Ccinquième(s) et un

Gender Guesser. I came across this online application that supposedly guesses the "gender" of the individual who wrote whatever text you enter into the system. It is highly problematic for a plethora of reasons, the most obvious of which includes their lack of distinction between sex and gender. They also profile "female" writing as weak and fiction-like, while they profile "male" writing as strong and nonfiction-like. It is apparent that their methods are inherently flawed as their historical frame of reference is the British National Corpus, which like most literary canons writes out the female by normalizing the male. Additionally, access to resources and institutions has historically favored males. The except below interests me because it reinforces the importance of subjectivizing maleness/masculinity, and subsequently rescinding the normative/hegemonic position they hold.

In particular, we find significant differences between male- and female-authored documents in the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers: although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. More generally , it is found that even in formal writing, female writing exhibits greater usage of features identified by previous researchers as "involved" while male writing exhibits greater usage of features which have been identified as "informational". Finally, a strong correlation between the characteristics of male (female) writing and those of nonfiction (fiction) is demonstrated.

For further reading, check out the full paper.