How gender recognition software could have saved the media

While Syrians were being attacked by their own government, the press seethed with anger.

But they weren't angry that a 13-year-old boy had been tortured to death and they weren't angry that security forces were opening fire on peaceful protesters — at least not as angry. No, they were mostly angry because they got duped by a Straight Guy from America.

The lesbian writer in Syria that published the Gay Girl from Damascus blog the media had fallen in love with and covered ad naseum turned out to be Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old American living in Edinburgh. Furious, and a little ashamed of itself, the press lashed out.

For future reference, my dear peers, there is an easy solution to this problem. In fact, we could have avoided the embarassment altogether and we could have done so without having to do any real reporting.

There is software now available that can calculate the likely gender of anyone writing on the web, or anywhere for that matter. Developed at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, the program allows those who need to know to copy and paste paragraphs into a dialogue box on the site. It then "analyzes" the writing to determine the gender, giving you the likely percentage that its author is either male or female.

According to the New Scientist, the developers used "psycho-linguistic" factors such as specific words (really, charming and lovely all signify a female), paragraph lengths and punctuation styles to determine the sex of the author. But what if the author is transgendered in one form or the other? Question marks also signified a female.

Paul Marks over at the New Scientist plugged in the last post from Gay Girl from Damascus and discovered that she was 63.2 percent likely to be a male. So there you have it. I plugged in Paul Marks' story and got back a 70 percent chance that he was male. Well done Paul.

Interestingly, I received a little over 60 percent when analyzing my own writing while Jon Jensen, my better half on this blog, consistently "scored" above 80 percent. What does it all mean? Is Jon more manly than me? Hardly.

I feel really confused.