The humble exclamation point carries a gender expectation. In a set of five studies, people associated using it more with women than with men, and women spent more mental energy deciding whether to add one.
The research was carried out by Yidan Yin of Pennsylvania State University, Gil Appel of George Washington University and Cheryl Jan Wakslak of the University of Southern California. It was published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology on August 4, 2025, in the November 2025 issue.
A small choice with social weight
The authors treat punctuation as a window into the many routine decisions people make when they write, especially in digital messages. Across the five studies, the norm was consistent: exclamation points were seen as more typical of women.
That expectation had consequences for how people wrote. Women were more sensitive to how an exclamation point might shape the impression they made. They reported thinking about the issue more than men did and were less certain about their own use of the mark.
Exclamations help, for everyone
The studies also tested how readers react. Messages with exclamation points produced more positive impressions overall, although they raised some negative concerns too.
The researchers found no evidence that these effects depended on whether the writer was a man or a woman. An exclamation point landed about the same way for both.
The authors call this one of the unexpected burdens of gendered norms: women put extra thought into a choice whose effect on readers, as far as these studies could detect, is the same for men.
Study Details:
- Title: Nice to meet you.(!) Gendered norms in punctuation usage
- Authors: Yidan Yin, Gil Appel, Cheryl Jan Wakslak
- Journal: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
- Publication Date: August 4, 2025
- DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104812