Ruprecht-Karls-Universitt Heidelberg Anglistisches Seminar PS1 Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis Lecturer: Monika Eller WS 2014/2015

Genderlects; Do they persist in computer mediated communication?

Mara Magdalena Khler

Steinhlde 21/2 74360 Ilsfeld

Maria_m_koehler@hotmail.de submitted 20.03.2015

Introduction

From a very early age, actually from the time that they were born, boys and girls, men

and women tend to be socialized in different ways. And over time what can happen is

that this can have a powerful influence on how both, men and women, are expected to

behave. Often this is what is called different cultures which comprises the idea that

genders and thus genderlects come from a masculine culture and a feminine culture

where individuals grow into. They create masculinity and femininity in their ways of

behaving, all the while believing they are simply acting naturally and from an overall

perspective the characteristics that are associated with masculinity and femininity can

have an enormous impact on their professional and personal lives.

Since genders are seen as coming from different cultures, we can refer to their

communicative intercommunion as Cross-Cultural Communication. In order to be better

conversationalists, better talkers, we have to understand gender and be aware of the

dichotomies between both cultures and their linguistic style.

Background

When talking about gender we need to bear in mind that gender is a social construct

devised by humans to define difference in masculine and feminine roles, behaviors, or

activities, whereas Sex is the biological/physical aspect that defines the difference

between men and women.

Deborah Tannen, whose work is the source for the background information and initial

point of this study, defines linguistic style as a persons characteristic speaking pattern

(1995; 139). It is a little bit more than just the way how we learned to talk. In fact it

includes properties like direct or indirect talk, pausing and pacing, word choice and the

selection of elements into your talk. All these parts combined together make a linguistic

style. She also defines it as a set of culturally learned signals by which we not only

communicate what we mean but also interpret others meaning and evaluate one

another as people (1995; 139). This idea, that we use it to evaluate other people, is

crucial to understanding the power of talk.

Deborah Tannens genderlect theory states that men and women have different

conversation styles, id est that there are gender differences in the way we communicate

and that understanding the differences is the key to better communication.

There are gender differences in ways of speaking, and we need to identify

and understand them. Without such understanding, we are doomed to

blame others or ourselves or the relationship for the otherwise mystifying

and damaging effects of our contrasting conversational styles. []

Recognizing gender differences frees individuals from the burden of

individual pathology. [] Taking a sociolinguistic approach to relationships

makes it possible to explain these dissatisfactions without accusing anyone

of being crazy or wrong, and without blaming or discarding the

relationship.

(Tannen, 1990, p.17)

Stereotypical gender contrasts described by Tannen are:

Conflict versus compromise: Men are generally more confrontational than women and

its easier for men to deal with verbal conflict than it is for women. Women tend not to

ask directly for what they want.

Independence versus intimacy: Men use conversation to exert their independence

while women often use conversation to preserve intimacy.

Status versus support: Men have a more competitive linguistic style, while women use

a more mitigated linguistic style in order to implicate mutual support.

Orders versus proposals: Men give direct orders while women use questions or

suggestions to indirectly issue a command.

Advice versus understanding: While men often give constructive criticism or advice,

women want a comprehensible listener for their problems.

According to Tannen (1995; 140), women acting naturally differ from men acting

naturally because in fact there are different patterns that form linguistic style in every

speech community known to linguists.

Women tend to use what is called powerless speech mannerisms like hedges (I guess

Id like it), hesitations (Uh, well if you, er), intensifiers (So thats how I feel),

polite forms (Excuse me, but could I), tag questions (You think?), which are

questions that come after the statement, and disclaimers (Im no expert but I think).

The masculine form of speech doesnt include these kind of speech patterns. According

to Herring (1994; 3) the female gendered style is supportive by the usage of thanking,

appreciation and community-building activities. Male style is characterized by

preserving a critical, self-confident and authoritative stance.

Two dynamics can be described of which one is the rapport talk whose properties are

the feminine style, form connections, cooperative metaphors, power down (see Tannen,

1995, 145), we-statements, since the first-person singular pronoun usage can give the

illusion of control and exclusion of other participants of the situation. Saying I am hiring

a new marketing manager and I am going to put her into control of our marketing

division is a less cooperative message than using the first-person plural pronoun in the

same sentence. The other dynamic is the report talk characterized by its masculine style,

hierarchy, competitive metaphors, power up (see Tannen, 1995; 145), and I-

statements.

According to Lakoff (1975), womens style has an extensive set of words specific to their

interests, hypercorrect grammar, use of intensifier so and empty adjectives. Moreover

he ascribes the use of hedges and politeness to womens language and describes that

they ask more questions (also more tag questions) than men.

