The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [22]
HOW BIG ARE GENDER DIFFERENCES IN LANGUAGE?
Although men and women use words differently, the differences can often be subtle. In one large study of over fourteen thousand language samples, we found that about 14.2 percent of women’s words were personal pronouns compared with only 12.7 percent for men. From a statistical perspective, this is a huge difference. The kind of whopping statistical effect that brings tears of joy to a scientist’s eyes (or at least mine).
But a tear-inducing statistical effect does not always translate into an everyday meaningful effect. Let’s say we find a slow-talking person who speaks at the rate of a hundred words per minute. In any given minute, an average woman should say 14.2 personal pronouns and the average male 12.7. That is, the woman will mention about one and a half pronouns more than the man every minute. These numbers add up over the course of the day. For example, the average man and woman each say about sixteen thousand words a day. In the course of a year, women will say about eighty-five thousand more pronouns than will men. It boggles the mind. But does it matter? Although women are uttering almost 12 percent more pronouns than men, our brains are not constructed to pick up the difference. The average person can’t consciously detect a 12 percent difference and can’t even see the difference in written text. If you are intent on stealth word detection, you need to either count the words by hand or use a computer to do the dirty work.
Although we might not be very good at perceiving the differences in language between men and women, how well do computers do at distinguishing the writing of women from men? Let’s say we saved the text of well over 100,000 blog posts from, oh, I don’t know, 19,320 blog authors who identified themselves by their sex. Imagine that we then trained our computer program to sort the blogs by function-word use into male bloggers versus female bloggers. As you might have guessed, we have done just this. Overall, the computer correctly classifies the sex of the author 72 percent of the time (50 percent is chance). If we also look at the content (in addition to the style) of what people are writing, our accuracy increases slightly to about 76 percent. Note that these guesses are far superior to human guesses, which are in the 55–65 percent accuracy range.
All of these statistics tell us that, on average, women and men use words differently. The differences are subtle and not easily picked up by the human ear. And, of course, it is even more complicated than I’ve suggested. All people change their language depending on the situations that they are in. In formal settings, for example, people tend to use far fewer pronouns, more articles, and fewer social words—meaning most of us speak like prototypical men. When hanging around with our family in a relaxed setting, we all talk more like women. In short, the gender effects that exist in language reflect, to some degree, gender. But the context of speaking probably accounts for even more of our language choices.
AN EAR FOR GENDER: PLAYWRIGHTS AND SCREENWRITERS
As a reader, you probably have a certain fondness for the written word. You can easily spot a passage that is well written versus one that is poorly written. As a teacher, I have long wondered what it takes for someone to become a good writer. Better yet, how does one become a great writer? In his delightful book On Writing, novelist Stephen King argues that with practice and hard work,