I am a female -ist who studies sex differences in human memory. I will say that when I talk about my work with men, they often seem intent on making some kind of completely unfunny joke. For instance, when I talk about memory changes across the menstrual cycle, they ask me when is the worst time to have a disagreement with their wives. I know they think they’re just being friendly, but the jokes are always stupid and I wonder how they would respond to unfunny jokes about their own work.
That personal complaint aside, there are established gender differences in language use. To borrow from a review of a review:
Recently, Mulac et al. (2001) summarized the findings of more than 30 empirical studies and reported relatively unambiguous gender effects for 16 language features. According to this, typical male language features include references to quantity, judgmental adjectives (e.g., good, dumb), elliptical sentences (“Great picture.”), directives (“Write that down.”), and “I” references. Typical female language features among others comprise intensive adverbs (e.g., really, so), references to emotions, uncertainty verbs (seems to, maybe), negations (e.g., not, never), and hedges. (Pennebaker et al., 2003).
I do not think any of these differences are insurmountable. For the most part, we tend to do ok.