There’s yet another difference among men and women—the way they email.
Saif Mohammad and Tony Yang, at the Institute of Information Technology in Canada, looked at emails to see the differences in communication among men and women in the professional workplace.
About 32,000 emails were looked at, from of which 20,000 were from men and 12,000 from women. Emails were 50 to 200 words in length.
The emails were from the Enron Corpus, which is a large database of emails generated by the employees of the Enron Corporation, the only large publicly available collection of emails. Most emails were professional, though some were for personal communications.
Mohammad and Yang considered the amount of emotional words in emails written by men, by women, by men to women, men to men and women to women. They looked for these emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, surprise and anticipation.
Men and women include more anticipation words in workplace emails to members of the opposite sex. Both men and women use trust words when writing to men.
Women use more cheerful words in emails than men. They tend to share their worries with other women. When writing to women, whether my men or women, more joyous and cheerful writing is used.
Men use a lot of fear words, especially when communicating with other men.