Furthermore Dindia and Allen (1992) also described a higher level of intimacy in female

language style and the importance of self-disclosure in genderlect. According to them,

sharing their personal experiences, views and problems is often used by women in

conversations to offer sympathy.

To put it in a nutshell women generally speak a language of connection and intimacy,

they use language as a way to establish connections and negotiate relationships and are

thereby anxious for making the conversation partner feel comfortable, while men

generally speak a language of status and independence and use it as a way to negotiate

and maintain status in a hierarchical order. This is a generalization and does not mean

that only men or women share certain properties in their language usage. There are, of

course, exceptions where women use a male linguistic style or male linguistic style

properties and vice versa. The founded generalization makes us expect certain

tendencies for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and hence this study will

examine to which extent gender difference becomes apparent in CMC, by means of

evaluating comments on a public page of shared interest on facebook.

Data

The present study is based on an analysis of a random sample of 341 comments of a

non-academic list collected from January, February and March 2015 on the official

facebook page of the news television channel Fox News Channel with currently about

10 million likes. The posts the comments belong to were chosen according to their topics

to exclude the possibility of not authentic results in consequence of a unilateral focus

on one topic or correlated topics. One of the three posts is of the topic animals/animal

business, the second one belongs to the topic (drug-related) crime and the third

one to the topic military. Out of thousands of comments on each post about 110

consecutive comments were selected randomly after deactivating the Top Comments

display, selecting the option Latest Activity and scrolling down a few times without

getting a picture of the comments content. All comments were in English so that no

comment had to be excluded for language criterion. To allow the evaluation of the

collected data it was necessary to clearly identify the commentators sex, which one

profile didnt fulfill and which is why it had to be excluded from the study.

Methodology

To identify and classify the collected comments they first had to be saved and adjusted

to a readable format and in order to make them suitable for this study the corresponding

sex had to be matched to every commentator. The clear assignment of sex to the

commentators was realized by calling up the commentators profiles, where their sex

automatically showed up if adjusted correctly. Only in one case the sex couldnt be

determined for which reason the comment was excluded from the study. In addition,

categories were designed to facilitate the examination of whether the claims of previous

researches also apply to the communication observable in the collected data. Those

categories were elaborated according to the previous described empirically observable

gender differences in communication.

First, the category questions was established to verify whether it is true, that women ask

more than men and furthermore the sub-category rhetorical questions was introduced

to differ between real seeking of information and the usage of a stylistic device. To be

classified as such, in this case, questions dont necessarily have to be marked by a

concluding question mark, as questions could be detected by their structure.

Second, since demands show a commanding stance, the category demands plays an

important role in analyzing whether the impression that men are more authoritative

than women appears in this case, too. This category contains instructions, orders,

commands and similar.

Statements, the third category, is sub-divided in non-judgmental statements/facts and

opinions figured as generally valid fact or truth. The usage of the latter demonstrates a

self-confident stance relating to the opinion that men speak a language of status and

independence, because formulating the own opinion about something as if it were an

objective fact shows a desire for or the existence of ones own assertiveness.

In order to examine the appearance of Dindia and Allens statement that women tend

to share personal information, experiences and problems, the category self-disclosure

was added.

And finally there is a category for thanking, showing happiness, recognition,

appreciation and giving affirmation with the title positive reactions. This category

comprises phrases similar exclamations and sometimes even only one word. Since there

werent any positive exclamations in the sense of thanking, showing happiness etcetera,

the category positive reactions was omitted for one post.

The expressions and utterances in the comments of each post then were put in their

belonging categories and evaluated according to the sex of the commentators, more

precisely the quantity of men or women. The result of the question how many

comments belonging to one category were done by females or males was put into

relation with the total number of women or men of the set of comments. The following

example will clarify the procedure. Given the case that a post has a total of 100

comments of which 50 commentators are female and 50 are male and the evaluation of

the comments counts 12 women showing self-disclosure, the amount of the members

of that gender in that category (12 women) has to be to be put in relation with the

amount of the total number of female comments (50), giving a percentage of 24%. This

means that in the fictive case 24% of the women shared their experiences, personal

information, views or problems.

There were comments that didnt fit in any of the categories and other comments with

more than only one sentence which is why some comments or rather their content fit

into more than one category.

Results

Below is the first randomly selected post, posted on January 7, 2015 on Fox News.

1) Petco has removed Chinese-made dog and cat treats from stores as they may

have sickened thousands of pets and killed 1,000 dogs since 2007.

http://fxn.ws/1Asvkci

The results of the evaluation of the comments show that from the total of 112

comments, 67 are female and 45 are male, which is 59.8% female comments and 40.2%

male comments (see Table 1).

