  The use of euphemisms is a known driver of language change. It has been
proposed that women use euphemisms more than men. Although there have been
several studies investigating gender differences in language, the claim about
euphemism usage has not been tested comprehensively through time. If women do
use euphemisms more, this could mean that women also lead the formation of new
euphemisms and language change over time. Using four large diachronic text
corpora of English, we evaluate the claim that women use euphemisms more than
men through a quantitative analysis. We assembled a list of 106 euphemism-taboo
pairs to analyze their relative use through time by each gender in the corpora.
Contrary to the existing belief, our results show that women do not use
euphemisms with a higher proportion than men. We repeated the analysis using
different subsets of the euphemism-taboo pairs list and found that our result
was robust. Our study indicates that in a broad range of settings involving
both speech and writing, and with varying degrees of formality, women do not
use or form euphemisms more than men.
