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

Abstract

Abstract Gender gaps in how scientific work is evaluated are well documented, but their sources remain debated. We ask whether an overlooked factor—the linguistic style of the writing itself—is gendered and consequential. Drawing on a framework that distinguishes informational features (which emphasize facts) from involved features (which emphasize relationships), we analyze single-authored abstracts of academic papers and patents across all fields of science and technology. Women’s writing is systematically more involved than men’s—richer in relational, audience-oriented features and higher in the balance of involved to informational language—a difference that holds across scientific fields, in collaborative and single-authored work, and throughout the full text of a large open-access biomedical corpus, not only their abstracts. This stylistic signature also shapes how work is received—papers whose abstracts are more involved are cited more by women and less by men, and the association persists even when papers are compared against their most content-similar alternatives, indicating a gendered signal independent of topic. That a near-costless feature of writing—word choice rather than substance—leaves a systematic, gendered trace on who cites scientific work points to a subtle channel through which evaluation bias may persist, in tension with the universalist ideal that ideas be judged independently of their author.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Quantitative Science Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