Gender and power: How gender and gender environment affect manifestations of power

Abstract

We investigate the interaction of power, gender, and language use in the Enron email corpus. We present a freely available extension to the Enron corpus, with the gender of senders of 87% messages reliably identified. Using this data, we test two specific hypotheses drawn from the sociolinguistic literature pertaining to gender and power: women managers use face-saving communicative strategies, and women use language more explicitly than men to create and maintain social relations. We introduce the notion of "gender environment" to the computational study of written conversations; we interpret this notion as the gender makeup of an email thread, and show that some manifestations of power differ significantly between gender environments. Finally, we show the utility of gender information in the problem of automatically predicting the direction of power between pairs of participants in email interactions.