a change of pace – gender genie

I have been thinking a lot about the role of women in technology and the need for us to “pass” amongst the male IT crowd since I read Dorothea’s excellent posts, “What some folks can do, if they choose” and “Sexism and group formation.” The former is in part in response to the Kathy Sierra situation and in part in response to Meredith’s post on the same topic. The latter is what really caught my eye. It’s all about women in technology needing to be honorary guys to fit in and get respect from their peers–definitely worth a read in full and far more serious than the rest of my post will be.

The honorary guy path is one I’ve been walking down as long as I can remember, and like Dorothea says in the post, it is usually great to be an honorary guy. Then again, sometimes, when total strangers think you are a guy, it is kind of creepy.

But anyway, I’ve been in this thinking-about-gender mode recently, especially since one of my del.icio.us fans intimated that I was male when tagging this blog. And in this general frame of thought, I ran across a post in David Weinberger’s blog about Gender Genie, this online tool that supposedly can gauge whether you are male or female from your writing style. It looks at words like “around” and “with” and gives you a total male versus female score. I naturally had to test it out. Uniformly, the Gender Genie said I was male. As if.