After trying out the GenderAnalyzer, courtesy of TallSkinnyKiwi, I decided to get a bit more serious and see how it worked, or at least how it was supposed to work.
In the process I came across a number of articles, including What Men and Women Blog About and Of Men, Women, and Computers: DataDriven Gender Modeling for Improved User Interfaces. The conclusion? While some stereotypes are just that, stereotypes, there are gender differences.
One interesting finding was that women tend to use more pronouns than men, and younger men used them more often than older men. Another was that feminine writing focusses more on the days-of-the-week, while masculine writing tends to focus more on months-of-the-year. Women, it would seem, are more here and now. But the big difference seemed to be women expressed themselves more in terms of particularities, men more in terms of generalities.
This would match my own anecdotal observations of Christian bloggers, that men tend to focus much more on theology and politics, women much more on personal stories and struggles. I suspect that’s why men tend to dominate discussion on missional ecclesiology, its not that there’s active discrimination against female voices, its that there simply aren’t as many women interested enough in the subject to blog so extensively about it.







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