"Men and women ostensibly write the same language, on the other hand, but according to a recent article in The Boston Globe, they do so in ways that immediately reveal which sex is doing the writing." That's according to Sunday's New York Times Magazine, which reports on research done by scientists who "devised an algorithm that could predict with 80 percent accuracy the sex of the author."

They discovered that "women are apparently far more likely than men to use personal pronouns -- 'I,' 'you' and 'she' especially. Men, on the other hand, prefer so-called determiners -- 'a,' 'the,' 'that,' 'these' -- along with numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' and 'some.'"

Is it truly possible to determine the sex of an author by a mathematical algorithm? If it's true, is this because men and women are so biologically different that even our prose is shaped by our genitalia? Or is this because of we've been socialized so much that masculine and feminine roles affect even our writing? Especially in light of the discussion below, I'm curious to see what you all think.

And: Can you tell the difference? To see if you can, I've created a little test (read on).

The challenge: Guess the sex of the author of the following passages. The answers are at the end, in white. Give it a shot and then post your score. We're all friends, so we trust you not to lie. Ahem.

My methodology: I went to my bookshelves and pile of magazines, selected a handful of texts, mostly at random, and selected, again mostly at random, a few sentences from each one. I only chose a new passage if I thought that the first one I found was too revealing (e.g., you'd recognize the work and thus the author because of character names or details). I also tried to make sure it was representative, and not just a random wacky passage. That said, I realize my methodology is completely nonscientific, and the study above actually examined the whole text, not just a segment.

Just take the test. Are these writers male or female?

The test

1. The ape is too distant to be sedulous. All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac have written a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property.
2. Misunderstandings tangle like phone cords; perverse emotions simmer beneath neutral banter. But IMing can be oddly hypnotic as well. As long as the chat box remains onscreen, a psychic connection continues even if neither participant says anything at all.
3. Dorothy put her right hand on Cara's belly. She was carrying high, which tradition said meant the baby was a boy, but this had nothing to do with Dorothy's certainty of the child's sex. She just had a feeling.
4. Black America and white America still live separately. Most whites live in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods; most blacks live in majority-black ones. Americans of different races still tend not to live together, socialize together, or chart their paths in this society together.
5. Time to escape. I want my real life back with all of its funny smells, packets of loneliness, and long, clear car rides. I want my friends and my dopey job dispensing cocktails to leftovers. I miss heat and dryness and light.
6. I just kept quiet and looked around. And I noticed things. The dots on the ceiling. Or how the blanket they gave me was rough.
7. I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day.
8. I knew he was near, because in the candlelight I could see blood scattered in the dust around my bed and there was a red handprint on the sheets. I guessed he was in the shadows at the other end of the longhouse, waiting to loom out and surprise me.
9. In the mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that quickened his imagination. For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.
10. A fire walker with steel rods through his cheeks had predicted the year would end in disaster, the islands would be laid waste by a curse. Educated Fijians had laughed at his prediction, shrugging off the odd cyclone and shark attack.

The answers (highlight -- click and hold your mouse as you drag over the line -- to read)

1. female: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own.
2. female: Emily Nussbaum, "Fast Company," Radar Magazine.
3. male: Michael Chabon, "Son of the Wolfman."
4. female: Farai Chideya, Don't Believe the Hype
.
5. male: Douglas Coupland, Generation X.
6. male: Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
7. female: Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted.
8. male: Alex Garland, The Beach.
9. male: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
10. female: Kiana Davenport, "Fork Used in Eating Reverend Baker."

So, how'd you do?

After trying these, are you more or less convinced of the scientist's argument and findings? What did you find yourself looking for to determine whether the passage was written by a man or a woman? What parts mislead you on the ones you got wrong? What parts were giveaways on the ones you got right?