Women talk about shopping and their hair on social networks. Men? They were more interested in discussing Modern Warfare and FIFA.

So found a new study from the University of Pennsylvania, which scrutinized the words used on social networks such as Facebook to see how they compared with those used on more standard personality questionnaires. They found that, even as many experts say it’s unfair to assign stereotypical likes or dislikes to given genders, some of those stereotypes—at least online—turn out to be true.

Researchers found they could determine a person’s gender with a 92 percent accuracy rate, just by examining the words most frequently used on their profiles. According to Time’s Charlotte Alter, “They found that words like mommy, boyfriend and best friend were more commonly used by women, while men tended to post words like Xbox, World Cup and Chuck Norris. Women said sooo, yummy and super excited, while guys said ftw, epic and every possible variation of the F-word…Girls used the word dress about as much as boys said engineering. Who used more smiley emoticons? Take a guess.”

Alter speculates that some of this inclination to gender cliché is simply the result of males and females playing to what’s expected of them. “If a boy is snuggling with his kitten,” she writes, “updating his Facebook status might be the last thing he’d do.” (Time)

Paul Asay has covered religion for The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Beliefnet.com and The (Colorado Springs) Gazette. He writes about culture for Plugged In and wrote the Batman book God on the Streets of Gotham (Tyndale). He lives in Colorado Springs with wife Wendy and his two children. Follow him on Twitter.