Gender Bias in Language Research?

On the WPA-L, someone sent around the link to The Gender Genie, a program that uses an algorithm to determine if the author of a text was male or female. First of all, I think the whole thing is hugely dubious. It is based on statistical analysis of the British National Corpus, so there is nothing remotely innate about the correlation between gender and "the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers" (Argamon, Koppel, Fine, Shimon [.pdf document]). The conclusions are rightly stated as "socialization of gender."

However, even this claim needs to be tempered. I ran my own little test using the Gender Genie. When submitting blocks of text, one must choose the type of text it is from broad genre categories of fiction, non-fiction, or blog. Since I don't really have a great deal of fiction to submit, I first took a piece of this blog and ran it through the Genie. It claimed the author was female. As a comparison, I took a piece of my dissertation. It claimed the author was male. Why the difference?

It maybe that the samples I submitted were too short. The blog was 289 words and the section of my dissertation was 382 words. So, I ran another test, this time with a different blog entry and a different section of my dissertation. They were 816 and 900 words, respectively. I achieved the same results with these samples as with the first test. My blog entry was seen as "female" and my dissertation was seen as "male."

My dissertation discusses theory and empirical data while my blog tends to remain more theory oriented. However, I would think this would actually score a difference the other way around with real experience scoring as more "feminine," assuming the Gender Genie reinforces the stereotype of abstract discourse as a penchant for males and experiential or intuitive discourse as something innately female. Moreover, since both blog entries and my dissertation involve academic thinking about discourse, the fact that any difference was detected strikes me as patently odd.

Now, to be fair, my dissertation involves more conclusive theorizing than the two blog entries I used previously. So, I ran a third test, this time involving only one strongly argued (and firmly believed) blog entry since we know the dissertation is "male." Based on only 441 words, mind you, the Gender Genie found this one to be "male" as it did my dissertation.

Conclusions? Beyond that the Gender Genie is absolute bunk (like you needed me to tell you)? That what is being measured here are stereotypes. The dissertation sections and the lone blog entry that scored as male did so because of the conviction and assured manner in which they were argued, not the more tentative and speculative manner of my blog entries. As such, the algorithm picks out a degree of certainty with which the author uses language to relate the reader to the subject matter being written. That is it. There is another step required to make the leap from that measure to the conclusion that these are indicative of the ways in which British or even Western societies socialize along gendered lines. The authors of the Gender Genie makes that step, equating a self-assured manner of writing with gender characteristics. But, in doing so only reinforces sexist stereotypes about women's and men's ways of writing.

Don't believe me? As a final check, I ran two more texts: Gwen Ifill's op-ed about Don Imus' derogation of the Rutger's women's basketball team and this blog entry. Ifill's op-ed that took Imus to task was 765 words and was seen as male. This entry? 618 words and written by a male.

Hyperides Speaks!

It is amazing that someone who lived in the Classical Greek world wrote something down, and that, despite his words being abraded off to use as parchment for medieval writing, the text still exists! Apparently, philosophers are going over the commentary on Aristotle here (requires Windows Media Player so Mac folks like me are SOL). Hyperides wrote about Aristotle's taxonomy and classification of animals, so there may be important contributions not only for philosophers of science, but also for those interested in the rhetoric of science and nature. Stay tuned!

VTech, Violence, and Writing

As the news trickles out about the killings at VTech, I know we are all pretty saddened, shocked and alarmed. For me, I find it disturbing that Cho Seung-Hui had written extensively for his courses as an English major and that he even was referred to counseling by his writing teacher. These things hit real close to where I spend a good part of my day, a day I often share with many like you.

So, I want to ask what our response might be at this time. We might think about revisiting some scholarship that has been published on dealing with violence in writing. I can't remember the title of it, but I recall an article about a piece of writing that described beating up a homeless man. It turned out to be fiction, but the teacher's response and thinking about appropriate action was really insightful. This may be a good place to start.

We may even look at Cho's writing. Distasteful as it may seem, it is posted online. We may ask what separates it from other writing that is also predicated on violence or just ask what we would do if a student handed in something like it in our courses.

My hope is that we can at least take an opportunity to inform ourselves on the possible situations we face as instructors.

So, I guess I am open to suggestions or ideas at this point and have a lot of questions about how to make this happen. If you have an article, a suggestion, a clue, or word of wisdom, please share! All I ask is that this not turn into rampant theorizing or polemicizing. Please keep the politics to a minimum.

Dvd

Prayers Go Out (V Tech)

My heart goes out to all the students, faculty, and staff at Virginia Tech today. The events of 16 April are truly horrible and will impact the school and its members for some time. As you grieve and begin the steps toward healing, I think of you and hope for your future.

Vonnegut 1922 - 2007

We will miss him.

Rutgers, Imus, and Critical Consciousness

I was going to post some exploration on the language of cephalopods. But with the whole Rutgers women's b-ball-Don Imus-Al Sharpton thing, and teaching this week on the power of language and how students sometimes have to read into texts in order to understand the power differentials, I found something more pertinent. Here it is reprinted from CommonDreams.org:

Trash Talk Radio

by Gwen Ifill

Let’s say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather.

The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.

In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.

But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.

The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before.

I know, because he apparently did it to me.

I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.

Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.

It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.

“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”

I was taken aback but not outraged. I’d certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.

I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.

It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.

Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don’t know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.

Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.

So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.

Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.

Gwen Ifill is a senior correspondent for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and the moderator of “Washington Week.”

© 2007 The New York Times

Animal Communication

Has it really been that long since I posted? Wow! Lots has happened, though: a new job, house hunting (unsuccessful so far), another chapter done... now if I can just finish grading papers by tomorrow.

Until then, I was watching Nature again, this time about cephalopods, those foot-headed protoypes for Cthulhu. Anyway, some species communicate through rapid color changes in skin pigmentation. This reminded me of insects and pheremone use, not to mention elephant's ability to register infrasound frequencies. So, with other species, we have ample evidence of systems of communications that are radically different from our own. Or are they?

Applying Gibson's theory of perception, I have to ask if communication is really just an affordance. Since an affordance is some potential that exists in one's environment -- defined so that one's "perceptual array" includes one's own body -- then manipulating the body to signal meaning would be the basis for communication, at least the basic unit.

Of course, this puts the onus on organisms as meaning-making animals and I'm not entirely sure this is an accurate assumption. It implies intent. Even we humans sometimes communicate unintentionally. So, taking ecological perception one step further and seeing other organisms as part of the perceptual field, sometimes affordances themselves (crabs use other organisms and myriad insects see others as good egg laying sites, i.e., seeing them as locations with potential in the environment, not as "food source").

So, with this in mind, we might test whether or not organisms read rather than write. If they do, then the world is abuzz with (pun intended) and literally saturated with meaning. Organisms are still meaning-making but not as intentional. Derrida would be more right than even he might have claimed.

But this isn't really my point since putting this to any kind of testing would be difficult beyond compare. Rather, my point here is that this disrupts writing theory to a large degree, making visual script (just) one more system among systems and, more importantly, less a methodical means to transmit meaning as an elaboration of