WOMEN, MEN AND LANGUAGE

The Social Consequences of Gender Differences in Language

“….In all-female groups, women adopt paralinguistic strategies which signal involvement: they lean forward, they turn their heads towards each other, they look at each other directly. Men, by contrast, lean back, and often avoid looking at each other. In all-women groups, women often discuss one topic for half an hour or more; they share a great deal of information about themselves and talk about their feelings and their relationships. Men on the other hand jump from one topic to another, vying to tell anecdotes which centre around themes of superiority and aggression. They rarely talk about themselves, but compete to prove themselves better informed about current affairs, travel, sport, etc. The management of conversation also differs significantly between women's and men's groups. Women are careful to respect each other's turns and tend to apologise for talking too much. Members of all-women groups are concerned that everyone should participate and dislike any one person dominating conversation. Men in all-men groups, by contrast, compete for dominance and over time establish a reasonably stable hierarchy, maintenance. with some men dominating conversation and others talking very little. Individual men frequently address the whole group (33 per cent of the time on average, in Aries's (1976) experimental groups), while individual women rarely do (6.5 per cent of the time on average), preferring an interpersonal style involving one-to-one interaction.

Turn-taking patterns in all-male conversation seem to correspond to those predicted by the model developed by Sacks et al (1974) (see Figure 6. 1) in that talk is structured by two main rules: (1) one speaker speaks at a time; (2) speaker change recurs. Turn-taking patterns in all-female conversation are far more complex: more than one speaker may speak at a time, with speakers working collaboratively to produce talk.

Maltz and Borker (1982) have analysed some of the ways in which these differences could cause miscommunication in mixed conversations. They argue very strongly that women and men develop different rules for engaging in, and interpreting, friendly conversation, and that these rules are learned in same-sex peer groups during childhood and adolescence (see section 7.3.3 for extended discussion of these ideas). Here I shall look at eight problem areas, elaborating on them in the light of earlier discussion connected with what has gone before…….”

“……. These areas of potential miscommunication arise directly from the different overall styles of women's and men's conversations. Women tend to organise their talk co-operatively, while men tend to organise their talk competitively. These different modes of organisation entail different conversational rules. In particular, women and men differ in their

expectations of what constitutes a normal component of conversation, of how conversations should progress, of how important it is to respect the current speaker's right to finish a turn, and of how important it is to actively support the current speaker. In mixed-sex groups, it seems that women put far more effort than men into maintaining and facilitating conversation.

Some may view the miscommunication that arises in conversations between the sexes as an interesting clash of styles (Maltz and Borker1982; Tannen 1991). But it can be argued that their competence in a different style disadvantages women in interaction with men. In mixed conversations, women do more of the interactive work, supporting others' topics, respecting others' turns, facilitating conversational flow through the use of questions. The end-product of all this is that male speakers dominate talk. Nor is this fortuitous. Power relations are reproduced through talk, and it would be naive to deny that there must be some relationship between these gender-differentiated conversational styles and existing power structures.

But is it adequate to respond that women need to change their style of talking? Many would argue that some features of women's talk are desirable for everyone. So perhaps it is male speakers who need to broaden their repertoire of speech styles. In discussions of this topic, male students have expressed to me their unhappiness at their inability to express their feelings or to discuss them with other men. Teachers at Hackney Downs Boys School in London started a Skills For Living course, one of whose aims was to help boys to talk about themselves. The teachers found that 'boys' ways of communicating with each other within the classroom tended to be rigid, stylised, and competitive, often making it impossible to discuss issues in a personal or meaningful way' (Guardian Women, 12 March 1985). The growing body of research in this area suggests that male inexpressivity is now seen as problematic (see Pleck 1975; Fitzpatrick and Indvik1982; Franks 1984; Noller and Fitzpatrick 1988; Seidler 1989).

Both women and men, then, seem to be disadvantaged by the existence of these two different modes of conversational interaction: women's collaborative, supportive style leads to their being dominated in mixed groups and unfavourably evaluated in public domains such as law and politics where a more masculine adversarial style is valued. Men's competitive style, on the the other hand may make it difficult for them to express their feelings or establish close friendships. 'Language comes to be used as a weapon for the defence of masculine identity, rather than a mode of expressing connectedness with others, or honesty about emotional life. (Seidler 1989: 7)