# Gender Issues



I fooled the Blog Gender Analyzer

At Talk Left I saw a reference to the Gender Analyzer, which uses artificial intelligence to “determine if a homepage is written by a man or a woman.”

You enter the address, and it analyzes the text and gives you a prediction and a probability ratio.

When I checked this site, I got this:

We think / is written by a man (79%).

Better luck next time, computer! Maybe some linguist out there can explain why the program thinks I write like a man.

I fed in a bunch of other blogs, with mixed results. The analyzer correctly identified the “male” blogs I tested as being written by men, but mistakenly thought some of the “female” blogs were written by men too.

If it’s a close call, the analyzer will give you this kind of answer:

We guess http://walkslowlylivewildly.com is written by a woman (56%), however it’s quite gender neutral.

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