Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Caitlyn Jenner, and What Really Makes Women Different from Men?

The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say about Us, James W. Pennebaker, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2011, pps. 352.

A recent essay by Elinor Burkett, noted commentator and filmmaker, appearing in The New York Times made the point that the media frenzy over the publication of Caitlyn Jenner's photos in Vanity Faire and the way trending transgender social issues are being discussed seem to have put women back in a stereotypical box (e.g., ''more intuitive, nurturing, emotional, etc.'') that they only recently escaped.

According to Burkett, ''For me and many women, feminist and otherwise, one of the difficult parts of witnessing and wanting to rally behind the movement for transgender rights is the language that a growing number of trans individuals insist on, the notions of femininity that they're articulating and their disregard for the fact that being a woman means having accrued certain experiences, enduring certain indignities and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.''

Male brain, female brain: Differences

Burkett's watershed piece of thought leadership continues: ''Brains are a good place to begin because one thing that science has learned about that is they're in fact shaped by experience, cultural and otherwise. The part of the brain that deals with navigation is enlarged in London taxi drivers, as is the region dealing with the movement of the fingers of the left hand in right-handed violinists.''

Do women and men have different brains? Do they speak and write differently? In my opinion that question was settled in 2011 with the publication of James W. Pennebaker's landmark book, The Secret Life of Pronouns.

In April's EWA, I described Pennebaker's life-long quest to develop the field of computational linguistics, which uses computers and specialized software to count the number and kind of words used in any message.

Function word use can predict the gender of the author.

Thanks to Pennemaker's groundbreaking research, the very shortest, insignificant words, what he calls function words, ''can lead to telling insights into personality, gender, deception, leadership, love, history, politics and groups.''

Function words, he says, include pronouns such as I, you, we and they; articles such as a, an, the; prepositions such as to, for, over; and other words which, along with function words, fit into a larger category he calls ''stealth words.'' Two examples: positive emotion words, for example, love, fun and good; and cognitive words like think, reason and believe.

As I wrote in April's EWA, Pennebaker asserts that hidden in patterns of stealth word use is a method that could be used to identify each of us by our gender.

Pennebaker's most important idea.

Here is the heart of Pennebaker's message: ''By listening to, counting, and analyzing stealth words, we can learn about people in ways that even they may not appreciate or comprehend. At the same time, the way people use stealth words can subtly affect how we perceive them and their messages.''

Do men and women use words differently? They do. Here are some of Pennebaker's findings. I'm quoting him.

-Women use first-person singular pronouns, or I-words, more than men.

-Men and women use first-person plural words, or we-words at the same rate. An interesting sidebar here mentioned by Pennebaker: ''The reason we is such a fun word is that half of the time it is used to bring the speaker closer to others, and the other half of the time to deflect responsibility away from the speaker. (For example, when a father says to his child, ''I think we need to do something about cutting the lawn; don't you agree it's about time?'') Women tend to use the warm we and men are more drawn to the distanced we.)

-Men use articles more than women do.

-No difference in the use of positive emotion words.

-Women use more cognitive words, which Pennebaker says is ''a slap in the face of Aristotle who believed that women were less rational than men and incapable of philosophical thought.'' (There's that box again.)

-And this most important conclusion: Women use more social words (any words related to other human beings.) Women do, indeed, think more and speak more about other people.

Other findings of Pennebaker's.

Men use more:

-Big words

-Nouns

-Propositions

-Numbers

-Words per sentence

-Swear words

Women use more:

-Personal pronouns

-Negative emotion (especially anxiety)

-Negations (no, not, never)

-Certainty words (always, absolutely)

-Hedge phrases (I think, I believe)

Pennebaker concludes, ''Males categorize their worlds by counting, naming and organizing the objects they confront. Women, in addition to personalizing their topics, talk in a more dynamic way, focusing on how their topics change. Discussions of change require more verbs.

What about Plays and Movies? Can Men Talk like Women?

As if that weren't enough, here is where Pennebaker's research findings become truly fascinating: He ran well known novels and plays through his Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software program and learned, for example, that William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has ''both young lovers, especially Juliet, expressing themselves the ways that males tend do.'' He ran Quentin Tarantino's script for Pulp Fiction through his LIWC and found that both women and men in that film talk like men.

Here are a few movies where, according to Pennebaker, both the women and men characters speak like women:

-Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle

-Sofia Coppola Lost in Translation

-Woody Allen Hannah and Her Sisters

He devotes many pages of his book to artistic literary analysis. (Playwrights and screenplay writers take note!)

In a time when we seem to be fascinated by the subject of what makes women female and men male, I believe Pennebaker's book is required reading. And what is the answer? My opinion: The differences in language processing, writing and speaking between men and women exist at a far deeper level than anatomical differences or surgical procedures can address.