You Blog Like a Girl
When I was in grad school, I took every linguistics course offered at the university I attended. While a M.A. in linguistics was not offered there, a talented and inspiring teacher who fueled my love for the study of language spent many an office hour discussing with me the minutiae of language variation that I enjoyed. Historical linguistics and dialectology were particularly fascinating to me, and for one of my courses I created a questionnaire geared to uncovering “genderlects” among college students. The aim was to see if the participants could predict the gender of a writer based on particular language markers–a concept that fascinated a budding feminist such as myself.
According to the research I had (primarily Lakoff, as I remember), feminine genderlects tend to:
-use language as a way to create and build relationships
-consist of stories, anecdotes, and narratives
-use hedging, as in “sort of,” “it would seem,” and the like
-employ what she called “empty adjectives,” like “adorable,” “super,” and such
-use “tag questions,” as in “You’re cold, aren’t you?” or “This is delicious, wouldn’t you say?”
-have a specialized lexicon, such as striating “pink” into “rose,” “blush,” “mauve,” and “magenta”
There were other markers that I have forgotten, but I do remember how confidently the survey participants labelled a speech or writing sample as “feminine” or “masculine.” In getting feedback from the participants, I noted that they also scrutinized the topics that each of the samples addressed as to whether they believed a female or a male would discuss such things, even to the point that one of the samples was described more than once as “a woman trying to sound like a man” (I can’t remember the exact piece but it was using the stereotypically male lexicon of sports coupled with hedging and tag phrases).
Without going further into the myriad of factors that complicate the viability of arguing for or against the presence of genderlects and the resulting judgments, I thought it would be fun to plug various bloggernacle voices into a web-based predictor of gender based on text: the Gender Genie. With a 500+ sample of text, the Gender Genie uses an algorithm based on recent research that boasts 80% accuracy. The argument that, for example, the use of “the” “a” and “said” are predictive of masculinity while “be” and “was” predict femininity raises my eyebrows (if not my hackles), but I’m not a statistician, linguist, or computer hack. With the caveat that I only used one sample of the following authors (each’s most recent post that fulfilled the 500+ guideline AND used few to no outside quotations), here are the predictions of gender of:
fmhLisa (Neighborhood Safety and Tact): Female
Artemis (Post Mission Speaking Circuit): Female–but just barely: 561 female score to 556 male score
EmilyS (Forgiving God): Female
Janet (Breath of Life): Male–very so: 1183 male score to 991 female score
Not Ophelia (Hello, My Name is NO–and I’m Mormon): Male by a wide margin: 1021 to 829
Quimby (When Two Spheres Collide): Male, again by a wide margin: 1937 to 1536
Rebecca (Observations in Vienna): Male, more than double the female score: 784 to 363
Going outside the permas at fMh, let’s look at:
Caroline (How the Doctrine of Polygamy Affected My Modern Mormon Life): Very Male
Heather O. (In the Time of the Butterflies): Female, slim margin
Julie (What Women Need): Male
Kaimi (The One-Room School[after the Kristine and fMhLisa quotes]): Female
Rosalynde (God of the Gaps [after the Holland quote]): Male
Russell (Larger Projects): Male
Steve (Why I Like Going to Church from JN-S’ Sunday Services: Two Experiences): Female
JN-S (Why I Don’t Like Church from his Sunday Services: Two Experiences): Male
Amri (Shared Shrines): Female, by a slim margin
Mark IV (A Presidential Cultist): Male, by almost 2-1
Lynnette (Testimony Bearing and Storytelling): Male by a huge margin
Eve (On the Occasional Spiritual Necessity of Defying the Church): Female, by a slim margin
Ziff (Amen to the Priesthood or Authority of That Man): Male, by a slim margin
Bored in Vernal (Writing a Life): Female, large margin
DKL (I’m Worth a Million in Prizes): Male
Rusty (Any Practical Solutions or Just Complaints?) Female, by a large margin
Fun stuff, eh? For my own scores, my most recent on this blog (Rapex) scored Male by a slim margin, but the four entries I tested on my own (non-controversial, home-and-family) blog predict my Female gender. I’m sure we’d all find interesting and amusing examples of incorrect predictions as well as correct ones, but the frequency of error in predicting gender in the recent bloggernacle posts I cited suggests that, like many gender-based theories, this one is too tenuous to prove (er, wouldn’t you say?).
In spite of my lack of interest in shoes, not wearing make up or jewelry hardly ever, they still pegged me for a girl. Guess I write like girl… not that there is anything wrong with that…
Comment by Jo in Utah — July 2, 2007 @ 10:05 am
This is interesting, thank you. A companion to this is the gender test at the BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml
(I have a stereotypically male brain.)
