Not taking into account any gender, sexuality, and sex specific terminology, discussions, websites.
I often find that I can usually tell the gender of a poster by something like how people react to suicide in disapproval. Men who condemn it will often emphasize on ‘cowardice’ and women will often emphasize on ‘selfishness’. For those men and women who emphasize on both, women use more emotional language ‘easy way out’ ‘pain’ and men emphasize more on what I call ‘the selfishness of cowardice’.
In general, It seems I’ve been right about 95% of the time. I suppose one could bring up the old nature vs nurture debate. I believe it’s mostly due to socialization but I could be wrong.
What’s been your experience and what do you think causes it?
I have no way of knowing how often I “guess right” on something like that. Nor, do I ever wonder, much less guess, about the gender of the writer. In fact, it hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder if theh OP of this thread is a man or woman.
When reading a novel, of course, I’m always aware of the gender of the author, and in the back of my mind, there is always a subconscious recognition of that. But rarely, if ever, do I think “a man would have said that differently”.
OK, so it’s not just me confused by this question.
I don’t think I have much of a sample size to deal with, and in the ones I may have, I haven’t seen anyone of either gender or sex write anything as callous as “cowardice” and “selfishness” in referring to that person. And I don’t see how “cowardice” would be a more “male” word and selfishness a more “female” word. Both are gender neutral words assholes would use in talking about a suicide.
If you are just looking for stats on word usage and male-female use, you can find the numbers here. There’s also websites that will try to predict your gender with a writing sample. I’m sure those are Googlable.
My track record of guessing a gender based on typing/word choice is horrible. I would be better off in places like this just flipping a coin; my average is maybe about 17-20% correct where basic odds say random choice would be better.
I just assume 100% of everyone on the internet is a man (unless they have pictures of themselves attached to the profile or something), and am always surprised when I’m wrong.
On the Dope I tend to think of posters as male unless there’s a strong indication otherwise. Most Dopers are male so I’d be right most of the time. I don’t think the context of suicide would give me much of a clue though.
Pretty much the same here. At least 12 gender-vague usernames in this thread so far and the only way I can tell is when people talk about themselves and I happen to remember what they said. Even then, I tend to forget. Much safer to assume that everybody out there is actually just an NSA bot.
I tend to assume that everyone on the internet is female. I am wrong about as often as I am right. In other forums or chat rooms, I can often tell someone’s age to about 10 years after a couple of interactions just by the chat speak they use.
Sometimes I play a game where I read an article and try to guess the author’s sex, then look at the byline. In formal writing I rarely notice a difference. Supposedly, according to certain studies, women use more pronouns and language describing relationships between people (her idea, our book) whereas men use more articles (the idea, a book) and numerical descriptions vs. general (10 books vs. a lot of books), but I don’t tend to notice any of that.
What I observe in informal writing is that men brag, threaten, curse, express a limited emotional range (heavy on the anger and lust), insult low status or incompetent men, and describe in detail taboo subjects like sex, death, or drug use, especially in a joking or flippant manner. Women more often employ euphemisms, say what people do or don’t deserve, describe a variety of emotions with greater detail (this made me feel like X, but also a little bit Y), use self deprecating, qualifying, or apologizing language, and use more cutesy adjectives, like precious, adorbs, and pretty.
Another aspect I notice is women tend to be more observational about other people, especially with descriptions of people’s appearance, like their clothes, hair, and jewelry. Men don’t usually notice if another man is wearing a wedding ring or if a woman tweaked their hairstyle. This is one of the few ways I guess the author of a formal news piece or popular science article may be a woman. The author will say they met some scientist and then spend a sentence or two describing what they look like or how they’re dressed or how they don’t look their age or it’s surprising they’re still out in the field using a cane.
