Letters of recommendation in academe: Do women and men write in different languages?

The present study analyzes seventy-eight letters of recommendation sent to a department of sociology and anthropology for six replacement and two tenure-track positions. The sample consists of fifteen pairs of letters written for women and twenty-four pairs written for men. Each pair of letters includes one written by a woman and one written by a man for the same candidate. Men and women wrote letters differently, but their letters also varied by the gender of the applicant. The concept of tokenism, Gilligan’s theory about moral reasoning, and Acker’s discussion of gendered organizations are used to interpret these differences. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting, Providence, R.I., April 12, 1991.