Men are around, women are with.
A while ago, I was talking about gender and characters' voices.
The characters are boys. Regardless of whether they're straight, gay, or the filling in a Woody Allen sandwich, they have to come across as sound like boys.
I think this is another symptom of the author substituting her voice for the character's. Yes, her voice: that seems to be how it works, and it's true working the other way as well. And there I'm going to leave it,for now.
I was wise to leave it. It seems, in English anyway, men and women use distinct enough sets of words to allow a fairly simple computer program to tell them apart eight times out of ten. You can try it out here.
I've skimmed the theory paper, but haven't gone into it in depth. At first sight, fooling Gender Genie should be easy. At one level, it's about using certain types of words more or less than others. For example, men say around, what, more, and the more; women say with, if, not, and me more. Deeper, and more controversially (it says here), it's another flavour of men talk about objects, women talk about relationships.
Anyway, I'm mildly reassured to discover that I and my male characters are indeed male. In fact, it's worked pretty well on the samples I've tried.
Of course, there's an exception to every rule, and I've found someone who writes like a female when she's talking about herself, and writes like a male when she's writing her stories, you know, those ones with male characters. That's a pretty darn neat trick, and I'd love to know how she does it for when I need to write female characters. :-)
Rubs hands and thinks of plans to make myself fortunes writing programs to mogrify text into gender-of-choice.