Men are from Nouns: Women are from Pronouns

From Netscape Communications Corporation:

So Personal! How You Write Reveals WHAT?

How you write--that is, how you string together verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs to form a sentence like this one--bears an invisible stamp that actually reveals your gender.

Women use more pronouns: I, you, she, he, their, myself. Women write about people and relationships.

Men focus on words that identify or determine nouns: a, the, that. Men also use words that quantify those nouns: one, two, more. Men write about things.

This is the word from researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, who developed a computer program that uses a simple algorithm to analyze writing style and determine the author's gender, reports Nature News Service. Apparently, at some deep, unconscious level, we can't hide who we are.

Just by scanning key words and syntax, the computer program is 80 percent accurate at detecting if a nonfiction book or novel was written by a man or a woman. As Nature News says, the program confirms the stereotypes we have about the differences in language use by men and women. Men really do talk more about objects, while women focus more on relationships. Men categorize. Women personalize. Men have an informational style. Women have an involved style.

Led by Moshe Koppel, the Israeli researchers tested their algorithm on 566 English-language works in numerous genres both fiction and nonfiction that were primarily published after 1975 and were able to correctly ID the author's gender 80 percent of the time. One text that fooled the program was Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day."

But the idea that a computer can determine one's gender is creating quite a fuss in some academic quarters. Koppel said when he submitted his research for publication to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, he was rejected "on ideological grounds." He told the Boston Globe, "They said, 'What do you mean? You're trying to make some claim about men and women being different, and we don't know if that's true. That's just the kind of thing that people are saying in order to oppress women.'"

Koppel insisted to the Scottish paper, The Scotsman, that he's just reporting the results of an artificial intelligence process that he considers almost flawless. Just to prove his theory correct, he ran dry, flat, academic prose through the program. Guess what? The computer won.