Iranian Youth Attitudes Towards Women’s Attitudes Towards Gender: A Study of Texts Produced Online by Iranian Youth

With respect to the fundamental role of culture on males and females’ attitudes, this study aims at investigation of the gender differences in the text produced online by Iranian youth in terms of theirattitudes towards women. The purpose of this study is, firstly, to explore whether men and women uselanguage differently and secondly, how their attitudes towards women are reflected in their diction. In order to collect the most natural-like data, 32 males and 28 females participated as informants. About 1,500 utterances were studied, in total. The data were, then, divided into 2 major groups: (1) thosewith positive attitudes towards women and (2) those with negative attitudes towards women. The results indicated that the participants’ different attitudes towards women were reflected in the choice of words: for expressing negative attitudes through diction, the men prefered to use grapheme device(8.6%), graphic device (8.3%), insult (6.9%), punctuation device (6.6%) and for positive attitudes poetical (11%) and idiomatical (8%), the women used question (7.3%), grapheme device (7.3%), benedictory (7.3%) for negative one and for positive attitudes question (8.9%), benedictory (7.6%) and scandal (7.3%).