  A large body of research on gender-linked language has established
foundations regarding cross-gender differences in lexical, emotional, and
topical preferences, along with their sociological underpinnings. We compile a
novel, large and diverse corpus of spontaneous linguistic productions annotated
with speakers' gender, and perform a first large-scale empirical study of
distinctions in the usage of \textit{figurative language} between male and
female authors. Our analyses suggest that (1) idiomatic choices reflect
gender-specific lexical and semantic preferences in general language, (2) men's
and women's idiomatic usages express higher emotion than their literal
language, with detectable, albeit more subtle, differences between male and
female authors along the dimension of dominance compared to similar
distinctions in their literal utterances, and (3) contextual analysis of
idiomatic expressions reveals considerable differences, reflecting subtle
divergences in usage environments, shaped by cross-gender communication styles
and semantic biases.
