T Murachver | PubMed Health

PubMed2001

Where is the gender in gendered language?

The purpose of these studies was to examine how women and men react and accommodate to gender-preferential language in e-mail messages. In Experiment 1, participants wrote messages to two assigned "netpals." These netpals were actually one of the experimenters. For each participant, one netpal used female-preferential language and the other used male-preferential language. Analyses revealed that the netpals' language style, and not the participants' gender, predicted the language used by participants in their e-mail replies. Female and male participants used the gender-preferential language that matched the language used by their netpals. In Experiment 2, the gender labels and language styles of netpals were independently manipulated. As before, linguistic style had the greatest impact on participants' language use. These results have implications for how people think about gendered behavior, and highlight how gendered language is constructed in social interaction.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Predicting gender from electronic discourse.

There is substantial evidence of gender differences in face-to-face communication, and we suspect that similar differences are present in electronic communication. We designed three studies to examine gender-preferential language style in electronic discourse. In Expt 1, participants sent electronic messages to a designated 'netpal'. A discriminant analysis showed that it was possible to successfully classify the participants by gender with 91.4% accuracy. In Expts 2 and 3, we wanted to determine whether readers of e-mails could accurately identify author gender. We gave participants a selection of messages from Expt 1 and asked them to predict the author's gender. It was found that for 14 of the 16 messages used, the gender of author was correctly predicted. In the third experiment, six messages about gender-neutral topics were composed. Using a subset of the variables identified in Expt 1, female and male versions of each message were created. When participants were asked to rate whether a female or a male wrote these messages, their ratings differed as a function of the message version. These findings establish that people use gender-preferential language in informal electronic discourse. Furthermore, readers of these messages can use these gender-linked language differences to identify the author's gender.

Adolescent↗