Why is female handwriting different from male handwriting?

[gigi]

@Infovore

That said, I did pride myself on my neat handwriting when I was a kid.

Penmanship was one of the subjects on our report card so yeah, it was important to me too.

[Hilarity_N.Suze]

@Crazyhorse

Agreed, and my point is that those telling signs existed in 70%-80% of handwriting samples across the board, consistently, across dozens of published studies conducted over decades, using thousands of handwriting samples that were evaluated by tens of thousands of eyes and the presence of those telling signs and people’s ability to recognize them wasn’t just a fluke or random chance.

This was in response the statement:

“Actually the sex/gender of the writer was never something you could tell from handwriting with any degree of accuracy”

But it was something we could tell with up to an 80% degree of accuracy, even using samples of handwriting from other languages, cultures and alphabets.

sigh

In my class, which was conducted under the auspices of an accredited university, about halfway through the class we were given samples–about 10 as I recall–and among other things, we had to determine whether the writer was male or female. We were only slightly better than chance, as a class, and this was due mostly to one or two samples that had obvious “female only” characteristics.

That said, the determination of the sex/gender of the writer is hardly ever at issue. What’s at issue is: Here is a sample of (say) Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting and a sample of an alleged ransom note. How likely is it that Patsy Ramsey is the writer of this ransom note? (An actual exercise, which tells you how long ago this was…)

And about half of us thought there was a greater than 75% chance that it WAS Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting, and the other half thought differently.

However, almost everybody in the class noted that there was an obvious attempt to disguise the handwriting in the ransom note.

This kind of analysis is now performed by computers BTW. I think it could have been done by computers then but the results were not accepted by the courts.

[WhyNot]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

Are there invariable anatomical differences between male and female hands?

Not in children. There is a change in size and shape of hands under the influence of testosterone during and after puberty, but a pre-purbetal boy’s hand is indistinguishable from a pre-pubertal girl’s hand.

[rhubarbarin]

All I know is that despite having a feminine appearance, digit ratio, and hand size, I’ve always been told I write ‘like a boy’.

I always found writing neatly and regularly extremely difficult. We were forced to learn cursive and it was painful for me to try to write with flow, I only have control over a writing implement if I press hard and/or go very slowly. I had such finger calluses from trying to write neatly that my fingers looked deformed, and my hand would hurt all the time.

My father had similar difficulties as a child. We both resorted to an irregular but legible square, all-caps kind of chicken scratch, all short hard lines. Our handwriting looks very similar.

[Pai325]

@LH75

Being a surviving victim of a Catholic school education 1958 - 1971, for a long time, my handwriting was identical to that of all my classmates. We were taught "the Palmer Method, and all departures from the accepted style were cause for points removed from any grade we received.

A couple of moths ago, I wrote a work order for a service call. The woman for whom I performed this service asked what school I had attended. She had gone to the parish school just to the south of mine at about the same time.

She had also learned the Palmer Method…

I went to Catholic school in the 50s, and yes, I also learned the Palmer Method. We had templates with all the letters so that as we wrote we could check that we were forming the letters correctly.

My grandfather had beautiful copperplate handwriting. He was born in 1892, though, so I’m not sure if kids were rewarded more for good handwriting back then or if he was just neat.