English language: In a broad range of settings involving both spoken and written speech, and with varying degrees of formality, women do not use euphemisms more than men

Kapron-King, Anna, and Yang Xu. 2021. “A Quantitative Evaluation of Gender Asymmetry in Euphemism.” PsyArXiv. April 23. doi:10.31234/osf.io/d4k6r

Abstract: Gender has long been discussed as a possible factor in how people speak differently. One gender-based difference asserted by scholars is that women use euphemisms more than men. Although there have been a number of studies investigating gender differences in language, the claim about euphemism usage has not been tested comprehensively. Using four large text corpora of English, we evaluate the claim that women use euphemisms more than men do through a quantitative analysis. We assembled a list of 106 euphemism-taboo pairs to analyze their relative use by each gender in the corpora. Our results do not show that women use euphemisms with a higher proportion than men. We repeated the analysis using different, more selective subsets of the euphemism-taboo pairs list and found that our result was robust. Our study indicates that in a broad range of settings involving both spoken and written speech, and with varying degrees of formality, women do not use euphemisms more than men.