Mach and mascarpone: testing how vocabulary is gendered

A survey has shown an 'awesomely sexist' discrepancy between the English words understood by different genders

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Do you know what decoupage is? Tresses, taffeta, and mascarpone? Then you're statistically more likely to be female. If you're more confident identifying a golem, a paladin, or a scimitar, then you're more likely to be a man. That's according to research from the Center for Reading Research at the University of Ghent, highlighted by MobyLives, which analysed the results of half a million vocabulary surveys, and found that "some words are better known to men than to women and the other way around". And the words? Well, as MobyLives put it, "our vocabularies are awesomely sexist".

Here goes, with the numbers in brackets being the percentage of men who knew the word, and women. These are the 12 words with the largest difference in favour of men: codec (88, 48), solenoid (87, 54), golem (89, 56), mach (93, 63), humvee (88, 58), claymore (87, 58), scimitar (86, 58), kevlar (93, 65), paladin (93, 66), bolshevism (85, 60), biped (86, 61), dreadnought (90, 66). These are the 12 words with the largest difference in favour of women: 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).

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