Men Talk about Mars, Women Talk about Venus



















Keith said…
Well there goes my productivity! "Modern warfare" and "street fighter" reach almost linuxian levels. Javascript is even closer.
But can you find any words that reach Bieberian levels? I think it says something that it's easier to find things that predominantly men tweet about but harder to find things that predominantly women tweet about. Perhaps women talk broader and men talk deeper? Men are easier to stereotype in their interests than women? :)
OK, my friend Mitch sent me these on Facebook, and all are 75% or more on the women's side:


Although Mitch found "husband" the two-word phrase "my husband" is even more gender-skewed.
Patrick said…
Perl = 94% manly, which I believe is a new record. There are definitely manlier languages, but apparently not popular enough to show up in the sample. Ruby does show up but is diluted by women talking about earrings.
I thought perl vs. purl would be a good comparison, since Mitch found that women talk about knitting. But no one apparently mentions purling in their tweets.
Mitch said…
With two-word phrases you can really get some skewed results. Check out the saccharine "my hubby." Biological difference is also much more poorly represented here than I thought. I tried a litany of reproductive ailments that are more commonly associated with women to no avail - one could puzzle out the majority-male use of "yeast infection" for example. There are clearly words though that take on differential gendered meanings though e.g. pluck, prejudice, sensibility, blow, etc.
hey retards, there's a difference between "11% of men mention bieber" and "11% of bieber utterances come from men".
Aaron said…
I am a guy, and I am posting this from Linux (a debian distribution), and have never heard of Justin Bieber. Culture and language has something to do with this, but the main reason is that, like many computer programmers, I have an extreme male brain.

Your article ends with a false dichotomy. I believe you could use any language or any cultural environment, and you /still/ would never get women (on average) more interested in Linux than men.

Something like this has been tried. In the Soviet Union, for 80+ years, 50% of engineers were women by government mandate. As soon as the mandate was removed, the number of women engineers reduced (Pinker, Susan 2008). (There have been other such totalitarian social experiments, all with the same result.)

So you see, it is more than a question of just language and culture, but biology is in there too, and, most importantly, nothing can be considered by itself. Trying to do so is an elementary mistake, esp. for a scientist.
TOWTANUSA is correct. I've updated the post to reflect that, of the tweets that mention Linux, 10% were written by women, and of the tweets that mention Bieber, 11% of those were written by men. Whoops.

Aaron - You raise an interesting point. Most aspects of being human are likely a product of both biology and culture. Language is hard to figure out, though: after all, we're all capable - males and females - of creating language equally. The question is really what do men and women talk about? The Maltz and Borker article I reference suggests looking for gendered linguistic differences in children's play. But they don't really propose an extra-cultural origin for the differences. I'm sure there are studies about gendered language usage within other languages (that is, those that rely on gender of parts of speech to convey meaning). I haven't read this literature, but it would be interesting to know if a less gendered language like English creates less gender division within society than, say, French/France or German/Germany.
Anonymous said…
i think that the source of this study which is "Tweeting/Twitter" is really not an accurate tool for measurement ... the source (tweeting) itself narrows the results down to people who have access to the technology, excluding a large number of (men/women) who do not have access to 'tweet', tweet as a source also narrows down the 'social/group and educational level' to only those people who are exposed to this kind of 'tweeting' technology ....

basically, basing this re-search on a source relying only on 'tweets' gives a result that is actualy biased in itself ....
pconroy said…

I don't think male and female brains are as malleable as you seem to suggest. I think the brains we are born with to a large extent bootstrap the subsequent culture we are surrounded with. So the arrow of causality goes from:
DNA --> Brain --> Culture

Let me give you the results of a little experiment that happened when I was a kid (sample n=2).
My aunt would came to visit from England and bring a suitv ase of gifts every year. She would visited with lots of families of nieces and nephews, and dispense the gifts. That year we were the last, and all she had left were 2 identical, cheap plastic, dolls. My sister 5 yo got one and I 4 yo got the other. My sister asked my Mom for a brush and set to brushing her doll's hair. Then she pretended to be having tea with the doll. Whereas I was interested in how my doll's arms and legs could move 360 degrees, so ripped off the doll's clothes to get a better look at the joints. Then I realized that by holding one arm, I could wind up the other, and it would spin like a propellor. Next I removed the arms and legs, to see why this was, and discovered a thick elastic band holding then together. Next I found that I could jamb an arm into a leg slot, but while trying to jamb the leg into the arm slot, I ripped the doll's arm slot. So then I resorted to using the leg with the elastic band as a catapult... and so on.

My sister would grow up to be a teacher, and I would grow up to be an engineer.

So the concept of genderized words and/or toys is I feel meaningless. Young toddlers already have very different brains based on their sex, and nothing cultural activists do will change that very much.
Well, the problem with most gender discussions is that we tend to essentialize these categories: boy/girl, man/woman, male/female. These categories have lasted a very long time, but we're coming to understand more and more that humans are complicated. And, most importantly, that we're a product of both biology and culture (of nature and nurture).

The problem with overly-gendered language, toys, clothes, etc., is that we're trying to predetermine our kids' identities at a time that they can't speak for themselves. We as adults find it easier to think of things in binary - it's in our nature (up/down, black/white, male/female). But nature can't be forced into a binary.

It's a good idea, then, to take steps - as the adults who run the show - to pass on the complexities of life to our kids. We can do this by not overly-dichotomizing things. We can't say "only boys play with trucks" nor can we only tell girls that they're "pretty." This forces the complexities of identities into small boxes.

Our biology may indeed influence our interests and personalities. But that doesn't mean that our biology predetermines our classification into one of two narrow categories. Our culture does that, and from the standpoint of an anthropologist, I find that troubling.
karen kilmer said…
when i was small my parents dressed me up in frilly dresses and i played with dolls when my brother came along when i was two then they started dressing me exactly like my brother as i got older and started to show that i was a female they would make me wear the loosed fitting clothes exactly like my brother boys shoes and all it was horrible i was made fun of my whole lifeto this day i cringe at the sight of makeup or even dress clothes the sad thing is it made my brother hate women even though hes married and makes his wifwe dress up and wear makeup all the time his daughter he dresses her just like i was made to he didnt start that until his son was born and now they dress just when i had a child i dressed her pretty not always in dresses bit i bought her both cars and barbies she played with both and now she does the same with her son i stopped the cycle with the way my parents raised me and my brother.

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