A new study shows that women are swearing more than men today, and the increase is (expletive) higher than in years past.
The Times reports researchers from Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press studied 36 volunteers by recording them for up to three hours of their daily lives and found that women were swearing more than men. According to the data, women's use of the f-word has "increased by more than 500 percent over the past two decades," while men's use of the word has cut in half.
The study found that women use the f-word 546 times per million words, while men use it 540 times per million words, which is a fall from 1,000 times per million words in the early 1990s. At that period, women were using the f-word 167 times per million words.
"It looks like there were a set of men who said [the f-word] a lot in the 90s, and they influenced the women to do it, and then it leveled," Tony McEnery, a professor at Economic and Social Research Council, told Refinery29. "As equality drives on, the idea that there is male and female language, that there are things which men and women should or should not say, is going to be eroded. Gentlemanly behavior and ladylike language is becoming something of the past."
The study also found that women were “four times more likely to say ‘sh—’ than men in the early 1990s,” but that amount has risen to ten times more likely.
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