Reference
Campbell Leaper
The measured size of the gap between how tentatively men and women actually speak comes from the meta-analysis he led with Rachael Robnett.
Leaper and Rachael Robnett pooled 29 studies covering 3,502 people to ask whether women really do use more tentative language. The answer was yes, with an effect size of 0.23. That is a real difference and a small one, and the overlap between the two distributions is far larger than the gap between them.
It is the number that belongs in the room whenever advice of this kind addresses itself to women as a group. A gap that small cannot carry the weight put on it: knowing someone's sex tells you very little about how they will phrase a request, and a generalisation this weak is a poor basis for telling half a workforce to edit their sentences.
Referenced work
- Women Are More Likely Than Men to Use Tentative Language, Aren't They? A Meta-Analysis Testing for Gender Differences and Moderators (Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2011) reference
Elsewhere
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