Comment by Julie M. Smith — July 2, 2007 @ 10:07 am
Thank you for this post, Idahospud! I’ve been wondering for awhile what about someone’s writing makes me think male or female where other clues (such as name) are lacking.
I’m going to go stick one of “Miranda’s” posts through that thing.
Comment by Proud Daughter of Eve — July 2, 2007 @ 10:15 am
Not to sound paranoid, but I subjected a lengthier post of my own to the Genie, and ended up decidedly male: 1838 to 1177. That’s better odds than I ever got from most of the women I dated at the Y.
Comment by Steve Evans — July 2, 2007 @ 10:32 am
“Miranda’s” results:
“What’s Wrong With Schools Nowadays?” 613F/501M :FEMALE
“Pulling Evolution From the Scriptures” 478F/528M: MALE
“Some of Us Can Go Home” 214F/589M: MALE
“In the Future, There Will Be No Diet Soda” 407F/1043M: MALE
“Who Are You Really?” 713F/529M: FEMALE
“Porn, Divorce and Modern Women” 572F/606M: MALE
“Esther: Hero or Heroine?” 280F/557M: MALE
Well there we go. Now we know what ratted DKL out!
Comment by Proud Daughter of Eve — July 2, 2007 @ 10:35 am
Spud,
This just goes to show that on the Internet, nobody knows I’m a dog.
YEEEESSSSS!!!! /Napoleon Dynamite voice/
My personal insecurities are of such a nature that I occasionally enjoy that kind of a boost. I tried the genie on another post I wrote. It thought that the author of this paragraph was FEMALE!!!:
Go figure. I think the only conclusion we can safely draw is that gender is complicated, probably more than we think.
Comment by Mark IV — July 2, 2007 @ 10:53 am
I checked 10 of my (more-than-one-paragraph) posts prior to that post and the all but one came up as male. That proves it, I’M A MALE!!
Comment by Rusty — July 2, 2007 @ 10:59 am
There’s something spectacularly upsetting in this algorithm for me: using the words “she,” “her,” and “hers” produces female points. By contrast, “he,” “him,” and “his” don’t score on either side. Since this algorithm is based on data dredging, this means that, empirically speaking, women write about both women and men — but men rarely write about women.
Comment by RoastedTomatoes — July 2, 2007 @ 11:03 am
Another thing: professional academic writing seems to come up as overwhemlingly male. I ran several passages written by female political scientists, and all came up as overwhelmingly male. For example, one scored 291 female versus 1116 male.
Comment by RoastedTomatoes — July 2, 2007 @ 11:08 am
Idahospud, that’s the cleverest title for a blog post that I’ve seen in a long time! (Fun post, BTW).
Comment by Kevin Barney — July 2, 2007 @ 11:13 am
i apparently blog like a girl and write academic prose like a male.
no surprise there, since i’m sure the linguistic cues they pick up on are generated by social and cultural gender formation and stereotypes and intellectual work is still gendered male, in spite of overwhelming facts demonstrating otherwise.
Comment by amelia — July 2, 2007 @ 11:32 am
I stuck in a few more of mine, and came out with two more female and two male. It doesn’t seem to do a very good job of predicting.
Mark Iv,
So, why would writing like a man be an ego boost? eh?
Comment by fMhLisa — July 2, 2007 @ 12:41 pm
This is funny. I love it. I hope my boyfriend doesn’t find out I”m marginally female. That would be so awkward.
Comment by amri — July 2, 2007 @ 12:54 pm
why is “the” male?
Comment by kristine N — July 2, 2007 @ 1:01 pm
Kristine, I think it’s because the female texts in their sample are more likely to address relational themes (using “his,” “her,” “our”) while male texts are more likely to speak in an abstract/universal mode (hence, “the”).
Comment by RoastedTomatoes — July 2, 2007 @ 1:05 pm
Personally, I’m a Vulcan. Gender shmender.
Comment by Frank McIntyre — July 2, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
fMhLisa: HA! Good one. I can give a better answer when I get back from hunting wolverines in Alaska with a 12 gauge.
amri: You really ought to tell him now. You don’t want to go through the rest of your life living a lie.
All: Don’t you all think somebody ought to blow the whistle on Idahospud? She has written a post that spreads gender confusion and blurs the lines surrounding our sacred gender roles. I think her bishop needs to know about this.
