Is K.J. Parker male or female?
Author Teresa Frohock asked visitors to her blog to guess whether prose excerpts were written by a male or a female:
Our scientist in residence, Mark Lawrence, kindly analyzed the data and reached the following conclusion:
“Given the 1,045 guesses and 535 correct guesses we can say that no statistically significant power to determine gender from writing has been demonstrated (under the assumption both genders were equally represented – they weren’t but it doesn’t introduce a large effect).
“With selection of authors drawn with equal likelihood of either gender then a random guessing machine making 1,045 guesses would expect to get an average of 522 correct answers and if it repeated the experiment many times we would expect 95% of the results to lie between 490 and 554 correct answers. So our result is well within the bounds of expected statistical variation for a random set of guesses.”
In other words, people can’t tell the difference between male or female writing styles based on the prose alone. Without the hint given within a name, people were guessing.
. . . .
None of you can say for certain whether K.J. Parker is male or female. You can guess. You can suspect. Ten thousand different rationales can lead down ten thousand roads. I used to work for attorneys where I mastered the art of reasoning both sides of an argument with supporting documentation, so I take it all with grain of salt. As Mark pointed out in one of our emails, it’s very easy–not to mention human nature–to skew the evidence to support an individual’s point of view. We like to think we know the answers and that the facts support our reasoning, but in the end, it’s all conjecture.
. . . .
Perhaps the publishers are right to ask women to submit their stories under pseudonyms. If a female name automatically conjures young adult/romantic/emotive story-lines in someone’s mind, and a good part of the audience suffers from contempt prior to investigation before the first line of prose is read, then the novel or story may never make it out of the gates sales-wise.
So the publishers succumb to subterfuge, the authors (tricksy, tricksy, tricksy authors)also participate in the game, and you, the reader, are left to guess. None of this is new, by the way. Female authors have been hiding their gender behind pseudonyms for over a century. Likewise, male authors who write romance or other genres with a predominately female readership are asked to disguise their gender.
Link to the rest at Teresa Frohock and thanks to Jane for the tip.
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Very interesting study! I’m glad she’s doing this, very helpful research to support women gaining respect in the literary field. That’s wonderful!
As a side note, this is not scientific, but at another forum I go to, they were sharing a computer program. If you type in some of your WIP, it would tell you if your “voice” was male or female.
It’s interesting that the results of that didn’t seem to correspond with the writer’s actual gender, according to the forum members.
I think writing is an art form where people can touch into all aspects of their personalities, including both the inner male and female.
Well, I read a ton, as a reader and an editor. And I’ve found that there are certain aspects to style that are more commonly found in male or female, though female can write “male”, and vice versa. (And usually, if a girl writes guy-ish—which I’ve seen more often than the other way around—she’s a gamer-nerd type who tends to hang out with guys more often than she does girls.)
Ever heard of the Gender Genie?
However, if the writing style itself is fairly neutral, I need to see the way certain things are handled. (Three keys that often give it away: romance, action, and a disagreement between a heterosexual couple.)
I wasn’t part of that linked study, but I think it says more about the average person’s ability to determine gender from writing style, than it does about writing styles necessarily being gender-neutral.
Oh, that thing is DANGEROUS.
I just fed it the text of “Caught In His Web,” a story I wrote (I’m “cis-gendered male”) from a female perspective. Results:
Female Score: 4835
Male Score: 4628
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!
And “The Reunion,” another female POV book:
Female Score: 18305
Male Score: 16013
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!
BWAHAHAHA I AM A GENDER CHAMELEON!
Interesting… I tried it with the first chapters from two of my YA fantasy series, and it thought I was female – wrong, but the protagonist is female. I then tried it with the start of my sci-fi novel, which has a male protagonist, and it thought I was male.
The fantasy series is in third person and the sci-fi novel is in first. I wonder if that makes any difference?
That is fun. I just dropped a publishing contract into the Gender Genie and received the following:
Female Score: 3164
Male Score: 3789
The genie guessed the author was male.
This thing’s addictive, and so far, I’m coming up like others, male for male POV and female for female POV. This is good.
I should’ve specified… The “I can usually tell” thing is referring to someone’s default style.
