endgendering gender

On a whim, I ran my previous two posts through The Gender Genie, a site that purports to analyze text, and determine the sex of the author.

I admit that my samples were rather short, so it likely wasn't a fair test. Nevertheless, I found it amusing that it rated the first entry, the haiku-like thing, to be male-authored, while the second, the introduction, was female-authored. Yet, I wrote them both.

BTW, one of my pet peeves is the confusion, especially in the US, of gender and sex. If a person is talking about biology, female and male, she should use term is sex, because gender is primarily a grammatical term. Both words have lots of analagous uses, but somewhere a long the way, Americans have confused gender with sex, maybe out of a prudish fear of sex.

Of course, many say, with some justification, that, while most humans have a fixed sex, they can adopt different genders, that is, different sets of attributes which may or may not be associated with sex. I suspect that's the intent of The Gender Genie, and I recognize that it's simply a proof of concept and a fun toy.

I just ran the above through GG, and it rated it as strongly female (326 vs. 226 male). It considers "if", "not", and "and" to be female words.