I find that about 70% of the time, I can tell whether a man or woman wrote something.
Why?
Other than little girls writing loopy script with hearts over the 'i’s, how would people come to have different handwriting styles based on sex?
I guess women may place more emphasis on being perceived as neat or delicate?
The other wrinkle is that in the remaining 30% of cases, I can’t really tell.
I’d say that male/female writing definitely exists. The question is whether it’s genetic or comes about as a result of the environment a person grows up in.
I think I could tell for printing, but I’m not so sure about cursive.
A google seach on “handwriting analysis” turns up plenty of links, but most of them seem to be about personality, rather than gender.
In general women have much finer motor control with their hands and fingers, which is why they’re so good at sewing. (Ow! Stop throwing things!)
But seriously, that leads to a big difference in handwriting quality. Handwriting analysts won’t tell you that a given script is definately male or female, but they will often say “probably female” or “very likely a male,” etc.
I think that, as a general rule, women tend to write with the loops and flourishes that are the standard they teach in elementry school, while men tend to simplifly them into simple lines more often. My own handwriting has often been confused for a girl’s because I try to write as I was taught in second grade (I find it more aesthetically pleasing).
I’m going to have to ask for a cite on that one.
/me wears thimble
How about an Encyclopaeaeeaedia Britannica article on Human Learning and Cognition:
I’ve also seen some studies on this, particularly in the context of ergonomics, but I don’t have access to a university library at the moment so I can’t look them up.
I’m female, and as a kid always got berated for lack of neatness and bad handwriting.
In 1st and 2nd grade, my school was girls-only. We went co-ed when I was in 3rd grade, merging and reorganizing with the all-boys school next door. The books we got for handwriting had round circles and the poles of letters are vertical, “redondilla” or “French script”. My hands insisted in tilting the poles ahead and also turning the circles into forward-aiming ovals: I wrote l as /
When I found out that boys had been taught “English script”, which corresponded pretty much to what I did naturally, was I pissed!
I think it’s a combination of factors, like pretty much everything. And that lines like “(her presentation skills) would be fine if she was a boy”, well… :smack: :smack: :smack: :rolleyes: :smack: :smack: :smack:
Cecil has addressed this, twice. In the second article, he brings up sex determination, and claims an accuracy of 60-70%.
One caveat, by the way, with studies of this sort: You need confirmation. It’s easy to sit down with a set of handwriting samples and say “Oh, yeah, this one is obviously a guy”, and check it off as a successful identification. But you need to be able to confirm that that one really is a guy before you can call it a success, or you’re just assuming that your abilities are accurate, and not really testing at all.
Cite two from Chronos addressed a letter I wrote (and Slug used my name in a cartoon, yay!!). Also, the first cite by the Master provided by Chronos is actually a revised one, as Cecil made some corrections based on my whining. Also, my opinions on all this cover a couple lengthy threads somewhere around here, so I won’t regurgitate everything. (though I will add that I don’t agree completely with Cecil’s conclusions.)
I’ve studied handwriting analysis for fun (though I haven’t much for a long time now). I used to collect samples, and have hundreds of them (maybe over a thousand) in some dusty box in my garage. I’ve read many books on the topic, and though a percentage of the content is hocus-pocus psychic nonsense, it is my experienced opinion that many aspects of a persons personality are reflected in their handwriting. One of the aspects that’s most easy to recognize is sex. This is not to say that sex can be determined 100% of the time through handwriting, or even 90% of the time, but it can much more than one would expect through random chance.
Further, sex can be guessed with a high degree of accuracy by people with no previous training in handwriting analysis.
I read a book about handwriting analysis once, and it said that there are four basic shapes in handwriting: circle, square, triangle, and squiggle. They correspond to different “goals”. Circle is love, square is security, triangle is sex/power, and squiggle is creative expression. It seems to me (from grading undergraduate assignments ad infinitum) that a man’s handwriting is usually dominated by squares or triangles, and a woman’s by circles or squiggles.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that there are inherent differences between male and female handwriting. There may well be inherent differences, but the biological factors don’t necessarily create the features that cause us to think of a certain handwriting as “male” or “female.”
If an amateur were to see a writing sample with very round letter forms, he would probably guess female. But is the roundness of the letters because of the XX chromosomes, or because girls are encouraged to write that way? I find the fact that amateurs can guess the gender of a given writer with some accuracy interesting, but not compelling.
I know nothing about handwriting analysis, but I’d find the following type of argument a lot more compelling: “Due to the fact that women’s hands are more likely to have X musculature, a woman will usually exert more pressure on a Y-type down stroke than a man. We’ve analyzed Z-number of samples done in a wide variety of different styles, languages, and time periods, and found this pattern to be consistent.”
Anecdotally: When I learned cursive writing, in about 1980, girls were put under extraordinary pressure to have attractive handwriting. This pressure manifested itself in a number of ways, not the least of which was teachers publically praising girls with a certain type of handwriting, and criticizing others who’s handwriting didn’t fit that model. It didn’t matter if your handwriting was legible. If it wasn’t pretty, it was unacceptable. Boys, on the other hand, were encouraged to be legible, but visually attractive handwriting didn’t seem to be a requirement to be a “teacher’s pet.” This kind of pressure created in me such a strong desire to write attractively, that I practiced my handwriting through school and into my adult life. I was 30 before I finally achieved handwriting that I found satisfactory. It’s only been in the past few years that I could look at something that I had handwritten without feeling a measure of shame. Now, that’s some serious pressure!
Whenever I go to the bank or the travel agent or yadda yadda and it’s a girl serving, they all seem to have the same style of handwriting. Very much like mine actually. Mine is full of circles and all the letters are the same size.It also is preactically unreadable-‘what’s this word?’‘sheep’‘those are E’s??I thought that was an F and a W’