Why Aren’t Women “Charming” Anymore?

It makes sense that we associate certain adjectives more with women (such as maternal) and some more with men (gallant). The surprising finding of a Stanford University study of language and gender is how much our associations have changed over the past century—and how much they haven’t. The researchers examined databases of books, newspapers, and online sources to see which adjectives were linked most often with which gender. In the first half of the 20th century, adjectives such as intelligent and logical were associated more with men, but the words have increasingly been associated with women since the 1960s. The most common word used to describe women in the 1910s was charming, but by the 1990s, it didn’t even make the top ten—but tidy did.