research about language and gender

• A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Linguistics

Volume 5, 2019, review article, language, gender, and sexuality.

• Miriam Meyerhoff 1 , and Susan Ehrlich 2
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6140, New Zealand; email: [email protected] 2 Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada
• Vol. 5:455-475 (Volume publication date January 2019) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-052418-094326
• Copyright © 2019 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

Research on language and gender encompasses a variety of methods and focuses on many aspects of linguistic structure. This review traces the historical development of the field, explicating some of the major debates, including the need to move from a reductive focus on difference and dichotomous views of gender to more performative notions of identity. It explains how the field has come to include language, gender, and sexuality and how queer theory and speaker agency have influenced research in the field.

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• Article Type: Review Article

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Language and Gender

Language and gender is a field of study that explores the way language is used differently by males and females. It has become increasingly important as the world is becoming more aware of gender inequality and the power dynamics in language between men and women. The field examines the different linguistic choices and speech patterns that are used by both genders in different contexts, the effects of these choices on their social and professional lives, and their implications for gender identity. It also looks at the ways our language can reinforce gendered stereotypes, and how we can use language to create a more equitable society. By understanding how gender is expressed linguistically, we can better understand how individuals perceive and interact with one another and how to create a fairer, more inclusive environment.

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Language and gender: Mainstreaming and the persistence of patriarchy

Issues related to gender (and sexuality), largely ignored in the early development of sociolinguistics, have emerged as a cornerstone of the field. Spurred on by the feminist movement and new generations of engaged scholars addressing how language use both reveals and embeds gender inequalities, scholarship on such questions is now “mainstream” across a range of disciplines. Deborah Cameron argues that the primary focus in recent decades on social identity and performance, while path-breaking in many ways, has had the unintended consequence of drawing attention away from core issues of power and patriarchy in terms of gender relations.

When I first studied sociolinguistics as an undergraduate in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, I had no idea that elsewhere (mainly, at that stage, in the United States) a new subfield was emerging that I would eventually become part of. Today it is generally known as “language and gender studies” (or, increasingly, “language, gender, and sexuality studies”). It has gradually acquired the institutional apparatus of a respectable field of scholarly inquiry: courses, textbooks, handbooks, a professional organization (the International Gender and Language Association, IGALA) that sponsors regular conferences, and a dedicated journal ( Gender and Language ). When it first emerged, however, during the peak years of the post-1968 feminist second wave, it was more like a grassroots initiative, or a series of them, reflecting the desire of many women at the time to bring their academic training to bear on questions of sexual politics.

1 Women on the margins

An online history of the linguistics department at the University of California, Berkeley , [1] identifies 1972 as the year when one of the department’s members, the linguist Robin Lakoff, “created the modern field of language and gender” with her essay “Language and Woman’s Place” (though better known in its slightly later incarnation as a book, it was originally published in 1973 as an article in the journal Language in Society ). In fact Lakoff was not a lone pioneer, but one of a number of scholars who took up similar questions in the early 1970s. Some were linguists – Sally McConnell-Ginet, whose PhD was in semantics, recalls that her own interest in language and gender began in 1973 when she was asked to teach a course for Cornell University’s women’s studies program – but others were based in departments of anthropology, speech communication (the journal Women and Language , now in its forty-first year of publication, continues to be run by communication scholars), English, psychology, and sociology.

This diversity was showcased in the collection Language and Sex: Difference and Domina nce, edited by the sociologist Barrie Thorne and the psychologist Nancy Henley, which appeared in 1975. The volume’s contents underline another key feature of much early work in the field: its concern to illuminate, through linguistic analysis, the day-to-day problems experienced by women in male-dominated societies. One of the guiding principles was, in the words of Lakoff (ibid.), that “linguistic imbalances are worthy of study because they bring into sharper focus real-world imbalances and inequalities. They are clues that some external situation needs changing.” (p. 73). Whether their focus was the historical tendency for words denoting women to become pejorative, the cross-culturally widespread exclusion of women from the speech events and forums where power was exercised, or the patterns of interruption found in mixed-sex conversation, researchers aimed to raise consciousness about the extent to which everyday linguistic practices both reflected and reproduced structural sexual inequality.

