Gender and Written Academic Discourse: Hedges and Boosters in Education Conference Papers.

The paper seeks to extend research on gender differences in spoken discourse into the domain of written academic discourse. A corpus of 78 conference papers written by education researchers for a conference in Australia in 2001 was examined to determine whether there were significant differences in the use of hedges and boosters. It was found that male authors were more likely to use boosters although there was no significant difference in the frequency of hedges. It was noted, however, that men were more likely to use the less common and women the more common hedges. Collaboration and first author effects were also observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]