Former Google Exec can predict if speaker is woman by use of the word “just”

Re:Former Google Exec can predict if speaker is woman by use... by tzakrajs on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:19PM (#9815241)

Evidence given for hypothesis: In a room full of young entrepreneurs, a nice even mix of men and women, I asked two people — a guy and a girl — to each spend three minutes speaking about their startups. I asked them to leave the room to prepare, and while they were gone I asked the audience to secretly tally the number of times they each said the word "just."

This is excellent science.

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Re:Former Google Exec can predict if speaker is woman by use... by dalke on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:46PM (#9815425)

This is not excellent science. The author even says "Now, that's not research". Instead, it's a test that the methodology might be used to do science.

Another way might be to look at presentation transcripts. Picking two TED talks from the top Google hits for "TED talk transcript", I found http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_soghoian_government_sur... and http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts/... .

The word "just" appears 4 times from the male speaker, and 12 from the female speaker.

There are 10 from this female speaker, http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes... , and 8 from this male speaker http://www.ted.com/talks/tony_robbins_asks_why_we_do_what_we... . Bill Gates uses "just" 8 times in http://blog.ted.com/bill_gates_talk/ while Maryn McKenna uses it 3 times in her talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/maryn_mckenna_what_do_we_do_when_an... .

From this alone we can see there's some variability, as McKenna uses "just" less frequently than any of the male speakers.

Based on this, it's clear that a much larger corpus needs to be used to tell if there's anything meaningful in that observation about the gender preference in the use of "just."

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