It would take time for this enterprise to be accepted by the wider academic community. None of the literature I’ve mentioned featured in any course I took as a student between 1977 and 1983: I only discovered its existence when I read, for a discussion in my local women’s group, Dale Spender’s (1980) popular feminist polemic Man Made Language . Many senior academics – of both sexes, though in those days they were mostly men – made no secret of their disapproval of a field they considered trivial, unscientific, and politically partisan. In the mid-1980s, when a junior lecturer in Berlin invited me (also at the time a junior lecturer) to give a talk in her department, a couple of professors surprised us by showing up; it turned out, however, that they had only come to register a protest, by pointedly opening their newspapers the moment I began to speak.

2 Moving into the mainstream

Today the anecdote I’ve just told prompts incredulous laughter. Language and gender is mainstream: a popular offering in many undergraduate linguistics programs, and the subject of numerous doctoral dissertations. Publishing on it is no longer an obstacle to getting hired, or getting tenure. It has also become more internationalized, with active research communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well as the older strongholds of North America, Europe, and Australasia. These are undoubtedly positive developments. But with them, arguably, has come something I find less positive: a retreat from the engagement with real-world sexual inequalities that was once seen as the field’s raison d’être .

I started to think seriously about this in 2015, when the resurgence of grassroots feminist activism, particularly among young women, prompted me to start a blog addressed to feminists. I called it Language: A Feminist Guide [2] : the idea was that I would choose topics that feminists were currently talking about and try to shed fresh light on them using the concepts and findings of language and gender research. As I put this plan into practice, I found it striking how many of the topics that came up, in the news or in feminist conversations on social media, were twenty-first century iterations of problems that had first been discussed in the 1970s (though the younger readers I was targeting often did not know that). How do women get marginalized – interrupted, talked over, patronized, not listened to – in so many discussions? Why did criticism of Hillary Clinton’s “shrill” voice figure so prominently in the 2016 presidential election campaign? What should feminists make of the taped conversation in which Donald Trump talked about “grabbing [women] by the pussy,” a remark he later dismissed as “locker room banter”? These may not be new questions, but for women they are still everyday issues. And when I went looking for recent research evidence about them, I began to notice how little of the relevant research had been done by language and gender researchers. It would be an overstatement to say that concerns about “real-world imbalances and inequalities” have disappeared from language and gender studies, but I think it would be fair to say that they no longer occupy such a central position. And the reasons for that, I believe, speak to more general trends in both sociolinguistics and feminist or gender theory since the 1990s.

3 The turn to identity

In her contribution to the first edition of The Handbook of Language and Gender , published in 2003, Susan U. Phillips made a pertinent comment from her perspective as an anthropologist who had been involved in the feminist theoretical debates of the 1970s and 1980s:

While a great deal was gained by the new feminist conceptualizing of women as intersections of various aspects of social identity, a great deal was lost too. The rhetorical force of the focus on the universal key problem of a very broad male power over women … was obscured, and really has not regained center stage in feminist writing since. (p. 260)

As I read this observation, Phillips is alluding to two significant (and related) developments: the turn to identity as the central problematic for feminist theory, and the rejection of essentialism , equated not merely with belief in fixed essences, but with any attempt to universalize or even generalize about the situation of women. While both developments had complex intellectual and political trajectories, in retrospect it can (crudely) be said that the publication in 1990 of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble , which conceptualized gender as “performative,” a form of identity that was not given in advance, but constituted through repeated acts, marked a defining moment. This way of thinking about gender had a significant influence on the way research on language and gender developed during the 1990s, with a focus on documenting the diversity of ways in which gender was performed across cultures and contexts, and often an emphasis on the agency of the performers and the potential of their performances to subvert conventional gender norms.

These trends have continued in the twenty-first century. The turn to identity, and to Butlerian queer theory, enabled the study of language and sexuality, which had previously followed its own path, to become more integrated with language and gender studies. The interest in performances that troubled or subverted the sex/gender binary prompted more research on queer, trans, and other unconventionally gendered subjects. One consequence, as Phillips observes, is that the question this research tradition began with – how language and language-use reflected, and contributed to maintaining, male power over women – no longer takes center stage. The decentering of both women and power in contemporary understandings of the field is evident in the statement that appears on the website of IGALA’s journal Gender and Language , which explains that it publishes “research on femininities and masculinities, on heterosexual and queer identities, on gender at the level of individual performance or perception and on gender at the level of institutions and ideologies.” [3]

4 The persistence of patriarchy

It would be hard to disagree with Phillips that much has been gained – in terms of precision, nuance, and attention to the way different systems of dominance and subordination interact – from adopting new perspectives on gender. But increasingly I have come to share what I take to be her worry about throwing the feminist baby out with the essentialist bathwater. In any mature academic field there will be pressure to move on – find new subjects, ask new questions, adopt new theoretical ideas – because originality is one criterion for evaluating research. But in this case a problem with moving on (and I think this is much more obvious now than it was in the politically quiescent, “postfeminist” 1990s) is that patriarchal social relations remain deeply embedded in almost all societies. Many aspects of most women’s situation have changed far less since the 1970s than we might like to think. Some, indeed, have arguably changed for the worse, and it is anger about this that has sparked a new wave of feminist militancy.

