Broadly, “sociolinguistic” approaches to CS are extremely varied and cover multiple levels of engagement with plurilingual data, from the societal to the intra-individual, Dividing thes approaches up is a partly arbitrary exercise, since the societal level and the individual are in constant dynamic interaction, the issue of gender is a case in point.
Whereas one might think of it as a broad sociolinguistic differentiator, it turns out in practice to have som potential explanatory power only through its interaction with finely tuned conversational factors which require a close knowledge of the community.