Twitter: The words you use betray your gender

Beyond the obvious differences between men and women, our sex also determines how we express ourselves through the written word. One study found that this inequality is also seen in social networks like Twitter, to the point that a group of researchers could tell the gender of individual users through their tweets.

Twitter turned 7 years and 140 characters can reveal much more than the opinions, tastes and preferences of its users. Three researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Stanford University analyzed 14,000 tweets to find patterns that define whether the author of the text was male or female. And find some peculiarities.

Women tweet more about mood than men. The researchers were able to define words like love, sad, happy, sick, proud, scared, angry, excited and jealous as female markers. Women also use more emoticons, sounds, onomatopoeia and lengthen the words to express feelings as surprise, joy or anger.

The men, however, use more numbers; are more direct and prefer to give information to suggest it. It is also usual to use bad words and write about sports results. The option to listen to music incorporating the social network, also provide clues about our gender.