Androgyny

Anthony informed me of the existence of the Gender Genie, that can supposedly tell whether a piece of writing was created by a man or a woman. His results from using it seem to show that it's broadly accurate, but trying it out on ten pretty randomly selected sections from this page gave me an exact 50/50 split between 'male' and 'female' posts which undermines his argument that it's 'too easy' to do it on my blog because of the posts about football (a post about football was one that got a 'male' result, though)

Anyway, as I'm bored I tried it out on some other bloggers - ten random (or as random as I could make them) selections from their front pages were sampled and the results were:

Green Fairy: 90% female, 10% male
Peter Cuthbertson: 50% male, 50% female
Ryan Beatnik: 30% male, 70% female
Oliver Kamm: 50% male, 50% female
Iain Coleman:45% male, 55% female (I didn't do 20 samples, it just couldn't decide on one of his, but felt his maiden speech to Cambridge City Council was made by a woman)

At which point I gave up as I don't really think that this proves anything, or even allow for many silly jokes. Given these results and what Anthony found I'd suspect that either the system has a slight bias towards seeing writing as female, or political blogging tends to be written in such a way that makes it more 'feminine' (at least according to the Genie) than 'normal' writing. Given that the feminine weighting in the algorithm used by the genie is applied to possessive words, and political blogging can use more of this than regular writing - there's lots of use of possessive terms to denote ownership of opinions etc and perhaps this throws out the scale.

Or then again, someone might do the same thing using slightly different samples from the people I've tested and get the exact opposite results.