Interesting.

[truepenny]

My journal says I'm 51% masculine.

What does your LJ writing style say about your gender?

LJ Gender Tool by hutta

A little experimentation with the Gender Genie reveals that my fiction reads as feminine, whereas my academic writing reads as masculine. (I also fed in, separately, that very long post about genre theory; it thinks that's masculine, too.) I suppose, in an odd sort of way, it makes sense that LJ entries would fall in the middle.

But still. Slightly disconcerting. I wonder what would happen if I tried writing fiction in my academic voice.

[UPDATE, 9:36 a.m.: I just gave it a longish thing I wrote recently about body image. Yes, my body image. My body image as an American woman. It came back with an overwhelmingly masculine result. Bizarre, no? --Ed.]

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I got 54% male and 46% female. I guess it just used the most recent entry?

[libskrat]

74% male! Go me! :)

Most attempts to write fiction in academic-voice fail because they aren't written by academics. (Steven Brust's "historian" is particularly inadequate.) A couple that work for me -- at least, as academia imitations -- are LeGuin's "Author of the Acacia Seeds" and the therolinguistics one, whatever its name is. Though they both need lotsnlots of footnotes.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

"The Author of the Acacia Seeds" is the therolinguistics story--unless there's another one I haven't read.

It's also one of my favorite Le Guin stories, because she does the divorce between subject-matter and presentation so beautifully.

And I didn't exactly mean, write fiction as an academic. I meant more, take the voice that I have in my academic writing and use it to write a story with. If that distinction makes any sense.

[libskrat]

Hm. I mean the one where she talks about the linguistics of penguins and rocks and whatnot. I thought it was a separate story, but perhaps I am just fuddled today.

I understand the distinction; I just wasn't using it. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Calling "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" a story is really a bit of a misnomer, but I don't know what else to call it. It's a collection of little things, including the bit about penguins and the bit about rocks, as well as "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" itself. In fact, those are the three short things that make up the story, proving that both of us have pretty good recall on that one. :)

[vass]

I think of Steven Brust's Paarfi as in a different category and a different century.

Have you read Raphael Carter's 'Congenital Agenisis of Gender Ideation'? If so, what did you think of it?

[libskrat]

Yeah, Paarfi is probably easier to take as the gentleman-scholar.

No, I haven't read Carter, and the very title scares me half to death. Maybe you could summarize?

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Curiously, my journal, and Snufkin's read as predominantly masculine, while my gardening journal reads as predominantly feminine. Make of that what you will.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm 66% masculine.

I shouldn't have done that, I'd have felt affronted whatever they said.

M/F/giraffe

Been testing my gender all morning

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

so far, the LJ tool, the gender genie, and the spark test all say I'm a guy. Pretty clearly a guy too (oddly enough, the spark test, clearly the least academic, was the one that granted me the most ambiguity).

I already went on a caffeine-induce rant (http://www.livejournal.com/users/tamnonlinear/19892.html#cutid1) about this in my own journal, Plug plug.

I wonder if the academic-as-masculine is a matter of group conformity. We tend to write like the people for whom we are writing (I assume). If academia still retains some vestiges of Old Boys Network, could the preference for academic writing = masculine writing be ingrained in that environment? Am I stretching this idea? Is academic writing instead more gender-neutral (dispassionate, concerned with facts rather than personality)?

I'd be more interested in seeing a program that makes guesses about aspects such as age. I ran across (and have since been utterly unable to recapture) an article tracking word usage shifts with age in published fiction writers. I know it talked about how many authors decrease their use of "I" sentances as their writing progressed (Jane Austen was specifically mentioned. I don't recall who else, other than that it left behind a memory trace that says masculine, early 20th C, possibly Russian...). Or maybe a program that says "You are American" or "You are Introverted" or "You are a liberal" or something along those lines. Something a little more insightful than gender, which we already know. Even if the program doesn't.

Re: Been testing my gender all morning

[libskrat]

I wonder if the academic-as-masculine is a matter of group conformity. We tend to write like the people for whom we are writing (I assume). If academia still retains some vestiges of Old Boys Network, could the preference for academic writing = masculine writing be ingrained in that environment? Am I stretching this idea? Is academic writing instead more gender-neutral (dispassionate, concerned with facts rather than personality)?

Well, the whole "dispassion" thing is kind of a red herring. (Men don't write passionately? Please!) What I think is going on is more like, most academics are men (for a wide variety of variously sexist reasons), academics write like academics, ergo academic writing is masculine.

It's not as if women can't write like that. As most of us here have abundantly proven.

Which brings up another point... the extent to which so-called "masculine" writing is a norm, to which so-called "feminine" writing represents a deviation. (Um. Just read Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman. Does it show?) What I want to know is, are male bloggers testing as female as often as the reverse?

Re: Been testing my gender all morning

[tamnonlinear.livejournal.com]

I think that's what I meant, even if it isn't what I said.

I'm not talking about men as dispassionate, but as academic writing as dispassionate. That is, more concerned (we hope) with the subject being discussed than the persons involved in the discussion. While this is often not true (personal rivalries and fueds being legion in the history of almost every area of study), the pretense is still that the debate is over the facts, not the person promoting one view over another.

And that as academic writing has, until recent history, been considered to be the province of men rather than women, that this style of writing is assumed to be more masculine than feminine when it should be seen as gender neutral.

Perhaps I'm confusing the passionate with the personal. It's simply that one is assumed to get emotional about the subjective and, well, emotional than the objective and impersonal.

I may be writing in circles here, and wearing myself into a ditch in the process.

Re: Been testing my gender all morning

[libskrat]

We're on the same page, I think, though you're in the text column and I'm wandering around the page footer somewhere.

My basic issue is that the whole gender thing is being cast as a matter of essentialism when it's really a matter of context. It *doesn't really matter* what criteria they picked out as characteristic of masculine/academic writing -- they would have found *something*. But they're not measuring Men versus Women. They're measuring Masculine Social Roles versus Feminine Social Roles, and privileging the former to boot -- and they haven't got the guts to admit it.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

That's interesting; the Gender Genie tagged my academic writing as masculine and my fiction as feminine as well. (Though my livejournal, strangely, is 53% masculine).

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I wonder what would happen if I tried writing fiction in my academic voice

I must have thought about this for nearly three minutes before deciding that it would hurt too much to be worth doing, no matter what the results were.

[heresluck]

I'm very curious what textual markers the tool's using for assessment purposes.

The body image text result isn't necessarily bizarre, IMO. When I'm writing about something that bothers me or that I'm struggling with, I often (and not always consciously) get more formal in an effort to make the subject feel more manageable by inserting some rhetorical distance. That formality could certainly (if not entirely accurately) be read as masculine -- not least because (for me as for many of the commenters here) "formal" overlaps very largely with "academic," and we've seen what it thinks of academic prose. It strikes me as possible that you might have done something similar in the text in question.

Now I'm wondering what it thinks of parenthetical asides. Prentenious masculine? Nonlinear feminine?

Heh.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I just gave it a chunk of my most stiffly formal fiction. It decided that was male, too.

(I am not going to procrastinate by hunting down their algorithm to see how it works. I am not, I am not, I am not. But if anybody else wants to ... *g*)

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

They have some info if you back up the URL to their main page, where you will learn that both when they hand-scored things based on the research and when they coded the Gender Genie, they got an accuracy rate of ... 50%.

[vass]

The Gender Genie tags me as male when my posts include numbers. Blech.