Whether men and women write differently can be hotly debated, but there’s a Web page called Gender Genie that claims to settle the matter. The site allows you to test writing samples to determine which gender wrote it. Simply cut and paste a chunk of text into the box on the page, wait a few moments, and the site tells you whether it was penned by a male or a female.

Gender Genie is based on an algorithm developed by two computer scientists. They dumped hundreds of texts into a computer, recording the gender of each author. They then crunched a bunch of numbers, and after doing that voodoo that computer scientists do, proclaimed their machine finished. They claimed they had developed a program that could predict the gender of any text’s author with 80% accuracy.

So I tried it out. I put in some of my own text, and when the score came back, I felt all proud. I’m a male! (Heck, if it’s so obvious to the computer, maybe I’m even macho! Damn, I wanna gnaw on some red meat and go fightin’.)

However, then I put in some text from Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, and her score was also strongly male. Seeking a more overtly feminine writer, I put in a chunk of text from left-leaning political commentator (and the screenwriter of “Sleepless in Seattle”) Nora Ephron. It was a piece in which she criticizes Nancy Pelosi for having too short a haircut – if that’s not girly enough – yet it also scored as leaning male.

So I searched for a clearly and inarguably feminine piece of writing. On Google I found a piece called “A Mom’s Feelings of Guilt.” (First line: “I wasn’t really sure where to put this or how to address it. It’s something that isn’t easy to talk about…”) This time the prediction was accurate. The piece’s score was overwhelmingly female.

So, okay, the machine’s not a total flop, but determining whether an author is male or female isn’t something it’s qualified to do. And, in fact, whether even a human can do that (without reading the byline) is questionable.

But I’m still happy that the computer thinks that I’m a man. I’m a man! Yippee!