain Male or Female" memes always tell me that I'm a man and a particularly macho, manly-man at that! After a while, that kind of negative reinforcement wears on a girl.
At the same time, I was curious to see if I could push the algorithm's limits; I started to plug in some of my longer monologues on politics and selections of the documents I write for the office. But as Gender Genie again and again announced that these pieces where written by a male author, this game began to lose its appeal.
I wasn't the only one concerned. Alexander Chancellor, who reviewed Gender Genie for The Guardian, found that the algorithm uniformly identified Guardina columns written by both male and female journalists as the product of male authors - unless the male journalist was writing about personal experiences, like Chancellor's new puppy, in which case, Gender Genie identified the columnist as female. Chancellor notes that, while the algorithm's authors conducted impartial research, "their algorithm seems nevertheless to be constructed around the idea that women are characterised more than men by a self-centred obsession with personal relationships" and that troubles me.
Moreover, that 20-30 per cent failure rate also seems to imply that the language of written argumentation itself is categorically "male" and, by extension, rational thought has a particularly "male" character.
Perhaps I'm building a mountain out of a molehill - after all, Gender Genie is meant to be a bit of harmless fun. At the same time, the belief that women were biologically less able than men to reason existed within living memory in our society. And it was not until my own lifetime that woman began to see meaningful progress in dismantling the societal and systemic barriers to their enrolment in professions such as engineering, law, medicine, science not to mention the military and law enforcement. Then something like Gender Genie comes along and reminds me that a significant gap continues to exist between how men and women are viewed in our society and that however much progress we think we've made towards sexual parity the old assumptions and stereotypes remain, hiding just below the surface.
FWIW, Gender Genie informs me that this post was also written by a man.