Comment by Mark IV — July 2, 2007 @ 1:29 pm
I like your answer, RT. I wonder if another possibility is that women use “a/an” where men use “the.” That is, women address a particular case, while men (are more likely to think we) address some abstract general case. Which is, I guess, probably another way of saying just what you were saying.
Comment by Ziff — July 2, 2007 @ 2:27 pm
Long ago, Lynnette and I took an intro to Psychology class together. As part of the class, we took a big personality test (the California Personality Inventory, if I remember correctly) and I recall that Lynnette scored far, far higher than I did on masculinity.
Comment by Ziff — July 2, 2007 @ 2:30 pm
Thanks for pointing this out, IdahoSpud. It’s too entertaining. I checked out a few Book of Mormon authors.
Nephi (2 Nephi 4:15-35): female, 673-453
Alma the Younger (Alma 5:3-62): female, 3319-3138
Zenos (Jacob 5:2-77): male, 4671-3230
Moroni (Mormon 8:1-31): female, 2279-2126
Mormon (Moroni 8:2-30): female, 1270-1234
Yeah, yeah, I know that the algorithm can be questioned even in the culture where it was invented, and I’m applying it to a 180-year-old translation of a document over 1000 years old, but still, isn’t it a little bit interesting that so many writers scored as female? Only Jacob quoting Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree came out as male.
Comment by Ziff — July 2, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
Spud, what a great post! I enjoyed the insights in comments #8 and #9.
And everyone knows I’m a girly-girl, but to all you males out there who scored female, I find your blogs more interesting when you tell stories, build relationships, and aren’t afraid of hedging a bit!
Comment by Bored in Vernal — July 2, 2007 @ 3:26 pm
Idahospud, thanks for an absolutely fascinating analysis!
Personally, I don’t like writing or conversation to be too male because (sorry, guys, let’s face it): it’s boring.
I’ve occasionally heard the feminine speech markers you list such as hedging and tag phrases derided as indicating indecisiveness, uncertainty, unwillingness to make an authoritative or definitive statement. Perhaps. But I think there’s more to it than that. Those feminine hedges and tag phrases acknowledge and expect conversation, exchange, dialogue. At its worst, a string of authoritative pronouncements of propositional statements–a stereotypically male style–just thunders obliviously from on high. And induces yawns.
Comment by Eve — July 2, 2007 @ 4:13 pm
“Since this algorithm is based on data dredging, this means that, empirically speaking, women write about both women and men — but men rarely write about women.”
RT,
Your comment about women using pronouns more overall points out another possibility.
If both men and women use their own gender pronoun more, but women use all pronouns more than men, you get algorithms where male nouns provide no info but female ones signal girliness. Not because men don’t talk about women, but because men don’t use pronouns.
Comment by Frank McIntyre — July 2, 2007 @ 4:31 pm
“I’ve occasionally heard the feminine speech markers you list such as hedging and tag phrases derided as indicating indecisiveness, uncertainty, unwillingness to make an authoritative or definitive statement. Perhaps.”
Did you do that on purpose?
Comment by Julie M. Smith — July 2, 2007 @ 4:35 pm
But of course! There’s no argument like illustration.
Maybe.
Comment by Eve — July 2, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
As Ziff mentioned, it seems scriptures are largely female-voiced according to this gizmo. My recent posts were labeled as decidedly more dudely when I omitted the scriptural blockquotes from them.
Comment by Geoff J — July 2, 2007 @ 4:43 pm
Julie, I think maybe you should’ve said, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” because that would be more “female” by these rules, wouldn’t it? (See what I did there? Eh? Aren’t I clever? Or I guess I should say, I’m clever aren’t I?)
Comment by Quimby — July 2, 2007 @ 4:46 pm
BTW, Idahospud, your lovely post has left me wringing my hands and weeping like a wishy-washy girl because, really, now I know what I want to be when I grow up: a linguist, of course that’s it, my true calling retrospectively made evident, the signs were there all along.
I’m going to run away from literature program and never come back. Neener neener neener, say I to litcrit.
Comment by Eve — July 2, 2007 @ 4:47 pm
[…] You Blog Like a Girl […]
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Comment by Rob — July 2, 2007 @ 5:14 pm
The gender genie is fascinating. I’ve fooled around now for twenty minutes and get the same results others have reported with the scriptures - all the passages I tested came back feminine. I tried general conference talks, and the gender genie thinks that Gordon B. Hinckley, Thomas S. Monson, and James E. Faust are female. It is especially funny to get a female tag coming back on a talk by GBH in general priesthood meeting!
