Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts

TLDR

The study examines gender differences in writing across diverse genres in the British National Corpus. The analysis reveals that female-authored texts use more pronouns and “involved” features, while male-authored texts use more noun specifiers and “informational” features, with a strong link between gendered style and genre (fiction versus nonfiction).

Abstract

This article explores differences between male and female writing in a large subset of the British National Corpus covering a range of genres. Several classes of simple lexical and syntactic features that differ substantially according to author gender are identified, both in fiction and in nonfiction documents. In particular, we find significant differences between male- and female-authored documents in the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers: although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. More generally, it is found that even in formal writing, female writing exhibits greater usage of features identified by previous researchers as 'involved' while male writing exhibits greater usage of features which have been identified as 'informational'. Finally, a strong correlation between the characteristics of male (female) writing and those of nonfiction (fiction) is demonstrated.