Writers can learn to change their style to suit the story, as in the case of writing a narrator of the opposite gender than the author. (Or to write using someone else’s writing style, as in the case of ghostwriting.)
*pastes in a chapter of the WIP*
Female Score: 2926
Male Score: 3015
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
*checks her pants*
Gender Genie is wrong, though it was a very close scoring.
*plugs in several others, including some 1st-person female protagonist bits*
Male, male, and… finally, female!
Heh.
I would hazard a guess that far more female writers disguise their names with initials, than do male authors who write in the romance/erotica genre.
While I’ve found many talented women authors who can write convincingly from a male perspective, I’ve found precious few male authors who can put on a bra and do the same.
Respectfully, how would you know?
Or, more specifically, assuming you base your opinion on what comprises a convincing female character on your own experiences as a female, and find men lacking in the ability to meet your requirements, how do you know that men wouldn’t find the male characters you find convincing equally lacking?
I myself find that either an author can create characters I find believable, or they cannot. If they can, it’s pretty rare that they can *only* create believable characters of one sex or the other, at least according to my own subjective evaluations. I frequently say to myself, “No intelligent human being would do that” in response to a character’s actions, but I rarely say, “No guy would do that” about a character in a book where I haven’t already said the former.
According to a course on graphology I took, you can’t determine someone’s gender from their *actual* writing, either. Their handwriting, that is. Just interesting to note.
(Yes yes I know graphology is woo. Contextually, it wasn’t woo. It’s complicated. In any event people who had spent a LOT of time looking at a LOT of handwriting samples were convinced that statistically speaking it’s not possible to have a lot of confidence as to whether a sample was written by a bio-male or a bio-female.)
I am all for authors concealing their gender from readers who might be unfairly prejudiced against them. There’s some big-name symphony that started doing auditions with the musicians behind a curtain, and when they started doing that, surprise! They started hiring more female musicians. Apparently when the judges could see who was playing, they were unconsciously biased against women.
I’m also reminded of an experience a friend had when her son played in a piano competition. It was his first competition, and they were both surprised when all the other competitors put on a show at the piano–swaying and bobbing to the music, caressing the keys, etc. My friend’s son had not been aware that was part of the competition–he had merely learned to play his piece very, very well. Another situation where if the kids were placed behind a curtain, showmanship would quickly be left out of the equation and it would be all about how well the kids played. But since the judges were watching, it had become a contest that was about more than just one’s skill at playing the piano.
I wonder how the results would differ in different languages. English can be delightfully coy and vague about gender. Also different cultural expectations of how men and women talk could influence things — what about English as a second language? Oooh, the research opportunities! Must apply for grant now!
I think there is a preconceived idea about the gender of writers of certain genres. There’s a reason Nora Roberts chose J.D. Robb and J.K. Rowling didn’t use her first name.
In my own limited experience, I queried over a hundred agents with my thriller whose main character is a man. I didn’t even receive a request for a partial. Finally, six months into querying, I made a new email address using a shortened form of my middle name, which is Patricia. So, I used Pat–just like from the old SNL skit.
I was almost out of agents to query, but I sent to a few more. I finally received a request for a partial. Then, I queried a few more. After one more month, I decided to self-publish the book, and of course, the next week, I had a request for a full. So, out of about ten queries sent with the gender neutral name of Pat, I had two responses.
When I see initials I think “woman.” And statistically, I would be right more often than wrong. (As a matter of fact, from the stats I’ve seen, I’d be right MUCH more often than wrong.)
It’s not about how or what they write, it’s about the fact that women in publishing are pushed to hide their gender, and are more likely to need to. As a result, people slowly begin to associate initials with women.
Therefore, any women who actually want to hide their gender should just go for an all-out male pen name.
But then Andre becomes a girl’s name!
(Seriously, I didn’t realize that Andre wasn’t a female name for quite some time, because I knew Andre Norton was female…)
LOL! I tried excerpts from two different stories – very different styles/voices. One is a current novel WIP [SF], the second a completed short story [kinda SF/horror]. The first was categorized male, the second, female.
Shakes head and wanders off into the wilderness seeking his true identity…