What do corpora tell us about gender and power? Evidence from idiomatic expressions

This paper is a corpus-based study of the differences in the use of idioms by males and females in the British National Corpus. Ten datasets of idioms are under analysis: Anxiety and Worries, Boastfulness and Conceit, Equality, Justice, Health and Illness, Beauty, Honesty, Mistakes, Chaos and Disorder and Clothes. The quantitative analysis has revealed unevenness in the dispersion of idioms in terms of male and female uses, the former having more lateral distribution than the latter. Furthermore, it has been found that there is a statistically significant association between gender and genre applying to 50% of the material under study. That said, out of academic, fiction, drama, newspapers, magazines, and informal discourse, the newspapers have shown the strongest association with male authors, which we subsequently relate to the concept of power.