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

Abstract

While universalism is a foundational principle of science, a growing stream of research finds that scientific contributions are evaluated differently depending on the gender of the author, with women tending to receive fewer citations relative to men, even for work of comparable quality. Strikingly, research also suggests that these gender gaps are visible even under blinded review, wherein the evaluator is not aware of the gender of the author. In this article, we consider whether gender differences in writing styles-how men and women communicate their work-may contribute to these observed gender gaps. We ground our investigation in a previously established framework for characterizing the linguistic style of written text, which distinguishes between two sets of features-informational (i.e., features that emphasize facts) and involved (i.e., features that emphasize relationships). Using a large, matched sample of academic papers and patents, we find significant differences in writing style by gender; women use more involved features in their writing, a pattern that holds universally across fields. The magnitude of the effect varies across fields, with larger gender differences observed in the social sciences and arts humanities and smaller gaps in the physical sciences and technology. Subsequently, we show that gender differences in writing style may have parallels in reading preferences; papers and patents with more informational features tend to be cited more by men, while those with more involved features tend to be cited more by women, even after controlling for the gender of the author, inventor, and patent attorney. Our findings suggest that formal written text is not devoid of personal character, which could contribute to bias in evaluation, thereby compromising the norm of universalism.