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In this study, the social category sex is based on the biological categories male and female. Sex differences are particularly interesting when it comes to the question of who leads linguistic change. Labov states that “in the majority of linguistic changes, women use a higher frequency of the incoming forms than men” (Labov 1990: 206). As Chambers (2009: 256) points out, this statement is somewhat vague because most changes are towards standardised forms. Therefore, Labov (2001: 293) refines his claim in the Sex Paradox: “Women conform more closely than men to sociolinguistic norms that are overtly prescribed, but conform less than men when they are not.” In general, women tend to use more standard forms than men because women’s perception of non-standard use of language is sharpened and women, in the majority of cases, lead language change (Wodak and Benke 2017: 138). However, male speakers lead change towards non-standard variants. For example, Trudgill (1972) shows that WC male speakers lead the change towards the use of [ɪn] instead of using the more standard variant [ɪŋ]. Likewise, Williams and Kerswill (1999: 160) find that WC (Working Class) boys in Reading and Hull are leading the change towards [ʔ] for (T).

Even though Chambers (2009: 105) states that “very few biological differences between males and females have an effect on language”, in instrumental/acoustic phonetics physiological differences between men and women have to be mentioned. Male speakers tend to have a larger larynx than female speakers. The size of the larynx influences the size of the vocal cords, i.e. males also have longer vocal cords which in return means that females have higher Hertz frequencies when speaking. In general, the aim of sociophonetic studies is to compare speaker groups and thus, normalisation procedures have to be applied to the data in order to extract physical sex differences (cf. Chambers 2009: 106f) by acoustic means.