A new study has found women use exclamation points more than men!
You know what punctuation mark I pity? The semicolon. Sociologists never study semicolons. All nerdy research gets aimed at exclamation points or question marks. Even commas, tildes and ampersands get more cultural attention.
Can you tell I’m going on two hours of sleep thanks to Monday’s epic and heartbreaking Jays loss? A baseball game should not be as long as a flight from Toronto to Paris. I was using verbal exclamation points whenever Shohei Ohtani’s Gerber face flashed on my TV. The Jays should intentionally walk that ball mutilator for the rest of the World Series.
Bases loaded? Walk in a run. It’s better than giving up a grand slam.
Ohtani should have an exclamation point after his name in the box score!
But I digress. Ladies, why do you use so many exclamation points?
The abstract to next month’s story in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology was tough to follow on two hours of sleep: “Across five studies, our findings suggest that exclamation point usage is associated more with women than with men, that these normative expectations are impactful, and that women — who are more sensitive to potential downstream impression formation implications of using exclamation points — think about this issue more than men …”
Exhausted and trying to finish my Freddie Freeman voodoo doll before Game 4 — it still looks more like Fred Jones from “Scooby-Doo” — I asked ChatGPT to do a meta-analysis and break down this gender-exclamation tempest.
“Sociolinguists have long noted that women are expected to sound friendly, warm and nonthreatening in professional and social writing,” it replied, before flashing the bullets.
• “!” signals enthusiasm, warmth or positivity — traits culturally coded as feminine
• Men, conversely, are socialized to value restraint, assertiveness and emotional control, so avoiding “!” can be seen as more masculine (and “professional”)
• So women often use “!” to manage impressions — to mitigate authority or appear approachable, especially in male-dominated workplaces
I don’t know! As with everything, context is key!
Let’s say one of my female overlords emails me a link and writes: “I thought you’d find this interesting!” Then I click and it’s a story about aliens colonizing the oceans. That is interesting!
And very different from an email that reads, “GET TO MY OFFICE RIGHT NOW!”
It’s crazy that women feel socially compelled to use exclamation points to telegraph warmth in 2025. I miss the old days when women telegraphed warmth by laughing at jokes they did not find funny. Or when they asked if I had been working out.
This is not what Alpoleio da Urbisaglia, 14th-century inventor of the exclamation point, had in mind. According to the upcoming study, he was “frustrated with the monotonic way people read scripts that were meant to evoke emotions.”
Seven centuries later, my wife is now subbing exclamation points for question marks: “Did you forget to send back the mortgage renewal!!!”
What the world needs right now is exclamation equality.
Gentlemen? What’s wrong with you? Why do you think you’re too cool to drop a triple-! into your texts? You’re OK with an eggplant emoji but not an exclamation point? Enough with lowercase stoicism that ends with an ellipsis.
We men need to learn to express our emotions. An exclamation point is cathartic. I had to pick up a few groceries on Sunday. I don’t know what was happening in my local store. Maybe the tariffs are wreaking havoc. Or I arrived when shelves were about to be restocked after an inventory. But they were out of everything.
No strawberries. No broccoli. No chicken breasts. Not even egg noodles.
As I told my wife: “I feel like I’m at a third-world bazaar during a civil war!”
And what is up with this insane shrinkflation? Why am I browsing pumpkin pies the size of hockey pucks?
I admire how women have co-opted the exclamation point. One 2006 study found more than 70 per cent of all exclamation usage is by females. Another study found women are three times as likely to use exclamation points. Another study found women who do not use exclamation points hate men who use parentheses.
(I just made up that last one!)
Women don’t use exclamation points too much — men do not use them enough.
How often do we hear mental health experts say it is unhealthy to keep things bottled up? Guys, an exclamation point is a bottle opener for your heart. Use it liberally at work and in your personal life. Let the world know you have feelings:
I will punch the umpires in their masks if they keep blowing strike calls against the Jays! No, I don’t have time to do a second report on Q3 earnings! I have a shooting pain in my rib cage!
I dream of exclamation egalitarianism.
Ladies, your days of owning the “!” are over!!!
