Evidence of the paradox is widespread in sociolinguistic variation studies that use either sex or gender as a variable, but findings that support the principles are not universal. Most data in support of the gender paradox come from studies of Indo-European languages in Europe or North America, but studies done in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East countries often show contradictory patterns. For example, male speakers use the prestigious classical variety of Arabic far more than women even though women lead in the use of locally-prestigious standard variants. Men speaking Malagasy also lead in the use of their ideal speech style, which is characterized by non-confrontational indirectness, but the women are norm-breakers and use the stigmatized direct style that is associated with negative information. Those counterexamples suggest that the gender paradox could be limited to Western cultures or languages.