One of the lessons I have learned from blogging for a nonacademic feminist audience is that concerns academic researchers have moved on from, considering them too familiar or too basic to be of interest, may still be highly salient for many women. Those who respond to my blog (some of them activists and frontline workers in women’s services, and a fair number located outside the Anglosphere) still experience language as an instrument of male power over women, used to silence, misrepresent, belittle, and harass them. What they want from experts is evidence and analysis that they can use to build resistance. If language and gender researchers want to support their efforts, there is a need both to revisit questions on which our evidence-base is now decades old, and to engage with new problems that arise from more recent cultural and political developments.

Some researchers are doing this. The discourse analyst Ruth Wodak (2015) , for instance, devoted a chapter of her book about right-wing authoritarian populist discourse, The Politics of Fear , to the discourse of modern political misogyny; Rodrigo Borba is currently researching the uses of gendered language in the politics of repression and resistance in Brazil. Other researchers are using a range of methods to examine the increasingly widespread and serious problem of online misogyny (see Hardaker and McGlashan 2016 ; Jane 2017 ). In these projects (and some others I have no space to mention), language and gender researchers are responding, as their predecessors did, to the real-world problems of the moment; but there is far more that could, and I hope will, be done in future.

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Article note

This essay was originally published in Items: Insights from the Social Sciences , a publication of the Social Science Research Council. Cameron, Deborah. “Language and Gender: Mainstreaming and the Persistence of Patriarchy.” In “Sociolinguistic Frontiers.” Series, Items: Insights from the Social Sciences . https://items.ssrc.org/sociolinguistic-frontiers/language-and-gender-mainstreaming-and-the-persistence-of-patriarchy/ . Reprinted with permission.

© 2020 Cameron, published by De Gruyter

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Coffey-Glover, L. (2019). Approaches to Studying Language and Gender. In: Men in Women's Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57555-5_2

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Language and gender identities

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Language, gender and sexuality, an analysis of heteronormativity in two swedish efl textbooks, feminist stylistics and some sociolinguistic features in trans-canada, the routledge handbook of language and identity, gender and language practices in female circumcision ceremonies in kuria, kenya., the routledge handbook of language and identity, gender and olds’ advice in written signs: a pragmatic study, gender representation and language politeness in speech acts: a pragmatic study, “like little helsinki girls in the backseat of a tram”, english loanword use in greek online women's magazines, 24 references, new generalizations and explanations in language and gender research, gender and spoken interaction, think practically and look locally: language and gender as community-based practice, gender articulated: language and the socially constructed self, rethinking language and gender research: theory and practice, a cultural approach to male-female miscommunication, cultural psychology: indexicality and socialization, are ‘queers’ really ‘queer’ language, identity and same-sex desire in a south african online community.

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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

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Language and Gender Studies

William Morrow, 1990/2007

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Language and gender is an interdisciplinary field of research that studies varieties of speech (and, to a lesser extent, writing ) in terms of gender , gender relations, gendered practices, and sexuality.

• In The Handbook of Language and Gender (2003), Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff discuss the shift that has occurred in the field since the early 1970s--a movement away from "essentialist and dichotomous conceptions of gender to a differentiated, contextualized, and performative model which questions generalized claims about gender."

Gender and Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics , the study of the relationship between language and society, provides a good basis for a discussion of gender and language, as a number of experts in the field explain.

Christine Mallinson and Tyler Kendall

• "Regarding gender, extensive research on language , culture, and identity has sought to uncover 'the logic of the encoding of sex differences in languages,' to analyze the 'oppressive implications of ordinary speech,' to explain miscommunication between men and women, to explore how 'gender is constructed and interacts with other identities,' and to investigate 'the role of language in helping establish gender identity [as] part of a broader range of processes through which membership in particular groups is activated, imposed, and sometimes contested through the use of linguistic forms . . . that activate stances' ([Alessandro] Duranti 2009: 30-31). Other work explores how language is used to reproduce, naturalize, and contest gender ideologies, drawing from many disciplinary perspectives . . .. Critical discourse, narrative , metaphor , and rhetorical analysis have been used to examine other gendered dimensions of processes of meaning making, such as gender bias in cell biology (Beldecos et al. 1988) and factory farm industry language used to conceal violence (Glenn 2004)." ("Interdisciplinary Approaches." The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics , ed. by Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, and Ceil Lucas. Oxford University Press, 2013)

