From The Boston Globe Online, a summary of forthcoming scholarship that quantifies differences in the way men and women write:

"Koppel's group found that the single biggest difference is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns-'I', 'you', 'she', 'myself', or 'yourself' and the like. Men, in contrast, are more likely to use determiners-'a,' 'the,' 'that,' and 'these'-as well as cardinal numbers and quantifiers like 'more' or 'some.' As one of the papers published by Koppel's group notes, men are also more likely to use 'post-head noun modification with an of phrase'-phrases like 'garden of roses.'"

Of course, this scholarship doesn't answer any questions about whether the differences are biological or socalized, but I enjoyed reading the tidbit about how the first version of their paper was rejected by a major journal on the grounds that it was anti-feminist. After "[o]ne of the coauthors, Anat Shimoni, added her middle name 'Rachel' to her byline," the authors got no further criticism on ideological grounds.