Language Style and Gender Stereotypes in Person Perception

Twelve sentence pairs representing Lakoff's “women's language” and corresponding “masculine” styles were developed in order to examine gender stereotyping as a function of linguistic pattern usage. College students (77 women and 74 men) read the sentences as transcribed from an interview with a hypothetical male, female, or sex-unknown client, and evaluated the speaker on 31 bipolar adjective scales. Ratings on the masculinity-femininity dimension confirmed Lakoff's “feminine” speech style as a gender stereotype. Factor analysis and subsequent multivariate analyses of variance on factor scores revealed that participants rated the nonfeminine linguistic style significantly higher in competence, but lower in social warmth, than the feminine style. Author gender did not contribute significantly to speaker evaluations. Implications of this importance of style over gender in person perception are discussed.