Sally McConnell-Ginet

• "Our diagnosis is that gender and language studies suffer from the same problem as that confronting sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics more generally: too much abstraction. Abstracting gender and language from the social practices that produce their particular forms in given communities often obscures and sometimes distorts the ways they connect and how those connections are implicated in power relations, in social conflict, in the production and reproduction of values and plans. Too much abstraction is often symptomatic of too little theorizing: abstraction should not substitute for theorizing but be informed by and responsive to it. Theoretical insight into how language and gender interact requires a close look at social practices in which they are jointly produced." ( Gender, Sexuality, and Meaning: Linguistic Practice and Politics . Oxford University Press, 2011)

Rebecca Freeman and Bonnie McElhinny

• "In the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s, women began to examine and critique societal practices that supported gender discrimination in consciousness-raising groups, in feminist cells, in rallies and media events (see [Alice] Echols, 1989, for a history of the women's movement in the United States). In the academy, women and a few sympathetic men started to examine the practices and methods of their disciplines, subjecting them to similar critiques for similar ends: the elimination of societal inequities based upon gender. The study of language and gender was initiated in 1975 by three books, the latter two of which have continued to significantly influence sociolinguistic work: Male/Female Language (Mary Ritchie Key), Language and Women's Place (Robin Lakoff), and Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance (Barrie Thorne and Nancy Hedley, Eds.). . . . Overly dichotomous ideas of gender pervade Western society in ways that must be challenged. Because, however, it is important that challenging exaggerated notions of difference does not simply result in women assimilating to male, or mainstream, norms, feminist scholars must simultaneously document and describe the value of attitudes and behaviors long considered 'feminine.' In doing so, feminist scholars challenge their exclusive association with women and point out their value for all people." ("Language and Gender." Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching , ed. by Sandra Lee McKay and Nacy H. Hornberger. Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Cynthia Gordon

• "Interactional sociolinguistics [IS] serves as one of many theoretical orientations that have been drawn on to investigate gender and communication. The pioneering study of Maltz and Borker (1982) provided a starting point for [Deborah] Tannen's (1990, 1994, 1996, 1999) writing on language and gender in which Tannen investigates interactions between women and men as a kind of cross-cultural communication and firmly establishes IS as a useful approach to gendered interaction. Her general audience book You Just Don't Understand (Tannen, 1990) offers insights into everyday communication rituals of speakers of both genders. Much like Lakoff's (1975) Language and Women's Place , Tannen's work has fueled both academic and popular interest in the topic. In fact, language and gender research 'exploded' in the 1990s and continues to be a topic receiving a great deal of attention from researchers using various theoretical and methodological perspectives (Kendall and Tannen, 2001)." ("Gumperz and Interactional Sociolinguistics." The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics , ed. by Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone, and Paul Kerswill. SAGE, 2011)

Experts on Language and Gender

Other experts have also written about language and gender, including "our own gendering and the gendering of others," as Allyson Julé wrote, or the once touted and now-discredited notion of " 'genderlect' to provide overall characterizations of sex differences in speech."

Allyson Julé

• "We act out gender roles from a continuum of masculine and feminine characteristics; we are therefore gendered and we are involved in the process of our own gendering and the gendering of others throughout our lives. In the field of  gender and language use, this performance of gender is referred to as 'doing gender.' In many ways we are rehearsed into our gender roles, like being prepared for a part in a play: gender is something we do, not something we are (Bergvall, 1999; Butler, 1990). Over our lives and particularly in our early formative years, we are conditioned, prompted and prodded to behave in acceptable ways so that our gender, and our community's acceptance of it, aligns with our ascribed sex. "[S]ome scholars in the field question the distinction that sex is a biological property and gender is a cultural construct, and both terms continue to be contested . . .." ( A Beginner's Guide to Language and Gender . Multilingual Matters, 2008)

Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley

• "In the first phase of language/gender research, Many of us were eager to piece together an overall portrayal of differences in the speech of women and men. We invented notions like ' genderlect ' to provide overall characterizations of sex differences in speech (Kramer, 1974b; Thorne and Henley, 1975). The 'genderlect' portrayal now seems too abstract and overdrawn, implying that there are differences in the basic codes used by women and men, rather than variably occurring differences, and similarities." (Quoted by Mary Crawford in Talking Difference: On Gender and Language . SAGE, 1995)

Mary Talbot

• " Language and gender studies have seen significant expansion to encompass sexual orientation, ethnicity and multilingualism , and, to some extent, class, involving analyses of spoken, written, and signed gendered identities." ( Language and Gender , 2nd ed. Polity Press, 2010)
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There is a sense of urgency around the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) five, which focuses on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. However, it represents a shared challenge and the British Council’s maximising impact research has made it clear how those challenges differ from region to region.

