SPECIALISED AND PROFESSIONAL DISCOURSE ACROSS MEDIA AND GENRES

Giuliana Garzone, Paola Catenaccio, Kim Grego, Roxanne Doerr
Title book

Anno 2018

SPECIALISED AND PROFESSIONAL DISCOURSE ACROSS MEDIA AND GENRES

This study investigates whether (lack of) familiaritywith the language of investor communication may contribute to an explanation of the well-documented gen-der gap in financial decision-making (i.e. women are more risk averse than men)and financial literacy (i.e. women are less literate than men). Using an interdisci-plinary framework that combines insights from Behavioral Economics, Finance and Linguistics, we analyze metaphors used in websites that target beginning retail investors in three different languages: Dutch, Italian and English. Employ-ing the conceptual metaphor analysis proposed by Cameron and Low (1999) and Charteris-Black (2004), we find that in all three languages the metaphors come from the same conceptual domains; namely, war, health, physical activity, game, farming and the five senses. As these domains refer to worlds that are predomi-nantly and (stereo)typically masculine, we conclude that the language of investor communication may give rise to feelings of familiarity and belonging among men while creating feelings of distance and non-belonging among women. Based on our findings, we conclude that further research is needed to assess whether lan-guage could be a tool to reduce the gender gap in financial attitudes and behavior.