GENDER/GENRE:

GENDER DIFFERENCES
IN PROFESSIONAL WRITING(?)

Image: flickr/srqpix CC BY 2.0

Brian N. Larson
January 26, 2015

Housekeeping
Communications: See slide footer . . .
www.Rhetoricked.com (these slides + some
additional)
Twitter: @Rhetoricked
Larson@Rhetoricked.com

Research supported by:

Graduate Research Partnership Program fellowship (U
of M CLA), 2012
James I. Brown Summer Research Fellowship, 2014
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Your visitor
Brian N. Larson
Ph.D. candidate:
Rhetoric and S&TC
University of Minnesota
Practicing attorney
14 years
Focus on Internet, including
copyrights, trademarks,
privacy, and media law
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My disciplinary profile
exemplifies mixed methods
Research
Inquiry focused on
production of texts in
professional and
technical contexts
Mixed methods,
including quantitative,
qualitative,
hermeneutic

Teaching experience
Technical and
professional commn
Science, technology,
and law
Argumentative writing
First-year comp
Legal writing (law
students)

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Todays topic: Do women and

men write differently?
The answer: It depends.
Before: Stylistic differences common in
studies
Often not clear how gender was ascribed
Texts in mixed genres (or no genres)
No common sense of goals or stakes among
writers

Now: Some differences, but not the old

patterns. Why?
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I chose texts written late in the

first year of law training
Law students at most law schools must
write a brief or memorandum as their final
writing project in legal writing at end of 1L
year
Usually in the form of a motion to dismiss
or motion for summary judgment
In response to a hypothetical case set by
the teacher or legal writing program
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Gendered authors did not

write genred texts differently
How should we assess difference?
Stylistic characteristics (though other
possibilities exist)

What is a genred text? Writer

perceives . . .
Conventional forms and shared social
objectives
Social stakes associated with conformity

What is a gendered author?

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This study used an ad hoc

gender research construct
When I talk about my own data, Ill refer to
Gender F authors/writers: Female,
Feminine, Fem, F
Gender M authors/writers: Male, Masculine,
M

These categories may or may not

correspond to other researchers
{woman, female, feminine}
{man, male, masculine}
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This study examined stylistic

features (variables)
For now, those of Argamon et al. 2003
Relative frequencies of
429 function words (Argamon used 405)
45 parts of speech from the Penn Treebank
tagset (Argamon used 76 BNC POS tags)
100 common part-of-speech bigrams
500 common POS trigrams
Other features, including varieties of pronouns
and contractions
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I calculated mean relative

frequencies
For each feature
Mean relative frequency (SD) for Gender F
authors
Mean relative frequency (SD) for Gender M
authors
Statistical significance assessed with MannWhitney U test (expressed as p-value)

A priori threshold for significance: 0.05

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I compared results to
Argamon et al. 2003
Used 500 published texts from BNC
Mean 34,000 words (tokens) per text
Statistical analysis showed
correspondence to Bibers (1995)
informational/involved dimension

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Bibers informational/involved
dimension figured in earlier studies
Biber (1995) labeled this a dimension of
register variation after doing cluster
analyses on frequencies to identify covarying features as dimensions
Consistent with popular conceptions
and works such as Tannen (1990
[2001]) that characterize women as
affiliative and men as informative
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Argamon: Features males

used more vs. present study

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Argamon: Features females

used more v. present study

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And the pronouns

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The take-away?
Statistics: The non-significant differences
should probably be regarded as nonsignificant
In that case, M-informational/F-involved is not
confirmed in this study

If the non-significant differences are taken

as suggestive
Evidence for M-informational/F-involved is still
mixed, especially in pronouns and presenttense verbs
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Cognitive pragmatic rhetorical