During a session, held in partnership with the British Council, at the 2024 THE   Global Sustainable Development Congress, industry experts discussed ways of bridging the gender gaps in higher education across different geographies. At higher education institutions, being evidence-based is key. Pursuing research that leads to better advocacy can deliver tangible improvements for groups that have traditionally been underserved and excluded by universities. 

“Something in gender studies that we always engage with is the notion of intersectionality,” Suat Yan Lai, senior lecturer at the University of Malaya, explained. “When we talk about gender and equality, discrimination can also occur because of other intersecting identities.” Higher education reflects the inequality that we see in wider society, which is why you find leadership in many institutions dominated by men, she said. 

However, despite the industry’s challenges, it is not monolithic. Things can change for the better as reflected in the journey many universities have been on with their gender, equity, diversity and inclusion (GEDI) policies. “For example, does your institution have gender-disaggregated data?” Lai asked. “What is your GEDI policy? What are your strengths and weaknesses here? There is no overarching GEDI policy – certainly, that’s not what we’ve seen in Southeast Asia. Usually, things are more fragmented.”

Building on Lai’s views, Kefa Lidundu Simwa, executive director of the African Network for Internationalisation of Education (ANIE), also spoke of practical measures and strategies for addressing barriers to gender equality and inclusion in higher education. “When you are in international forums, issues of culture always come into the mix,” Simwa said. “Based on our gender analysis in higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa, many female students continue to face barriers and challenges to accessing entrepreneurship and employability opportunities.”

Collecting data from surveys, interviews and focus group discussions from several countries, ANIE’s research elucidates regional issues around inequality. For example, the data reiterates that gender norms and cultural values in the region still disadvantage female students. “Access is a problem for the female student, particularly in the STEM subjects,” Simwa added. “There is the challenge of finance but also of finding role models. There are very few females in leadership roles and they are spread thinly.” 

Digitalisation, political policies, curriculum development and international support can all help to improve gender equality in the higher education space. Universities are beginning to offer community counselling or creating new gender frameworks to promote their GEDI goals. Similarly, enhancing representation and transparency are both worthwhile endeavours but it’s important that actionable steps are identified to deliver concrete improvements. “It’s one thing to say something on paper, but it is another thing entirely to create genuine change,” Simwa said. “Particularly where culture is involved.”

• Leighton Ernsberger, director of education for East Asia, British Council (chair)
• Suat Yan Lai, senior lecturer, University of Malaya
• Kefa Lidundu Simwa, executive director, African Network for Internationalisation of Education

Find out more about the British Council.

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Gender prediction of generated tweets using generative ai.

1. Introduction

• We collected a dataset containing gender-specific GenAI-generated tweets from users using ChatGPT, and human-authored tweets labeled by gender (OpenAI 2024).
• We presented a novel approach and methodology for collecting a dataset tagged with hashtags, utilizing a temporal approach to capture trending hashtags over different time periods. This ensures a balanced and representative sample of tweets.
• We employed a two-stage feature selection method to identify the most discriminative features for gender prediction. This involved analyzing term frequencies and applying the Chi-square test to select features with high discriminative scores that significantly contribute to distinguishing gender-specific language in tweets.
• Through extensive experimentation with various Machine Learning (ML) classifiers, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), we validated the efficacy of our method. Our results demonstrate that we can accurately predict the gender of text content in tweets generated by GenAI.

2. Related Works

3. materials and methods, 3.1. motivation, 3.2. dataset, 3.3. approach.

• Top 500 Features: We first selected the top 500 most discriminative features based on their scores. These features are expected to have the highest impact on distinguishing between male and female language in GenAI-generated tweets and human-authored tweets.
• Top 1000 Features: In the second category, we extended our selection to the top 1000 most discriminative features. By including a larger set of features, we aim to capture more characteristics variations in gender-specific language. This broader selection helps ensure that detailed but potentially important linguistic patterns are not overlooked.
• All Selected Features: Finally, we compiled a comprehensive set of all the features that were identified as discriminative, regardless of their rank. This complete set includes every term that demonstrates a statistically significant difference in usage between male and female categories. Using this extensive set allows us to fully explore the complexity of gender-specific language in GenAI-generated tweets and human-authored tweets and provides a robust basis for our predictive models.