It is obvious that the scriptures, general conference, even the hymnal are all done in grrrltalk. Gents, so much for the patriarchal hegemony we have been working so hard to establish. It’s time to go back to the drawing board. I suggest we start by trying to get the hymnal re-gendered so it includes The Streets of Laredo and I’m on Old Cowhand From the Rio Grand’. Any other suggestions?
Comment by Mark IV — July 2, 2007 @ 5:41 pm
You people are hilarious!
Ironically, I ran this post through the Genie and it comes up 618 Male and 532 Female; I’m fascinated that I blog “male” here and “female” at my own blog.
There are so many interesting turns the conversation has hinted at; I’m amused at how our men whose writing predicted a female had to point out that the many many many other samples they ran through the Genie predicted a male, complete with hollering, “I’m a MALE!” Then we have the visibly relieved men who were predicted male. Conversely, our women who tested male simply shrug. I think the reactions point to the power that “sounding male” locates in the most fundamental venue of identity: the very words that come from our mouths. It makes me think of the discussions we’ve had that argue for a primary marker of male identity is “NOT female.”
And then the GA/scripture issue: if (stereotypically) women’s primary goal in verbal/written communication is to build relationships and men’s is to establish and manipulate power, I think it fitting that words of God and of God’s servants should, even subconsciously, communicate and foster relationships rather than promote a Top Dog agenda.
Comment by Idahospud — July 2, 2007 @ 7:10 pm
Try this, Mark IV–using the NIV and the RSV translations of the New Testament yield Male results while the KJV yields Female! (At least for a few chapters that I tried.) Interesting.
Comment by Bored in Vernal — July 2, 2007 @ 7:13 pm
Brigham Young writes male. Hoo-wah!
Comment by Ardis Parshall — July 2, 2007 @ 9:03 pm
Oh dear; it looks like I’ve somehow managed to misplace my femininity yet again. However am I going to be able to serve my purpose as the divine adornment of humanity?
Comment by Lynnette — July 2, 2007 @ 10:30 pm
Fun post, SpudNik.
Ya know, I really don’t have a problem being told that I write like a girl. After all, there are so many good woman writers in the nacle. Like Lynnette, and Julie, and Rosalynde, and —
Hey, wait a minute . . .
Comment by Kaimi — July 3, 2007 @ 12:31 am
My first name sounds more masculine than feminine. People always assume I’ll be male. (That is, before they meet me!) Which isn’t always a bad thing. Once, in high school, I went to a conference which was being organised by another school. They assumed I was male and put me with a house full of boys. It was a terrific weekend. Not only did I get to flirt to my little heart’s content (shameful, I know, but I love to flirt), but because I was the only girl there, the host family gave me a bedroom and bathroom all to myself while all the boys had to share a room and a bathroom. Ah, the memories.
Comment by Quimby — July 3, 2007 @ 1:03 am
Nope, that last phrase marked you as Yiddish.
Comment by Peter LLC — July 3, 2007 @ 4:43 am
BiV, yeah, I did the same test that you did with various Bible versions. In my experiment, the newer Bible translations also came up as more male than the older, evidently more female, KJV.
So, here’s my favorite result yet: according to this website, the Lord is a woman. I ran Joseph Smith’s revelation on polygamy (in which the speaker is clearly identified as the Lord in the final passage) through the Gender Genie. The resulting score is 5781 female, 4089 male.
Comment by RoastedTomatoes — July 3, 2007 @ 3:34 pm
I take it back, the Gender Genie is totally accurate!
Comment by fMhLisa — July 3, 2007 @ 4:42 pm
Peter (#38), why can’t he be a Yiddish Vulcan? Sheesh, what are you, some kind of anti-Semite?
Comment by Quimby — July 3, 2007 @ 4:55 pm
I agree, Lisa, what more evidence do we need than Evans? Turns out the man-purse is just, you know, a purse.
Comment by MCQ — July 4, 2007 @ 1:01 am
It thinks I’m male.
Picking a blog entry at random from my browser’s history (Is religion the problem?) it gave me the following score:
Female Score: 1657
Male Score: 2218
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
That’s a little odd. I’m pretty sure I’m not….
Comment by C.L. Hanson — July 5, 2007 @ 11:36 am
I love that you love what I love! Isn’t it wonderful to be weird together! Ah, joy!
Comment by Mary — July 6, 2007 @ 10:07 am
[…] couple of months ago Idahospud favored us with a fascinating analysis of blogging genderlect over at FMH, which reminded me of a long-simmering desire to take a manly stand for womanspeak. […]
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