Does writing style affect gender differences in the research performance of articles?: An empirical study of BERT-based textual sentiment analysis

“Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” is essential to reduce gender disparity and improve the status of women. But it remains a challenge to narrow gender differences and improve gender equality in academic research. In this paper, we propose that the impact of articles is lower and writing style of articles is less positive when the article’s first author is female relative to male first authors, and writing style mediates this relationship. Focusing on the positive writing style, we attempt to contribute and explain the research on gender differences in research performance. We use BERT-based textual sentiment analysis to analyse 87 years of 9820 articles published in the top four marketing journals and prove our hypotheses. We also consider a set of control variables and conduct a set of robustness checks to ensure the robustness of our findings. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings for researchers. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-023-04666-w.