”Killar skriver inte puttinuttigt” : En experimentell studie av genusföreställningar i textbedömningar

• Main Author: Byrman, Ylva
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Svenska/Nordiska språk 2011
• Subjects: academic writing; gender; gendered writing; language and gender; assessment of text; evaluation; feminization; metalanguage; akademiskt skrivande; genus; språk och kön; textbedömning; textvärdering; metaspråk; feminisering; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-113807

This thesis examines conceptions of gender revealed by people when assessing texts. The research questions are: What associations can be discerned between gender conceptions and ideas about the quality of texts? What features of content and style are perceived as female or male? The study seeks to develop a method for comparing different people’s assessments of the same text. The material was collected by means of questionnaires in which 114 informants were asked to assess three anonymous student texts and then guess the sex of the writer. The material has been analysed quantitatively by correlating the assessments of the texts with the guesses about the sex of the author, and qualitatively, as the informants’ freely worded assessments of the texts were analysed for content and form with the support of assumptions about how assessments are expressed in text. The result shows that the assessments do not significantly correlate with assumptions about the sex of the writer, although there is a tendency to regard textual flow as feminine. Informants rarely bring up gender spontaneously when assessing texts. The properties of a writer that are mentioned are instead intellectual capacity, ambitions, social background and self-confidence. But when informants are asked to guess the sex of the author and state reasons for their answers, dichotomous stereotypes appear, such as that men’s texts are characterized by individualism, a focus on facts, self-confidence, simplicity, and slovenly and terse language, whereas women are assumed to write altruistically, focusing on experiences, with care and complexity, and in a polished and narrative style. This thesis argues that writing is increasingly perceived as a female domain, and discusses the results of text assessment on the basis of Nicky Le Feuvre’s (2009) theories of the effect of feminization processes on the gender order.