4. Experimental Results

4.1. evaluation.

• Feature 500: When trained on a feature set consisting of 500 features, the MLP classifier demonstrates the highest performance across all metrics, achieving an accuracy of 83%. SVM follows with slightly lower scores of 81% accuracy. RF obtained 78%, DT scored 80%, and the NB classifier shows the lowest performance in this feature set with an accuracy of 76%.
• Feature 1000: When trained on a feature set consisting of 1000 features, the MLP continues to outperform the other classifiers, achieving an accuracy of 86%. SVM shows strong performance as well, with a slightly lower accuracy score of 84%. RF obtained 80%, DT scored 81%, and NB showed improved performance compared to the 500-feature set, indicating that increasing the number of features enhances model performance, with an accuracy of 77%.
• All Features: When trained on a feature set consisting of all features, the MLP achieves the highest scores across all metrics, with an accuracy of an accuracy at 90%; this was followed by SVM at 87%, RF at 84%, and DT at 85%. NB, though improved, remains the lowest performer with an accuracy of 80%.

4.2. Observation

5. conclusions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Alowibdi, J.S. Gender Prediction of Generated Tweets Using Generative AI. Information 2024 , 15 , 452. https://doi.org/10.3390/info15080452

Alowibdi JS. Gender Prediction of Generated Tweets Using Generative AI. Information . 2024; 15(8):452. https://doi.org/10.3390/info15080452

Alowibdi, Jalal S. 2024. "Gender Prediction of Generated Tweets Using Generative AI" Information 15, no. 8: 452. https://doi.org/10.3390/info15080452

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Health Utility Value of Overactive Bladder in Japanese Older Adults

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Objectives: To determine the health utility values (HUVs) of overactive bladder (OAB) among adults aged ≥65 years and to assess the HUV decrements (disutilities) of OAB according to its severity. Methods: This cross-sectional Internet-based study was conducted between 2 and 9 November 2023, with quota sampling with equal probability for each gender and age group (age 65–74 years and ≥75 years). OAB was defined as an urgency score of ≥2 points and a total score of ≥3 points based on the Overactive Bladder Symptom Score. OAB severity was categorized as mild (total score, ≥5 points) or moderate-to-severe (total score, 6–15 points). HUVs were measured using the EuroQol 5-Dimension 5-Level value set for the Japanese population. Multivariable linear regression models were fitted to estimate the covariate-adjusted disutilities of OAB, with eight covariates selected based on previous studies. Results: Among the 998 participants (51.9% male; median age, 75 years), 158 (15.9%) had OAB, of whom 87 (8.8%) had moderate-to-severe OAB. The mean HUVs for participants with mild and moderate-to-severe OAB were 0.874 and 0.840, respectively, which were lower compared with the HUV for those without OAB (0.913). After adjusting for relevant covariates, disutilities (95% confidence intervals [CIs]) for mild and moderate-to-severe OAB were −0.0334 (−0.0602 to −0.0066) and −0.0591 (−0.0844 to −0.0339), respectively. Conclusions: This study examined HUVs in older Japanese adults with and without OAB. The results demonstrate that increased OAB severity is associated with greater disutility.

Competing Interest Statement

TY has received the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI grant (grant number: 21K17228) for conducting the survey. RG has received grants for the evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of medicines and medical devices from the National Institute of Public Health, Japan since 2019, which support the consultation fees for the development of search strategies and will support the article publication fee. KO, SF, and TM have no conflicts of interest to declare. The funders did not participate in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, review, approval, or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Funding Statement

This study was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI grant (grant number: 21K17228) for conducting the survey. This study was also supported by the National Institute of Public Health for the language editing fee and article publishing charge.

Author Declarations

I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.

The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

All respondents completed online questionnaires after providing digital informed consent indicating their willingness to participate in the survey. Participants received monetary points as an incentive for participation. All the procedures adhered to the ethical guidelines of the 1975 Declaration of Helsinki and its subsequent 2013 revision. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Keio University School of Medicine (approval number: 20221120). This study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) guidelines for cross-sectional studies.

I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals.

I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).

I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable.

Data Availability

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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