Women are more likely than men to be compassionate on social media: Aussie research

Men are more likely to be more impersonal and use masculine language on social media, while women are most likely to use polite and compassionate language, Australian researchers revealed on Thursday.

In a study into the habits of men and women on social media, researchers from the University of Melbourne analyzed the language of 65,000 Australian Facebook users to determine how men and women express themselves differently online.

The university's Dr Margaret Kern said an algorithm was used to automatically identify subtle differences in how men and women type conversational words on social media.

Kern said the algorithms were capable of correctly predicting a user's gender over 90 percent of the time.

"We found that women mentioned friends, family and social life more often, whereas men swore more, used angrier and argumentative language and discussed objects more than people," Kern said in a statement released Thursday.

"In many ways, the topics most used by women versus men are not surprising as they fit common gender stereotypes. The computational methods let us make visible what the human mind does to automatically categorize people and things that we encounter in our everyday life."

Kern said the topics used in the study appealed to the different genders in different ways, proving the way people express themselves online could be strongly linked to the gender one identifies with.

"Our results demonstrate that gender is a complex, multi-faceted and fluid concept, but this study shows that self-reported gender does influence the way people express themselves on (social media)," she said.

Dr Gregory Park, lead author of the study, said the data will help experts to see the "bigger picture" with complex data.

"When we organise the topics by warmth and assertiveness and then visualise all of them together, it's clear that many of the language differences break down along these interpersonal dimensions," he said. Endit