Types of gender theory

Types of gender theory More recently, people have clustered the various strands of genderlect theory
and characterized them all according to their approach to gender:

The diversity approach

A post-2000 theory, the diversity approach, has been led by Deborah Cameron. This approach
emphasises that gender is just one facet of identity, and highlights how other genderlect theories have
worked to generalise and summarise 'men' and 'women' as categories. For Cameron, any individual man
may have more in common with a woman than with another man linguistically even though it may be
true that generally. Cameron also points to meta-research carried out by Janet Hyde, who drew together
the results of hundreds of gender studies and found no significant differences in the language used by
men and women. This huge study looked at a wide range of areas of psychological research and found
only two differences in the language area, both of them small: in smiling and spelling. Cameron believes
that despite this lack of empirical evidence, genderlect theories are so compelling because people have
expectations of behaviour- including linguistic behaviour- based on gender. This fits into the larger
concept of performative identity, especially performative gender identity, as proposed by Judith Butler
in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. To some extent, we all choose how to perform our gender identity,
including whether and how to conform to expected gender norms of linguistic behaviour. We also notice
behaviour that fits these expectations rather than behaviour that does not. This is called 'confirmation
bias' - we are biased towards noticing things that confirm our expectations rather than question them.