This chapter has provided essential background to explain the motivation for performing the gender-difference study described in this dissertation. Several studies using large (or larger) data sets generally showed there were differences in the writing of men and women (Argamon, Koppel, Fine, & Shimoni, 2003; Argamon, Koppel, Pennebaker, &
Schler, 2007; Koppel et al., 2002; Rao et al., 2010; X. Yan & L. Yan, 2006). This outcome is consistent with folk beliefs and popular works (including, for example, Tannen (2001)) that there are deep differences in the communicative styles or cultures of men and women (DeFrancisco et al., 2014). As a consequence, I will assume that in unmarked situations, men and women probably do make different stylistic choices.
At the same time, a small number of earlier studies in professional and technical communication showed no significant differences between the writing of female and
male authors (Smeltzer & Werbel, 1986; Sterkel, 1988; Tebeaux, 1990). Each of these studies examined student writing in professional or technical writing courses, and the authors concluded that the lack of gender differences there could be attributable to the students’ efforts to “assimilate” to conventional professional language. Unfortunately, these studies had sample sizes that were too small—that is, they had too little statistical power—to infer from the lack of difference in them that there would be a similar lack of difference in a bigger sample or in the population at large. Nevertheless, they suggested that the different communicative styles or cultures of men and women may not be even skin deep, that men and women, when faced with a common task after receiving common training, produce communicative performances that are stylistically indistinguishable.
This dissertation presents a well designed study of a larger sample of student writing prepared in a professional training environment; and it shows that gender differences (if they existed before these students came to law school) did not persist in such writing contexts.
In Section 3.2, I considered the continuing debate about whether researchers should perform research that looks for gender differences in human communication. I consid-ered the arguments of DeFrancisco et al. (2014), who argued that research on gender differences reinforces essentialist views of gender, tends to conflate sex and gender as variables, overlooks substantial similarities in performances between women and men, and does not provide the rich intersectional analysis that ethnographic and other re-search methods provide. I refuted these arguments with my own and then described three benefits that Hultgren (2008) saw in the kind of empirical research that I describe in Chapter 4. Ultimately, the conflicting views of Hultgren (2008) and DeFrancisco et al.
(2014) represent conflicting epistemic commitments, which I believe can be reconciled if researchers value the complementary contributions of quantitative and qualitative research.
Because the empirical study in this dissertation was motivated by and uses the same stylistic features as the Argamon/Koppel 02/03 study (Argamon, Koppel, Fine, & Shi-moni, 2003; Koppel et al., 2002), I described it in considerable detail in Section 3.3. The Argamon/Koppel 02/03 study analyzed stylistic features—lexical and quasi-syntactic decisions of writers—to study texts from the British National Corpus. They found vari-ations in frequency depending on author gender (Argamon, Koppel, Fine, & Shimoni,
2003), and they found that machine-learning algorithms could distinguish texts written by women from those written by men around 80% of the time based on those features (Koppel et al., 2002).
Ultimately, however, the Argamon/Koppel 02/03 study suffered from three impor-tant methodological limitations, which I described in Section 3.3.3. First, it is unclear how the gender of text authors was ascribed to the texts that Argamon and his col-leagues studied. Second, the Argamon/Koppel 02/03 study did not control the texts for genre in a genre-theoretic sense; that is, they did not study texts where the authors shared key components of their cognitive environments, including goals, assumptions about typified situations, etc. And finally, they did not address what I have called the “single-author problem,” uncertainty about whether texts are written or entirely written by the person under whose byline they appear.
These three limitations provided the structure for a review of other studies and for me to articulate my own framework for addressing them. In Section 3.4.1, I de-scribed previous studies of gender differences in language, including studies from the disciplinary, professional, and technical communication field and later studies citing the Argamon/Koppel 02/03 study or using its methods. I concluded that most of them had failed either to explain their conception of gender as a research construct, to explain how they had ascribed gender categories to texts, or both. In Section 3.4.2, I offered my own framework for operationalizing gender as a research construct, including three pro-posals for researchers considering using gender as a variable. I then defined the gender construct for this study and explained how I ascribed gender categories to the papers in the sample analyzed.
In Section 3.5, I laid out the definitions from genre theory in disciplinary, pro-fessional, and technical communication and described the rationale and methods for studying genres in this sense. After describing some questions or problems with genre theory, I noted in Section 3.5.5 that only the disciplinary, professional, and technical communication studies above made any effort to control the samples they analyzed for the writers’ rhetorical purpose. I then briefly explained in Section 3.5.6 the genre con-ception, grounded in CPR theory, that I have employed in the study in this dissertation.
Finally, I described the “single-author problem” more completely in Section 3.6 and claimed that this study resolves it to a reasonable degree of probability.
Two groups of studies—big-data studies that showed gender differences in texts without a common purpose or genre, and smaller studies that showed no gender differ-ences in texts written with a common purpose—prompted me to ask whether gender and genre interact, and if so, how. I wanted to see if gender differences of the kind pre-viously identified would appear in a larger sample of texts that were controlled for text genre and attempt to offer a theoretical explanation for those findings, whatever they might be. That led to the empirical research study in this dissertation, the methods for which are described in Chapter 4.
I did not find the patterns of difference seen in the previous big-data studies, as Chapter 5 shows. In Chapter 6, I demonstrate how CPR theory could explain these findings.