check this out. an anonymous friend of mine has created a site that guesses the gender of the author of whatever text you feed into it based on an algorithm created by moshe koppel, bar-ilan university in israel, and shlomo argamon, illinois institute of technology.
i fed various bits of legal writing that were sitting on my computer at work into the site. half were written by me, and half by a female co-worker. the gender genie said they were all male. then i fed several letters from the new york times into it, and it did much better--guessing correctly on all but one of the 8 or so letters i entered. the genie supposily works best with fiction, which i haven't tried yet.
i'm actually curious if formal writing from fields other than law will also come up as male (i.e. if the algorithm reads all formal writing as male) or if each discipline's writing style will appear to be one gender or another.