Table 1. Distribution of Comments written by men and women to the first post

The classification of the comments showed, for women, the biggest percentage in the

categories Self-disclosure and Questions. This means that women mostly gave personal

views, experiences or information while for men the categories Statements and Self-

disclosure. 32.8% of all the women who commented the post used self-disclosure in their

comments and 20.9% asked questions. The percentage for male comments in the

category Statements is 33.3% and for Self-disclosure 22.2%.

112 Total comments 100%

67 Women 59.8%

45 Men 40.2%

The table below lists the proportional distribution of comments among all the

categories.

Category Male Female

Questions - Real questions - Rhetorical Questions

15.6% 2.22% 13.33%

20.9% 4.5% 16,4%

Demands 20% 16,4%

Statements: - Non-judgmental - Opinions as fact

33.3% 13.3% 20%

12% 9% 3%

Self-disclosure 22.2% 32,8%

Positive reactions 0% 7.5%

Table 2. Proportional distribution of the comments to the first post among the categories

The most striking differences between men and women are noticeable in the category

Statements, not only because more men than women comment in a stating manner, but

also because as we can see in Table 2, women tend to give non-judgmental information

or facts if they state something, while for men it is the other way round. Their comments

give the impression to be a fact but on closer inspection it becomes clear that they carry

certain valuation or an opinion. In the category Self-disclosure is another divergence. In

relation, female tendencies toward self-disclosure are bigger than male tendencies.

The following randomly selected post is from March 4, 2015.

2) Breaking News: Mexican police arrest Alejandro Trevino-Morales, leader of

the notorious Los Zetas drug cartel. http://fxn.ws/1B0ED57

In this case, the evaluation of the corresponding comments had a widely differing

distribution than the evaluation of the comments to the previous post. In this case only

32 of the comments were comments done by women, which represents 29.6% of the

total amount of comments and 76 men commented, which represents 70.4 percent of

all comments.

Table 3. Distribution of Comments written by men and women to the second post

Of those 32 women that wrote a comment to the post the majority chose to write a

statement that on closer look is an opinion figured as generally valid fact or truth. None

of the women wrote a non-judgmental statement but 37.5% of them wrote their opinion

in form of a statement. The second largest percentage of womens reaction can be found

under the category Positive feelings. 31.3% of the women showed their satisfaction

about the news or recognition and gratitude.

60.5% of the men used statements in their comments and 57.9% of them were used not

to give facts, but to state the own opinion. The second largest percentage of mens

comments are shared by two categories equally with 17.1%. There werent any real

questions but 17.1% of the men used rhetorical questions in their comments and also

17.1% demands.

Category Male Female

Questions - Real questions - Rhetorical Questions

17.1% 0% 17.1%

15.6% 0% 15.6%

Demands 12.5% 17.1%

Statements: - Non-judgmental - Opinions as fact

60.5% 2.6% 57.9%

37.5% 0% 37.5%

Self-disclosure 6.3% 4%

Positive reactions 1.3% 31.3%

Table 4. Proportional distribution of the comments to the second post among the categories

As we can see in Table 4 the most striking divergences between comments done by men

and by women to this post, is the strongly differing percentage in the categories

Statements and Positive Reactions. We can see that women use statements and positive

reactions in their comments to nearly the same extend but almost no man gives positive

reaction in his comment. Compared to the first post, there is a shift of the percentage

distribution between non-judgmental statements and opinions figured as generally valid

fact. No woman used value-free statements while in the comments to the first post

more women that wrote a statement wrote an unbiased one.

The third randomly selected post is from February 17, 2015.

108 Total comments 100%

32 Women 29.6%

76 Men 70.4%

3) Breaking News: Islamic State militants have burned to death 45 people in the

western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, just five miles away from an air base

staffed by hundreds of U.S. Marines, a local police chief tells the BBC.

http://fxn.ws/1L7GW7F

The collected data of this post consisted of a higher percentage of womens comments

than of men. From 103 comments, 67 were from females and 36 from males. This

represents a percentage of 65% for women and 35% of men as shown below in Table 5.

Table 5. Distribution of Comments written by men and women to the third post

In this part of the data set the evaluation differed a little bit from the other two parts

because there was a considerable number of comments that didnt fit in any of the

elaborated categories. Those comments were mostly supplications but were not

excluded from the study since they represent a part of the total comments and have an

influence on the percent distribution of both, the participation of men and women as

commentators for this post in general and the classification into categories. In this case

the two categories with the biggest percentage were for men statements with 30.5%

and demands with 22.2%, for women demands with 23.9% and also statements with

20.9%.

