Does speaking a gendered language make you a gendered being? Gender differences in personality are associated with linguistic gender differences across 49 languages

Previous studies have suggested that personality assessments can be influenced by the language people speak. Therefore, gendered ways of thinking, feeling and behaving may be associated with gendered structures encoded in different languages. Here, we study the association between gender differences in personality traits as measured by the IPIP-NEO (n = 926,463; representing 49 languages from 257 countries, with English being the language of assessment and therefore held constant) and the genderness of languages as rated by experts, estimated by word embedding models on large-scale text corpora from movie subtitles and Wikipedia, and rated by generative AI such as ChatGPT, Gemini and DeepSeek. Consistent across all measures of language genderness, more gendered languages were associated with stronger gender differences in personality traits compared to less gendered languages (r = 0.52 to 0.56), suggesting that language might influence people’s self-concept in terms of their gender.