Women and men are different. OK, that’s not revolutionary but it hasn’t stopped publishing empires being built on explaining how that is so. There is no end of evidence to support the difference between the genders and it would be easy to employ witty epithets as to what women and men view as “clean” or how they navigate. If you want some hard evidence on the difference between the sexes though, it has come in a new study looking at the differences in the words women and men use on Facebook.
In the new study researchers from Stony Brook University, Pennsylvania University, and the University of Melbourne analysed the words used by more than 65,000 women and men on Facebook.
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The analysis showed that women mention friends, family and social life more often. By contrast, men swore more, used more angry and argumentative language, and discussed objects more than people. On average women used language that was more characteristic of compassion and politeness whereas men used language that was more hostile and impersonal.
Women tended to use words like wonderful, happy, birthday, daughter, baby, excited, and thankful. On the other hand, men tended to use words like freedom, liberty, win, lose, battle, and enemy.
Interestingly, even though men showed up as using more aggressive language an analysis of assertiveness showed that women were no less assertive and in fact they were slightly more assertive than men. It seems that you don’t have to be an ass to assertive after all, but in the end we do all have a real language a-gender.
