Why do you think handwriting often displays gender cues?

Handwriting typically follows art. In art, flowing rounded lines indicate female, or romanticism (If I’m remembering correctly) and straight lines are male related. Same as the body. Men have sharp-bold lines and woman generally have fluid like motions. Sorry, started to go off in a daze. Handwriting I think follows this same hidden rule. Women usually have fluid like bubbly lettering and men are more straight-messy lines.

Unless I’m wrong, of course…

I think that’s true. Women tend to write neater than men for the most part. Yes there are exceptions but that’s true with everything.

I imagine that it does and I think of women’s handwriting as being round and flowing and men’s as more angular but I am not sure why I think that. Maybe because women’s voices seem less harsh than men’s I expect their writing to be smoother too?

Interesting question.
Hormones affect index finger to ring finger ratios.

Females have better fine motor skills.

Social and cultural pressure.

But I don’t, all appears neutral to me.

I wonder if it has more to do with gender differences in the brain or gender differences in the hands.

I’m trying to teach my six year old how to write. I recall that at his age I was already a fairly proficient writer for six (early literacy runs in the family in both sides) but I cannot get him to practice the right way to write letters for the life of me.

He starts every letter on the bottom line and works up from there. So, so very sloppy.

But several school friends of mine, all male, wrote the same way. (We had some fun one day trying to copy each others’ handwriting, it was memorable.)

I’ve never seen a girl write that way. I wonder why…

It probably doesn’t help that I’m a calligraphy enthusiast…

Handwriting offers personality clues, and there’s a field of forensic handwriting analysis that supports this idea. So handwriting may or may not reveal gender, but more pointedly it can reveal a spectrum of personal concerns or attributes that are sometimes viewed as typical of a gender. One example is the sort of classic teen-girl style. The minimizing of ascenders and descenders and the expansion of the x-height essentially puts all the action in the middle of the line, which indicates preoccupation with “domestic” concerns (relationships, material security, etc.). This is contrasted with something like this style where the action is mostly above and below the x-height (where little effort is paid). This writer likely has concerns related to the libido (descenders) or lofty, abstract thoughts (ascenders) and probably doesn’t care as much about domestic issues.

@kevbo That sort of handwriting analysis strikes me as highly suspect. It sounds like another take on phrenology.

I remember when a was younger, in middle school and high school, there were notable shifts in how I wrote. Sometimes they were engineered as I tried to find my own way of writing, other times they were natural degradations or simplifications.

I think it has mostly to do with cultural norms. Women are typically better at English, because we’re raised to be communicators, to understand how people are feeling, and to express our emotions. Writing is a part of the arts – a way for people to express their feelings. Stories, poems, love letters, etc. Men, on the other hand, are not raised to express themselves the same way, typically.

Also, go far back enough in time and try to decipher a male’s handwriting from a female’s. It would have been nearly, if not completely, impossible. Penmanship, however, used to be important for every literate person. Letters themselves used to be much more artistic, and as the Western world progressed, artsy and “flowery” stuff became a female stereotype – so it makes sense that a lot of modern men don’t have nearly as nice handwriting.