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arXiv · 2204.13805

Investigating individual writing style as a contributor to gender gaps in science and technology

Kara Kedrick·Ekaterina Levitskaya·Russell J. Funk
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Abstract

Gender gaps in how scientific work is evaluated are well documented, but their sources remain debated. We ask whether an overlooked factor---the linguistic style of the writing itself---is gendered and consequential. Drawing on a framework that distinguishes informational features (which emphasize facts) from involved features (which emphasize relationships), we analyze single-authored abstracts of academic papers and patents across all fields of science and technology. Women's writing is systematically more involved than men's---richer in relational, audience-oriented features and higher in the balance of involved to informational language---a difference that holds across scientific fields, in collaborative as well as single-authored work, and in a large open-access biomedical corpus, throughout the full text of papers, not only their abstracts. This stylistic signature also shapes how work is received---papers whose abstracts are more involved are cited more by women and less by men, and the association persists even when papers are compared against their most content-similar alternatives, indicating a gendered signal independent of topic. That a near-costless feature of writing---word choice rather than substance---leaves a systematic, gendered trace on who cites scientific work points to a subtle channel through which evaluation bias may persist, in tension with the universalist ideal that ideas be judged independently of their author.

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Kara Kedrick, Ekaterina Levitskaya, Russell J. Funk. 2022-04-28. Investigating individual writing style as a contributor to gender gaps in science and technology. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13805

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