John Tang, Utrecht University

"The masculine I: Gendered use of first-person pronouns in academic scholarship"

Abstract

Sociolinguistic research has documented gendered differences in language use, with females more likely to use standard variants and politer speech. Studies of academic scholarship have also found a difference in language use by gender when academics describe their results. I test the hypothesis that male academics prefer the singular first-person pronoun (FPP) while female academics the plural form in single authored journal publications. For my analysis, I use articles from leading peer-reviewed journals in the fields of economics and psychology between the years 2010 and 2018. These disciplines were chosen to highlight potential differences in usage given their respective gender shares; that is, whether the gender composition of a profession affects language use among its practitioners. I find that for intensive measures of FPP use, male economists of the millennial generation use the singular FPP more than females and the opposite for the plural form. In contrast, there is no statistically significant difference for either form among male and female psychologists.

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