Or quite possibly people (men especially) feel more secure expressing themselves more emotively in an anonymous arena like an internet message board. I would question whether or not the writing style is consistent when it is not anonymous.
I remember one time someone started a thread on this board tittled: “How do you flirt?”
In the thread I quoted somebody I thought was a female and then said something flirty to them. My intensionn was to give the OP an example of how I flirt.
Well, it turns out the poster I was flirting with was a guy. And to make things even more comical, he happened to be gay.
So yeah, I think it’s real easy to get confused on a board. At least it is for me.
If you have a vowel at the end of your name, you’re a girl. Ok for me, but I remember Malacandra used to have a disclaimer in his sig for a looooooooooooooooooong time.
I think that its pretty easy to guess a posters gender by the contents of their post.
The ladies,bless their pretty little heads, tend to post more about fluffy bunnies and kittens and how to make themselves more attractive to their men,leaving the important subjects to us blokes.
This is of course as it should be,men are a lot more intelligent then the fairer sex and lets be honest,anything along the lines of politics or economics apart from being a mystery to the ladies is not going to be of any interest to them.
Dont you just love 'em with their muddle headed little ways?
It is a rare woman indeed who would put up with the high-handed dick-waving from the neckbearded Angry White Males in GQ and GD. I suspect that it’s the rutting instinct that keeps most of the males there, bickering and sniping and comparing their penis length. It doesn’t help that they’re mostly the nerds and geeks who got ostracized in school for being jerks (although they believe it’s for professing science) and now walk around with a chip on their chubby little shoulders.
Well, STS’s own genitalia wagging, and other humble opinions aside, I just found this article addressing the subject - that is gender differences in what the author refers to as computer-mediated communication (CMC).
So there do seem to be some gender related differences and some of Syntropy’s points seem to be supported by what research there is. And I happily embrace my previously unrecognized female characteristics. (Even though they reside in an apparently neck bearded rutting male with a chip on my admittedly too chubby shoulders. (I really gotta start training for another endurance event …)
I tend to think any poster who uses “squee!” as an exclamation or curly braces to signify a hug is probably female, but I don’t presume to be certain.
Not just any vowel. If I saw the names Anaamiko* and Malacandro, I would probably assume they were men.*
If you don’t know, why should he tell you?
ETA: *Now that I see it in print, I take it back. The -ko ending makes it look like a Japanese girl’s name. But any other consonant followed by an “o” would suggest a masculine name, while “a” is feminine: Antonio vs. Antonia, Mario vs. Maria, etc.
I don’t. I believe the SDMB overall has somewhat more men than women, but it doesn’t seem to me that GD has a disproportionate number of male participants. It’s my impression that the gender divide in IMHO is also pretty much in line with the overall board population. MPSIMS may skew female, but I don’t spend much time there so I’m not sure. And I’m a woman myself, so even if MPSIMS is mostly women it isn’t especially attractive to all women here. If my time is limited the forums I check are GD, CS, and the Pit.
I can say that other people’s perception of a poster’s gender can make a big difference in how that poster is treated. I’ve occasionally been mistaken for a man here (which is funny, since my username is more obviously feminine than my real first name!), and I can remember a few threads where other posters’ attitudes towards me changed dramatically once I corrected this mistake.