‘Robot Kung fu’: Gender and professional identity in biology and philosophy reviews

Abstract

In academic writing the construction of an authorial identity is constrained by different social, biographical and academic factors as writers bring their diverse personal experiences to a text. One of these factors is that of gender, although this has been far less studied in published academic writing than in other forms of social interaction. In this paper, we explore the issue of gender in academic interactions by analyzing a corpus of academic book reviews and interviews with academics from Philosophy and Biology. Focusing on metadiscourse features, we examine the similarities and differences in the rhetorical practices of male and female academics in their construction of a disciplinarily appropriate identity. Our findings show while there is no one-to-one relation between gender and language, gender and discipline identities cross-cut each other in significant ways in the context of professional self-conception and personal preferences.