(CPR) theory
Grounded in relevance theory, a cognitive
theory of linguistic pragmatics (Sperber &
Wilson, 1995)
Enhanced with relevance philosophy of
Alfred Schutz (1973, 1964, 1966)
HT to Straheim (2010), who bridged them
My own additions from rhetoric, cognitive
science, cognitive linguistics, and
psycholinguistics
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CPR: The stage is set for

production
Writer and reader have cognitive
environments, presently accessible
Assumptions (representations or beliefs about
the world)
Emotions
Goals

In RT terms, the writers cognitive environment

is manifest to her
Her meta-representations about readers CE
are mutually manifest
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CPR: Writers process

Writer seeks to modify readers CE
Making some assumptions, emotions, or goals
manifest, or more manifest than others

Relevance: Writer balances

Effort: Attention, invention, conscious stylistic
choices (heuresis and lexis).
Effect: Writers goals, modifications she seeks
in readers CE
Default: Habitual choice will always be easiest
to find
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CPR: Readers process

Reader seeks to achieve his goals
To be educated, delighted, or moved

Relevance: Reader balances

Effort: Attention, heuristic comprehension
where stimuli are expected, search costs
where stimuli are unexpected
Effect: Advancing readers goals

The most accessible interpretation is the

best one (though not always correct)
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Explaining my findings with

CPR theory
If children are acculturated to writing in certain
genres and on certain topics in their youths
depending on gender . . .
. . . they may unconsciously habituate to
certain stylistic choices
. . . and may vary their habitual stylistic choices
later with great effort
Diminished relevance in most studies makes this
unlikely
Communicative production will likely be habitual

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Confronted with high-stakes social

situation and conventional genre . . .
The effect side of the relevance ratio
gets much more weight
Increase in relevance makes variation from
habit likely
Students here exhibited that

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CPR explains genre stability

and dynamism generally
Varying from genre conventions imposes
processing costs on the reader
Sometimes, writer can seek to achieve her
own goals only by breaking conventions
But she has to sell it to the reader
Alter the readers CE to perceive the
communication as having greater potential
effects and therefore . . .
. . . being worthy of greater processing effort
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Question and answer

and Thank You!
Communications:
www.Rhetoricked.com (these slides + many
bonus slides)
Twitter: @Rhetoricked
Larson@Rhetoricked.com

Research supported by:

Graduate Research Partnership Program fellowship (U
of M CLA), 2012
James I. Brown Summer Research Fellowship, 2014
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BONUS SLIDES
These slides contain additional
information that may be valuable for
context for this talk
At the end are my works cited

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Many researchers have asked

Do men and women communicate
differently?
Much work inspired by Robin Lakoff (1975)
Scholarly and popular works by Deborah
Tannen (e.g. 1990[2001]) and others
Much of this research in oral/face-to-face
communication
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Writing:
Process and product
In writing studies, we can (roughly)
divide process and product
Do men and women produce writing using
different processes?
Is the writing they produce distinguishable
based on author gender?

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Previous studies:
Process research
Focus on interpersonal communications
in mixed-gender contexts
Lay, 1989 (Schuster); Rehling, 1996; Raign
& Sims, 1993; Ton & Klecun, 2004; Wolfe
& Alexander, 2005; Brown & Burnett, 2006;
Wolfe & Powell, 2006, 2009.

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Previous studies:
Product research
In technical and professional
communication
Sterkel, 1988 (20 stylistic chars)
Smeltzer & Werbel, 1986 (16 stylistic and
evaluative measures)
Tebeaux, 1990 (quality of responses)
Allen, 1994 (markers of authoritativeness)

Manual methods, small samples

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Gender in computer-mediated
communication (CMC)
CMC popular for NLP studies
Data are readily available
Data are voluminous

Examples
Herring & Paolillo, 2006 (blog posts, stat analysis)
Yan & Yan, 2006 (blog posts, MLA analysis)
Argamon et al., 2007 (blog posts, MLA analysis)
Rao et al., 2010 (Twitter, MLA analysis)
Burger et al., 2011 (Twitter, MLA analysis)
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Rationale:
Why is the question important?
Lend support to one or more theories of
gender
Two cultures (Maltz & Borker, 1982)
Standpoint (Barker & Zifcak, 1999)
Performative (Butler 1993, 1999, 2004)
Others

Sorting out methodological problems,

particularly use of gender as a variable
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Study design goals

Research questions
Did Gender F and Gender M writers in a disciplinary
genre in which they are being trained use lexical and
quasi-syntactic stylistic features with relative
frequencies that varied with their genders?
If so, did the differences appear in interpretable
patterns?