Three percent of the women gave value-free statements while 17.9% of them gave their

opinion figured as a generally valid fact. 23.9% of the women gave directives, even

extreme ones, e.g. demanding the death of the Islamic State militants or the release of

an atomic bomb. Just like in the other two parts of the data set, the majority of the men

made assertions that implied their opinions. For the other categories the results of the

evaluation are listed below in Table 6.

103 Total comments 100%

67 Women 65%

36 Men 35%

Category Male Female

Questions - Real questions - Rhetorical Questions

15.7% 2.8% 13.9%

17.9% 1.5% 16.4%

Demands 22.2% 23.9%

Statements: - Non-judgmental - Opinions as fact

30.5% 0% 30.5%

20.9% 3% 17.9%

Self-disclosure 11.1% 14.9%

Positive reactions 0% 0%

Table 6. Proportional distribution of the comments to the second post among the categories

In this case there werent any positive reactions. The results show that in relation, men

used more statements than women, just like in the results of the evaluation according

to the results of the data evaluation of post 1) and 2) and women shared more

personal information (self-disclosure) and asked more questions.

Comparing the three Tables, the results with respect to questions and demands show

different occurrences. Table 4 shows that men ask more questions than women,

whereas in Table 2 and Table 6 men have the lower percentage in the category

questions. Nevertheless the proportion between real questions and rhetorical

questions stays in all three tables more or less the same.

When taking a look at the category demands we can see, that in Table 6 the percentage

of demands from women (23.9%) is similar to the percentage of men using demands

(22.2%), whereas Table 2 shows with a difference of 3.6% between female and male

usage of demands, that more men use demands in their comments. Table 4 shows a

difference of 4.6% between female and male usage of demands in their comments,

whereby in this case the percentage is higher for women than for men.

In the following category, statements, the percentage of all tables leads to one

reasoning, that is to say that male tendency towards statements as a tool to convey their

opinion is in all three cases higher than female tendency towards representing their

views as a fact. The proportion between statements that carry own opinions (In The

tables labelled as statements as fact) and non-judgmental statements differs between

the tables. The percentage for female non-judgment statements in Table 2 is lower than

the percentage of opinion as fact-statements and in Table 4 and 6 it is higher higher

for the latter than for value-less statements.

Besides a small deviation in Table 4, the results are concordant regarding the category

self-disclosure. The female percentage for self-disclosure is higher than the male one in

Table 2 and 6.

For the category positive reactions the tables show an unambiguously result, namely:

positive reactions are almost exclusively shown by women.

Conclusion

By means of the previous observations, two features can be clearly observed. First,

male tendencies towards statements that imply an opinion are higher than woman

tendencies to the usage of statements for expressing their opinion. Second, women tend

to give more positive reactions, for example Thank you, Good news or Awesome.

Moreover women rather give personal information, experiences and views and use

more rhetorical questions.

Since the category questions was established to examine whether Lakoffs statement

that women ask more than men is true for communication mediated via facebook

comments, the study came to the finding that in two cases the percentage of female

usage of question was higher and in one case, with a difference of 1.6% it was lower

than male usage of questions in comments. 1.6% is a very low difference and for this

reason it can be said, that women used slightly more questions in the data set of the

study than men did.

It also can be said, that men speak a language of status and independence, because the

majority of men chose to figure their opinion as a valid fact or truth. This demonstrates

a self-confident stance about their opinion.

The category self-disclosure was added in order to examine the appearance of Dindia

and Allens statement that women tend to share personal information, experiences and

problems, more than men. In sum this was also true for this study because only in the

part of the data set belonging to post 2) the proportion slightly differed and was higher

for men than for women.

As the category positive reactions was elaborated to see whether Tannens and Lakoffs

statements that were described in the background part of this study are true, the answer

is yes, due to the big differences between males and females positive feedback.

Only the claim that men are more authoritative than women could not be proved

because no significant divergence in the usage of demands came up.

Therefore it can be said on the whole that already existing observations and beliefs also

apply to computer mediated communication.

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Honor Pledge

I declare that I have read and understood the material exemplifying and explaining

cases of plagiarism included in the Studienfhrer ('Genius borrows nobly':

Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism), and that my paper contains no plagiarized

material and is solely my own work. I am aware of the fact that should my paper be

found to contain plagiarized material or to have been written in part or whole by

someone else, this will entail serious consequences. These include the following:

1. The reason for my failure will be recorded by the department.

2. I will not be given credit for the course.

The Honor Board may review my paper and suggest additional sanctions, including

expulsion.

Furthermore I am aware that submitting the same or a revised paper in two separate

courses without the instructors' explicit consent will result in similar consequences.

Mara M. Khler

March 20, 2015