LANGUAGE AND
GENDER
EngLang U4 AoS2
DO MEN AND WOMEN
COMMUNICATE DIFFERENTLY?
What do you think?
What have you observed?
CHANGING VIEWS IN RESEARCH ON
LANGUAGE AND GENDER
Ideas about language and gender changed quite profoundly over the course of the
20th century.
We will look briefly at some of the major theories in this area of linguistics. You
don’t need to recall all of these details, but they provide useful background for
contemporary discussion.
Some linguists have grouped the various approaches to this topic as the ‘four Ds’:
• deficit
• dominance
• difference
• dynamic
THE DEFICIT
APPROACH
EARLY RESEARCH
Early research into language and gender saw male
language as ‘the norm’ and female language as
an inferior variety.
Otto Jesperson (1922) was one of the first linguists
to specifically address the differences between
men’s and women’s speech.
JESPERSON’S IDEAS
Jesperson claimed that women:
• avoid vulgarity and swearing
• speak more
• speak more hyperbolically and use more adverbs
• leave more sentences unfinished
• have smaller vocabularies (he did concede that this might have something to do
with inequalities in education)
• use less complex sentences and instead string ideas together with ‘and’ (because
they are ‘emotional’ while men are ‘grammatical’)
• aren’t as ‘interested’ in words (he believed men drove language innovation)
SOME QUOTES FROM
JESPERSON
“Woman is linguistically quicker than man: quicker to learn, quicker to hear,
and quicker to answer. A man is slower: he hesitates, he chews his cud to make
sure of the taste of words, and thereby comes to discover similarities with and
differences from other words, both in sound and in sense, thus preparing himself
for the appropriate use of the fittest noun or adjective.”
“Women much more often than men break off without finishing their sentences,
because they start talking without having thought out what they are going to
say.”
(Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin)
WOMEN’S REGISTER
Robin Lakoff’s book Language and Woman’s Place (1975) is usually viewed as
a continuation of the deficit approach. Lakoff proposed the idea of a ‘women’s
register’ and argued that it served to maintain women’s inferior place in society.
She identified a range of linguistic forms used more by women than men,
which reflect and reinforce this subordinate role, such as:
• tag questions
• questioning intonation (what we might refer to as high-rising terminal)
• indirect language and hedges
• more politeness markers, weaker expletives
THE
DOMINANCE
APPROACH
LANGUAGE AS POWER
The dominance approach to language and gender suggests that men use language
as a form of power.
In Man Made Language (1980), Dale Spender argued that in patriarchal societies
men control language and it works in their favour.
Don Zimmerman and Candace West (1983) found that men were more likely
than women to interrupt others.
Pamela Fishman (1983) conducted research into how often women and men took
up and continued others’ topics of conversation and how often their own topics
were picked up. Her data showed that women did a lot of the ‘work’ of taking up
others’ topics compared to men.
GENDER OR POWER?
Other researchers have argued that dominance in communication is not related to
gender, but to power relationships.
In a study of witnesses giving evidence in court, William O’Barr and Bowman
Atkins (1980) found that language use was associated with the degree of status
in court and familiarity with court procedures, rather than gender. Less
experienced witnesses of both genders used language features more typically
viewed as feminine (ie those features identified by Lakoff), while expert female
witnesses demonstrated fewer of these features.
THE
DIFFERENCE
APPROACH
NOT INFERIOR, JUST
DIFFERENT
By the late 1980s, there were researchers who did not want to describe what
women did as keeping them less powerful. Instead, they proposed the
communication styles of men and women were simply different.
Foremost among these ‘difference’ proponents was Deborah
Tannen, whose 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand: Men
and Women in Conversation became a bestseller.
“For most women, the language of conversation is
primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing
connections and negotiating relationships ... For most men,
talk is primarily a means to preserve independence and
negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social
order.”
EFFECT OF SOCIALISATION
Other researchers proposed that different verbal and non-verbal skills were
learned in segregated same-sex peer groups as children and persisted into
adulthood.
Amy Sheldon, in a 1992 study of preschool children, found that boys used
“direct confrontational speech acts”, while girls used “elaborate linguistic and
interactional skills” and did “difficult and artful work” to mediate opposition.
