GENDER/GENRE:

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN
PROFESSIONAL WRITING

Image: flickr/srqpix CC BY 2.0

Brian N. Larson
29 October 2014
Current Research in Writing Studies

Housekeeping
www.Rhetoricked.com (these slides + some
additional)
Communicate with me:
@Rhetoricked
Larson@Rhetoricked.com

Research supported by:

Graduate Research Partnership Program fellowship (U of M
CLA), 2012
James I. Brown Summer Research Fellowship, 2014

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Gender, sex,
and research constructs
When I talk about my own data, Ill refer to
Gender F authors/writers
Gender M authors/writers

These categories may or may not

correspond to other researchers
{woman, female, feminine}
{man, male, masculine}

Thats the subject of another talk (or for

Q&A)
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Many researchers have asked

Do men and women communicate
differently?
Much work inspired by Robin Lakoff (1975)
Scholarly and popular works by Deborah
Tannen (e.g. 1990[2001]) and others
Much of this research in oral/face-to-face
communication
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Writing:
Process and product
In writing studies, we can (roughly)
divide process and product
Do men and women produce writing using
different processes?
Is the writing they produce distinguishable
based on author gender?

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Previous studies:
Process research
Focus on interpersonal communications
in mixed-gender contexts
Lay, 1989 (Schuster); Rehling, 1996; Raign
& Sims, 1993; Ton & Klecun, 2004; Wolfe
& Alexander, 2005; Brown & Burnett, 2006;
Wolfe & Powell, 2006, 2009.

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Previous studies:
Product research
In technical and professional
communication
Sterkel, 1988 (20 stylistic chars)
Smeltzer & Werbel, 1986 (16 stylistic and
evaluative measures)
Tebeaux, 1990 (quality of responses)
Allen, 1994 (markers of authoritativeness)

Manual methods, small samples

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Enter computational methods

Natural language processing (NLP)
Allows processing of large quantities of
text data
Study that attracted my attention
Koppel, Argamon & Shimoni, 2002
(machine-learning algorithms)
Argamon et al., 2003 (statistical analysis)
Ill focus on Argamon et al. in this talk
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Argamon et al. 2003

Used 500 published texts from BNC
Mean 34,000 words (tokens) per text
Statistical analysis showed
correspondence to Bibers (1995)
informational/involved dimension

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Gender in computer-mediated
communication (CMC)
CMC popular for NLP studies
Data are readily available
Data are voluminous

Examples
Herring & Paolillo, 2006 (blog posts, stat analysis)
Yan & Yan, 2006 (blog posts, MLA analysis)
Argamon et al., 2007 (blog posts, MLA analysis)
Rao et al., 2010 (Twitter, MLA analysis)
Burger et al., 2011 (Twitter, MLA analysis)
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Rationale:
Why is the question important?
Lend support to one or more theories of
gender
Two cultures (Maltz & Borker, 1982)
Standpoint (Barker & Zifcak, 1999)
Performative (Butler 1993, 1999, 2004)
Others

Sorting out methodological problems,

particularly use of gender as a variable
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Study design goals

Research questions
Did Gender F and Gender M writers in a disciplinary
genre in which they are being trained use lexical and
quasi-syntactic stylistic features with relative
frequencies that varied with their genders?
If so, did the differences appear in interpretable
patterns?

Examine a corpus of texts

All of the same genre
Where we can be confident of single authorship
Where author gender is self-identified

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Data collection
Major writing project at end of first year of
law school
Students address hypothetical problem
(writing in same genre)
Students not allowed to collaborate
Plagiarism difficult (but still possible)

Students self-identified gender*

193 texts (mean word tokens = 3764)
*This study IRB-approved (UMN Study #1202E10685)
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Text genre: Memorandum

regarding motion to dismiss
Written to hypothetical court
Supporting or opposing a motion before
the court
High-level organization is formulaic

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r
t

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Memorandum Sections

Caption**
Introduction/summary*
Facts
Legal standard of review*
Argument
Conclusion
Signature block**
* Not always present.
**I did not analyze (content is highly formulaic)
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Feature (variable)
selection
For now, those of Argamon et al. 2003
Relative frequencies of
429 function words (Argamon used 405)
45 parts of speech from the Penn
Treebank tagset (Argamon used 76 BNC
POS tags)
100 common part-of-speech bigrams
500 common POS trigrams
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Part-of-speech tags?
Bigrams & trigrams?
First, tokenize each sentence
(automated):
My aunts pen is on the table.

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POS tags
Purple words are function words

Tag the parts of speech (automated)

Then calculate relative frequency of
function words and POS tags
(automated)
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POS bigrams and trigrams

A bigram or trigram is a 2- or 3-token
window on the sentence.
Automated calculation

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Feature (variable)
selection
First-person pronouns (total)
Singular: I, me, my, mine, myself.
Plural: We, us, our, ours, ourselves.

Second-person pronouns: You, your, yours, yourself.