Examine a corpus of texts

All of the same genre
Where we can be confident of single authorship
Where author gender is self-identified

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Data collection
Major writing project at end of first year of
law school
Students address hypothetical problem
(writing in same genre)
Students not allowed to collaborate
Plagiarism difficult (but still possible)

Students self-identified gender*

193 texts (mean word tokens = 3764)
*This study IRB-approved (UMN Study #1202E10685)
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Gender construct in my study

Gender construct: A loosely and culturally
defined set of social behaviors that are
expected to make it possible to distinguish
persons of the two most common sexes
from each other.
Susceptible to application of gender label
Gender F (corresponding to Sex F): female,
feminine, woman
Gender M (corresponding to Sex M): male,
masculine, man
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Gender ascription in my study

Series of demographic questions in
survey
Gender: followed by open box
allowing free-form response
Problem?

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Proliferation of labels
Number of
Response participants
Not answered 4
Cis Male 1
F 5
Fem 1
Female 95
female 3
M 3
Male 84
Masculine 1
Grand Total 197
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My job: Make an argument

That these responses can be classed together
as Gender M
Cis Male
M
Male
Masculine

And these as Gender F

F
Fem
F/female
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Text genre: Memorandum

regarding motion to dismiss
Written to hypothetical court
Supporting or opposing a motion before
the court
High-level organization is formulaic

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r
t

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Memorandum Sections

Caption**
Introduction/summary*
Facts
Legal standard of review*
Argument
Conclusion
Signature block**
* Not always present.
**I did not analyze (content is highly formulaic)
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NLP methods allow larger

corpora to be analyzed
Natural language processing (NLP)
Allows processing of large quantities of
text data
Study that attracted my attention
Koppel, Argamon & Shimoni, 2002
(machine-learning algorithms)
Argamon et al., 2003 (statistical analysis)
Ill focus on Argamon et al. in this talk
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What are Part-of-speech

tags? Bigrams & trigrams?
First, tokenize each sentence
(automated):
My aunts pen is on the table.

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POS tags were

assigned and tallied
Purple words are function words

Tag the parts of speech (automated)

Then calculate relative frequency of
function words and POS tags
(automated)
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POS bigrams and trigrams

were assigned and tallied
A bigram or trigram is a 2- or 3-token
window on the sentence.
Automated calculation

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Other stylistic features

were tallied
First-person pronouns (total)
Singular: I, me, my, mine, myself.
Plural: We, us, our, ours, ourselves.

Second-person pronouns: You, your, yours, yourself.

Third-person pronouns (total)
Singular (total)
Feminine: She, her, hers, herself.
Masculine: He, him, his, himself.

Plural: They, them, their, theirs, themselves.

Contractions: Including all instances of nt, ld, ve, etc.

All relative frequencies calculated (automated)

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Situating the findings within

gender & language theories
Findings weakly support or contradict
Two sociolinguistic cultures view (Maltz &
Borker 1982; Tannen 1990 [2001])
Intersectionality/performativity views (Barker &
Zifcak 1999; Butler; many others)

Some gendered linguistic habits appeared

to resist retraining and conscious efforts to
conform to register conventions . . .
. . . others were apparently overcome.
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Are gender and genre the

same?
Gender
< Old French gen(d)re (French genre) = Spanish
and Portuguese genero, Italian genere, < Latin
gener- stem form of genus race, kind

Genre
< French genre kind: see gender n.
a. Kind, sort, class; also, genus as opposed to
species

Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.). "gender, n.". Retrieved from

http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/77468
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Works cited
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