Business Insider announced this week the results of a study by the Center for Reading Research on the relationship between gender and word recognition. Are there words more easily recognized by one gender or another?
The CRR study answered that question in the affirmative, producing the following list of "men's" and "women's" words collected by the Ghent University online vocabulary test. (Numbers in parentheses indicate men's versus women's rates of recognition, among the first 500,000 test takers.)
Words men were most likely to recognize over women:
codec (88, 48)
solenoid (87, 54)
golem (89, 56)
mach (93, 63)
humvee (88, 58)
claymore (87, 589
scimitar (86, 58)
kevlar (93, 65)
paladin (93, 66)
Bolshevism (85, 60)
biped (86, 61)
dreadnought (90, 66)
Words women were most likely to know over men:
taffeta (48, 87)
tresses (61, 93)
bottlebrush (58, 89)
flouncy (55, 86)
mascarpone (60, 90)
decoupage (56, 86)
progesterone (63, 92)
wisteria (61, 89)
taupe (66, 93)
flouncing (67, 94)
peony (70, 96)
bodice (71, 96)
Business Insider went on to note that the lists are not all that surprising.
The male words tend to center on transportation, weapons, and science, while the female words mostly relate to fashion, art, and flowers.
Preconceived notions prevail, we guess. The commenters on the Reddit thread, however, introduced some valid counterpoints.
The study put us in mind of the testosterone-fueled movie Fight Club, where Brad Pitt's character Tyler Durden asks, "Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word?" Perhaps, this study suggests, men may not be quite so oppressed as Durden believed.
See a Vocabulary List of words to antagonize Durden here, or challenge gender stereotypes by picking your favorite word from your gender opposite and adding it to your learning with the Vocabulary.com app.
