Recently I came across the Gender Analyzer website, which analyses the language of any blog whose URL you put into it, and tells you whether it’s written by a man or a woman. My blog  is apparently 57% likely to be written by a man (interesting, particularly because yesterday it was 67% likely to be written by a man…) but is “quite gender neutral”. I suppose I don’t really think about how gendered my language is, although I consider other effects of language; it’s not the way I tend to think about it, but I’d be interested to know more about it. The website just says:

” We created Genderanalyzer out of curiosity and fun. It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has been trained on 11000 blogs written by men and women. In our lab it seems to works pretty well, we want to see how it performs on the web!”

Presumably the result of the blogs which the text classifier uses is that it looks for certain clusters of words or frequency of recurring words. I don’t know enough about this but am going to find out more!

Have a go yourself at http://genderanalyzer.com/