Does the gender influence the way people interact in a speech community, like international research articles?
Hi Mahnaz,
It's difficult to generalize here. It's probably true that many female academics might be drawn more to qualitative approaches that can lead to a more 'personal' style of writing - or they might be drawn more to journals that encourage a more 'anecdotal' , descriptive or narrative approach. However, on the other hand, many females are attracted to 'pure' scientific disciplines - and may favour a far more objective, distant and 'impersonal' discourse. On the flip-side - the same could be said of male authors. I'm male, and personally am quite happy writing in both 'modalities' - and that's probably reflected in my research approach preference - which is mixed methods research - which can employ both modalities
This is an interesting question and I doubt if there is a clear answer, so this is just my perspective: I consider gender as a continuum rather than a duality. Therefore there is no obvious male/female split and we are all placed somewhere between the two. Our gender in this instance is a result of nature but will be conditioned to some degree by our environment. From this perspective, there is no 'natural' male or female modality rather there is a wide range, but writers may be conditioned by their environment to be more inclined to adopt a specific modality.
Hi again Eric,
I think that we are broadly in agreement here - which makes it an interesting question to pose - but not one with a 'ready' answer. I agree that there is no natural 'professional' modality between genders. For instance, as a stereotype here, if you are a female working in medicine - chances are the 'system' will dictate how you conduct and report clinical studies - and it's most likely going to be in the format of a 'strict' language and conditions. Many medical journals favor very limited word counts and certain methodologies I.e. RCTs - so a 'rich' narrative is just not possible under those conditions
Hi,
Scientometrics studies have broadly shown the patterns of collaboration and co-authoring of male and female generations but I guess your question should be answered from gender studies' point of view which is much more related to sociology.
Saeid - not sure that it needs a sociological gender studies exploration at all; that would, over-complicate the question. It's simply, as Eric and I have alluded to, that there probably is no clear division or academic discipline that could come up with a concrete answer. There are many, many variations where there might be gender division writing modalities and, equally, many, many where there might not
Hi
Thank you for all. As you all may agree, i take a position that gender difference occurs on a continum and that two extreme poles are biological sex differences. My attempt is to find dominamt pattern and gender preferences, cross-disciplinary. To conduct this research i will start from journal articles. My sub-questions are which disciplines can easily reveal this differrence and in which section of reseach articles (abstract, introduction, discussion,...) do you advise me to look for?
regards,
Mahnaz
I believe that women academics have generally tended to closely follow the norms of male writers, except those committed feminists looking for an alternative. I hope they find one.
Jay - I'm not sure that there is a 'norm' for male writers that females could follow. I personally think that it's far more related to research paradigm and methodology tradition and worldview. Yes, historically, males have been the dominant force in driving say positivist science - and developing the associated language that comes with it - but then so have males been equally dominant in post-modernist discourses. It's probably a bit limited to suggest that the only exception to this is feminist methodology - or that this is an 'alternative'. A lot of critical social theory-based feminist discourse that I see is highly academic and scientific - and not what I would refer to as 'feminine'.
Please find attached two articles of Moshe Koppel et al. concerning differences between male and female writing:
“Automatically Categorizing Written Texts by Author Gender”
“Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts”
http://www.amicaproject.be/~walter/educational/material/Koppel_LLC2003.pdf
Your question is so related to mine; I'm doing a study on essay writing by men and women. Newman et al 2007 found that men and women do differ in the use of function words. Another study found that they differed when writing about past experiences. Apparently, the previous studies approached gender differences from different angles. What appears interesting is what stands as 'the perfect measure' to analyse the writing of men and women?
Dear Maram,
Thank you for your answer. I am very glad that you are interested in this topic and as you said you are working on it. I am looking for some indices like mood and modality realizations that may better shows any differences.
Regards
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