Gender Gaps in University Perceptions of Social Reality

A critical reading through lexical centrality

Abstract

This paper examines gender gaps in the perception of socially sensitive topics—such as feminism, gender-based violence, immigration, religion, and pornography—among university students in Málaga. Using lexical association tasks and the calculation of the Lexical Centrality Index (LCI), we identify significant divergences in the lexical repertoires activated by male and female participants. The analysis reveals that women tend to use more introspective, emotionally charged, and socially engaged lexicon (e.g., fear, trauma, objectification), while men exhibit more distant or resistant discursive patterns, including terms such as sect, mockery, or scam. Grounded in Fuzzy Set Theory, the study is framed within critical sociolinguistics and gender studies, interpreting lexical differences as discursive traces of differentiated socialization trajectories and symbolic power structures. Furthermore, lexical centrality analysis is proposed as a diagnostic tool for designing educational interventions aimed at promoting equity, ideological literacy, and the discursive transformation of social imaginaries