Given how the test was administered - it was a yes/no "do you know this word" test with some fake words mixed in to discourage people from saying yes to words they don't know - "know" is a bit of a stretch here - "recognize as a word" is probably the better description of these percentages. I don't think the results are all that meaningful because none of these words are used much - most of them are used only in contexts that already imply an uneven gender ratio. On the other hand, there are probably a lot of common words used in casual contexts that are recognized by virtually everyone whose usage is significantly skewed by gender - those are probably much useful for identifying gender.
For me, if I had to actually define some of these words, it would skew even more by gender, depending on what you mean by "define". For example, I know that a peony is a flower, but I wouldn't be able to draw you one, nor would I be able to identify it other than by process of elimination. Similarly I know that "taupe" is a color, but I don't really know which color (I mean, obviously these are now bad examples because I look thinks up when I don't know them, but the point is still relevant).
I'm not that surprised that many of the "female" words have to do with clothing that only women wear. Men don't tend to wear anything all that elaborate, and often it's unisex anyway. It's possible that that's an artifact of the fact that women tend to be more interested in fashion than men, though - I guess I don't really know the difference between Oxfords and boat shoes, so maybe the fact that there's no comparable set of fashion terms for men is because even men don't know the terms for the clothes they might wear.
That data would be easier to get by finding text written by men or women and finding words that correlate with gender. Finding words that we recognize but don't use regularly is harder and requires a test like this.
I remember some research doing this on twitter data:
>the more obvious results pointed out that women will normally tend to use emotional language like “sad, love, glad, sick, proud, happy, scared, annoyed, excited, and jealous.” Emoticons, and CMC (computer-mediated communication) terms (lol, omg, brb, for instance) are female markers, “as [are] ellipses, expressive lengthening (e.g., coooooool), exclamation marks, question marks, and backchannel sounds like ah, hmmm, ugh, and grr.”
>Clear male markers include words related to swearing, technology, and sports, and in relation, numbers (as in scores).
