Ungendered writing – #awareness
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/03/14
Maybe the outcome of this research study is even more reason to promote awareness around ungendered writing.
In this world at large, inclusivity should be the norm and showing that in your writing should increase funding rates for science articles.
[Wayback/Archive] Ungendered writing: Writing styles are unlikely to account for gender differences in funding rates in the natural and technical sciences – ScienceDirect.
Oh: for a change, I was glad that the full article is in the HTML page, so no separate PDF download or paywall. Great!
Highlights
- Structural differences in funding rates between male and female scientists have been reported.
- We study the potential influence of gendered differences in writing style on funding decisions
- Unlike previous studies, we only find minimal differences in writing style between the sexes, using full-text applications.
- We conclude that writing styles are unlikely to account for skewed funding patterns in the natural and technical sciences
Besides the general outcome, there is some great information in it about the open source tools (mainly Python and Perl based) for parsing and readability scoring. Great information if you ever want to work with natural language yourself.
- [Wayback/Archive] mediacloud/sentence-splitter: Text to sentence splitter using heuristic algorithm by Philipp Koehn and Josh Schroeder.
- [Wayback/Archive] Lingua::Sentence – Perl extension for breaking text paragraphs into sentences – metacpan.org
Via [Wayback/Archive] Ionica Smeets on Twitter: “Ungendered writing: Writing styles are unlikely to account for gender differences in funding rates in the natural and technical sciences door o.a. @schneider_jw”.
--jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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