Third-person pronouns (total)
Singular (total)
Feminine: She, her, hers, herself.
Masculine: He, him, his, himself.

Plural: They, them, their, theirs, themselves.

Contractions: Including all instances of nt, ld, ve, etc.

All relative frequencies calculated (automated)

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Each students text is

represented by variables
A series of numerical values expressing each
feature (variable), i.e., the relative frequency of:
Function words / total tokens
POS tags / total tokens
Bigrams / total bigrams*
Trigrams / total trigrams*
Pronouns
Automated calculation
*Multiplied by a factor.
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t
T

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Example 1

Tokens of the function word-type all in

paper 1007 account for less than 7/100
of 1% of all tokens in that paper.
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Example 2
Bigrams made up of
a plural common
noun (NNS) followed
by a coordinating
conjunction (CC)
accounted for 1/10
of 1% of bigrams in
paper 1009.
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Mean relative frequencies

calculated
For each feature
Mean frequency (SD) for Gender F authors
Mean frequency (SD) for Gender M
authors
Statistical significance assessed with
Mann-Whitney U test (expressed as pvalue)

A priori threshold for significance: 0.05

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What Argamon et al. 2003

found: Men
Males used significantly more
Determiners, a, the, these
Determiner+noun bigrams: the books, a
dog, these Tories
Attributive-adjective+noun bigrams: great
leaders, old form
Prepositions: at, from, for, of, behind
Its
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What Argamon et al. 2003

found: Women
Females used significantly more
Pronouns (all)
1st person sing.: I, my, mine
2nd person: you, yours
3rd person: they, them, theirs

Present tense verbs: walks, eradicates

Contractions
Negation with not
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Informational/involved
Biber (1995) labeled this a dimension of
register variation after doing cluster
analyses on frequencies to identify covarying features as dimensions
Consistent with popular conceptions
and works such as Tannen (1990
[2001]) that characterize women as
affiliative and men as informative
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What I found:
Nouns & determiners
Nouns
Some categories showed non-significant
Gender F preference (weakly contradicting
Argamon)

Determiners and determiner+noun

Only significant: DET-NNP (proper noun)
But all showed non-significant Gender M
preference
(Overall, weakly supporting Argamon)
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What I found:
Adjectives & prepositions
Attributive-adjective+noun
Non-significant Gender M preference
(weakly supporting Argamon)

Prepositions
Non-significant Gender M preference
(weakly supporting Argamon)

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What I found:
Pronouns (i.e., a mess)
All pronouns: Non-significant Gender M
preference (weakly contradicting Argamon)
1st p sing., 2nd p., 3rd p. overall, 3rd s. fem: Nonsignificant Gender F preference (weakly
supporting Argamon)
3rd p. plural: Significant Gender M preference
(contradicting Argamon)
Its: Non-significant Gender F preference
(weakly contradicting Argamon)
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What I found:
Verbs, contractions, not
Present-tense verbs
Significant Gender M preference for 3rd p.
singular (contradicting Argamon)
Non-significant Gender M preference for the
rest (weakly contradicting Argamon)

Contractions: Non-significant Gender F

preference (weakly supporting Argamon)
Negation with not: (weakly supporting
Argamon)
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The take-away?
Statistics: The non-significant differences
should probably be regarded as nonsignificant
In that case, M-informational/F-involved is not
confirmed in this study

If the non-significant differences are real,

evidence for M-informational/F-involved is
still mixed, especially in pronouns and
present-tense verbs
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Explaining the findings with

relevance theory
Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995)
recognizes the effects of habituation
If boys and girls are acculturated to writing
in certain genres and certain topics in their
youths . . .
. . . they may unconsciously habituate to
certain (appropriate) word choices
. . . and may not be completely free to
vary their word choices consciously later.
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Situating the findings within

gender & language theories
Findings weakly support or contradict
Two sociolinguistic cultures view (Maltz &
Borker 1982; Tannen 1990 [2001])
Intersectionality/performativity views (Barker &
Zifcak 1999; Butler; many others)

Some gendered linguistic habits appeared

to resist retraining and conscious efforts to
conform to register conventions . . .
. . . others were apparently overcome.
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Im left with more questions

than answers . . .
But you are entitled to ask some
questions now . . .

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THANK YOU!
www.Rhetoricked.com (these slides + some
additional)
Communicate with me:
@Rhetoricked
Larson@Rhetoricked.com

Research supported by:

Graduate Research Partnership Program fellowship (U of M
CLA), 2012
James I. Brown Summer Research Fellowship, 2014

www.Rhetoricked.com
@Rhetoricked

Works cited
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Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Fine, J., & Shimoni, A. R. (2003). Gender,
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Argamon, S., Koppel, M., Pennebaker, J. W., & Schler, J. (2007).
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Works cited
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Automatic classification of foot examination findings using clinical notes
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Rao, D., Yarowsky, D., Shreevats, A., & Gupta, M. (2010). Classifying
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