COATES’ FINDINGS
Jennifer Coates (1989) found the following differences in communication styles:
Aspect Men Women
Topics Things, impersonal topics People, feelings
Conversation style Little overlap (monologuing) Frequent overlap
Goals Information exchange Maintenance of social relationships
Authoring Individual ownership of ideas Collaborative development of ideas
Thus the difference approach seeks to celebrate the quality of women’s
interactional styles as more nurturing, supportive and cooperative than men’s.
THE
DYNAMIC
APPROACH
THE MYTH OF MARS AND
VENUS
Beginning in the 1990s, Deborah Cameron refuted much of the previous work on
language and gender.
In her 2008 book The Myth of Mars and Venus, she
argued that there is as much similarity and variation
within each gender as between men and women, and that
we need to think about the topic in a much more nuanced
way.
CAMERON’S MYTH
BUSTING
• Myth 1: Language and communication matter more to women than to men; women talk
more than men.
• Myth 2: Women are more verbally skilled than men.
• Myth 3: Men’s goals in using language tend to be about getting things done, whereas
women’s tend to be about making connections to other people.
• Myth 4: Men talk more about things and facts, whereas women talk more about people,
relationships and feelings.
• Myth 5: Men’s way of using language is competitive, reflecting their general interest in
acquiring and maintaining status; women's use of language is cooperative, reflecting their
preference for equality and harmony.
• Myth 6: These differences routinely lead to ‘miscommunication’ between the sexes, with
each sex misinterpreting the other's intentions.
CAMERON’S RESEARCH
Much of Cameron’s data came from her studies of young men living in college
dorms in the US. Here is a sample conversation:
Bryan: You know that guy in our Age of Revolution class who sits in front of us?
He wore shorts again, by the way, it’s like 42 degrees out he wore shorts
again [@@@]
Ed: [that guy]
Bryan: It’s like a speedo, he wears a speedo to class (.)
he’s got incredibly skinny legs [you know]
Ed: [It’s worse] you know like those shorts
women volleyball players wear?
It's like those (.) it’s [like]
CAMERON’S RESEARCH
Bryan: [you know] what's even more [ridiculous? when]
Ed: [French cut spandex]
Bryan: you wear those shorts and like a parka on (.)
He's either got some condition that he’s got to like have his legs
exposed at all times or else he's got really good legs=
Ed: =he's probably
he’s [like]
Carl: [he] really likes
Bryan: =he
Ed: =he's like at home combing his leg hairs=
Carl: his legs=
Bryan: he doesn't have any leg hair though=
CAMERON’S RESEARCH
We can see that the men in this conversation use typical ‘feminine’ language
features, such as overlap and collaborative development of ideas, and are
talking about a ‘feminine’ topic (people, bodies).
Cameron suggests that Coates’ ‘cooperative’ vs ‘competitive’ binary is
unhelpful. And with examples like this one, she disproves Tannen’s claim that
men don’t know how to do ‘women’s talk’.
BEYOND THE STEREOTYPES
Furthermore, Cameron suggests that discussion of 'masculine' and 'feminine'
language is somewhat facile:
"Instead of looking for linguistic features which distinguish generic masculinity
from generic femininity, researchers today tend to assume that there is no such
thing as a generic man or woman. Masculinities and femininities come in
multiple varieties, inflecting and inflected by all the other dimensions of
someone's social identity – their age, ethnicity, class, occupation, and so forth."
FINALLY
"The myth of Mars and Venus has told us what is normal for men and women in
the sphere of language and communication. Its generalisations about male and
female language use have come to influence our expectations and our
judgments of how men and women communicate. We see its consequences when
employers view women as better candidates than men for jobs that demand the
ability to chat (and men as better candidates than women for jobs that demand
verbal authority and directness). We see them when parents and educators
expect girls to be better at languages, and boys to be better at maths. We see
them when jurors at rape trials give men who claim to have "misread a
woman's signals" the benefit of the doubt. And we see them in a small way
every time someone makes a joke about how much women talk or how useless
men are at expressing their feelings."
FURTHER READING
Living Lingo pp213–218
Resources section of the OneNote
