Gender in Writing Style

I’ve been going through a very fascinating book by Ben Blatt called Nabakov’s Favorite Word is Mauve. This book quantifies commonly accepted writing norms and rules across well-known classics and best-sellers.

We have already talked about adverb usage and exclamation point frequency and these posts have generated much discussion.

This post will talk about words that are present with more frequency in writing based on the gender of the author. I think you’ll find this fascinating. I know I did.

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In his book, Nabakov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, Ben Blatt examines the types of words and actual words used most frequently by authors of different genders. He starts out simply by examining Facebook posts.

He starts out by citing a University of Pennsylvania that analyzed millions of Facebook, chatroom, Twitter and blog posts to see what words were being used most by each gender. A table of the results is shown below:

Source	Lopsided usage by males	Lopsided usage by females
Facebook	F*ck, League, Sh*t, F*cking, Shave	Shopping, Excited, <3, Boyfriend, Cute
Chat room emoticons	😉	😀
Twitter assent or negation terms	Yessir, Nah, Nobody, Ain’t	Okay, Yes, Yess, Yesss, Yessss, Nooo, Noooo, Cannot
Blogs	Linux, Microsoft, Gaming, Server, Software	Hubby, Husband, Adorable, Skirt, Boyfriend

Another study from 2003 conducted by British computer scientists found that males use many more noun specifiers (a, this, these) while females use many more pronouns (I, yourself, their).

It might seem unlikely, but through this analysis, the scientists were able to create an algorithm that could predict an author’s gender with 80% accuracy just by looking at these characteristics.

Bratt extrapolated the methods used in these two studies and began examining classic fiction. He took 100 classic books, 50 by male and 50 by female authors and came up with the following results for frequency of words in descending order

Most Gender-Indicative Words in Classic Literature
Male	Female
Chief	Pillows
Rear	Lace
Civil	Curls
Bigger	Dress
Absolutely	China
Enemy	Skirt
Fellows	Curtains
King	Cups
Public	Sheets
Contact	Shrugged

Blatt then takes these words and does the reverse of his process to see how accurate an examination of both Classic and Best-Selling novels would be in predicting gender of the author. the results are interesting as shown in the following two tables. The errors are noted with an *.

Most Masculine Classic Novels	Most Feminine Classic Novels
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce	Ellen Foster – Kaye Gibbons
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White	Rubyfruit Jungle – Rita Mae Brown
Orlando – Virginia Woolf*	A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess*
Animal Farm – George Orwell	Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Shipping News – Annie Proulx*	The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson	Bastard Out of Carolina – Dorothy Allison
Lord of the Flies – William Golding	The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand*	Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather*	Lady Chatterly’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence*
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway	The Death of the Heart – Elizabeth Bowen

Most Masculine #1 Bestsellers	Most Feminine #1 Bestsellers
Inferno – Dan Brown	Kiss the Dead – Laurell K. Hamilton
The Fallen Angel – Daniel Silva	Power Play – Danielle Steel
The English Girl – Daniel Silva	Hit List – Laurell K. Hamilton
The Heist – Daniel Silva	Until the end of Time – Danielle Steel
Act of War – Brad Thor	Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn
Flash and Bones – Kathy Reichs*	Big Little Lies – Liane Moriarty
The First Phone Call from Heaven – Mitch Albom	Dead Ever After – Charlaine Harris
Kill Alex Cross – James Patterson	New York to Dallas – J.D. Robb
Cross My Heart – James Patterson	Frost Burned – Patricia Briggs
The Time Keeper – Mitch Albom	Dead Reconing – Charlaine Harris

This was an interesting topic to look at. Depending on the level of discussion, I may spill it over into another post as Blatt has a lot more to share on this subject.

I look forward to your comments.

 

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