This study consider five pairs of synonyms formed from the word nü “women, female” and nan “man, masculine” in Mandarin Chinese. Those words can be combined with ren “human”, xing “sex”, sheng “student”, hai “child”, and de “of”, forming nü/nan-ren, nü/nan-xing, nü/nan-sheng, nü/nan-hai, and nü/nan-de. These five pairs are among the most frequently used words when referring to females and males. However, what factors can differentiate them in terms of usage? We used Chinese Sketch Engine and selected the Chinese GigaWordCorpus as a basis to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses. By searching for the ten target words from the five pairs of words (nü/nan + ren/xing/sheng/hai/de), we extracted 97,726 occurrences linked to feminine referents and 51,128 linked to masculine referents. To analyze the similarities and differences in the behavior of each word, we examined their collocations and investigated their syntactic roles and semantic categories. We also conducted sentiment analyses based on feminine referents and masculine ones. The interaction between the variables was assessed using generalized linear mixed models. The results show that agentivity, register, and semantic domains associated with the referents play a role in differentiating the usage of these words. For example, nü/nan-xing are more likely to appear in medical and professional contexts and are less appropriate to be in collocation with demonstratives; nü/nan-sheng are more likely to appear in a school setting, and among them the female one is used more often in collocation with a sexual assault context; nü/nan-de are more likely to appear when their biological sexual dichotomy is emphasized. Furthermore, sentiment analyses show that the context surrounding feminine referents has a more negative sentiment than the one surrounding masculine referents.