The first published work on the subject of gender specific communication styles came in 1922, from Otto Jespersen. In this book of his Jespersen devoted an entire chapter entitled "The Woman", to the subject. It was Jespersen’s belief that the woman’s vocabulary was limited and that new language development was facilitated only in men’s speech. He attributed these differences to the early division of labor. He also postulated that social changes at the time might eventually modify the linguistic relationship of the sexes. Susan Githens, a student of linguistics at Georgetown University stated that "Perhaps Jespersen was predicting the very speech styles that sociolinguists today are studying".
The next benchmark in the development of this field of research came from Robin Lakoff, in 1975, when she published Language and Woman’s Place. "This 1975 book spawned dozens of studies on the existence and characteristics of women’s language"(Githens). Lakoff’s work agreed in a large degree with the work of Jespersen. In her 1975 article entitled "Woman’s Language", Lakoff proposed 10 characteristics of woman’s language(Githens).
|
1) Hedges: Phrases like "sort of", "kind of", "it seems like", etc. 2) (Super)polite forms: "Would you mind...", "I’d appreciate it if...", "...if you don’t mind". 3) Tag questions: "You’re going to dinner aren’t you?" 4) Speaking in italics: intonational emphasis equal to underlining words -- so, very, quite. 5) Empty adjectives: divine, lovely, adorable, etc. 6) Hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation: English class grammar and clear enunciation. 7) Sense of humor lacking: women do not tell jokes well and often do not understand the punchline of jokes. 8) Direct quotation: men paraphrase more often. 9) Special lexicon: women use more words for things like colors, men for sports, etc. 10) Question intonation in declarative statements: women make declarative statements questions by raising the pitch of their voice at the end of statements, expressing uncertainty. For example, "What school do you attend?" "Lafayette College?" Taken from Susan Githens’ May 1991 thesis, Gender Styles in Computer Meditated Communication |
Deborah Tannen is a Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University as well as a former student of Robin Lakoff’s. She published a series of books and articles which once again aroused interest in gender specific communication styles. Her benchmark book, You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation was her fourth book on conversational styles. A previous book of Tannen’s, That’s Not What I Meant!, demonstrated that different people have different conversational styles. Tannen dedicated one chapter of this book to gender specific conversational styles. It recieved an overwhelmingly popular response. As she puts it, "when I received requests for interviews, articles, and lectures, 90 percent wanted me to focus on 10 percent of the book--the chapter on male-female differences"(Tannen, p.13-14). Tannen too found the subject fascinating, so she focused her next book on gender specific conversational styles.
Her work did away with the perspective of "men as norm." The usual result of this perspective is that women are told to change. According to Tannen, "Denying real differences can only compound the confusion that is already widespread in this era of shifting and re-forming relationships between women and men"(Tannen, p.16). In fact, according to Deborah Tannen’s theory, trying to force either male or female to change their communication style would be harmful to both parties.
She looked at the subject of gender specific communication styles from a socio-linguistic standpoint. She showed that the different environments that boys and girls are raised in constitute different cultures, therefore communication between boys and girls constitutes cross-cultural communication.
Tannen also makes a distinction between something she calls "rapport-talk" and something called "report-talk". Rapport-talk is the use of language for intimacy and relationship building. Report talk is for conveying information. According to Tannen, women today dominantely use language for rapport-talk while men dominantely use language for report talk.
Women are taught from childhood that "talk is the glue that holds relationships together"(Tannen, p.85). This behavior is carried over into adult life as women use conversations as "negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus"(Tannen, p.25). Women who use speech as report talk are often looked down upon by their peers.
Men on the other hand, have a highly competitive culture. They use conversation to "maintain the upper hand in a conversation and protect themselves from others’ perceived attempts to put them down"(Githens). As males they learn from their early years to maintain a relationship through activities "so conversation for adult males becomes a contest"(Githens).
Report is used for public speech or just speech that feels public, such as an unfamiliar group. Males normally feel more comfortable speaking in public, than females, who are normally very quiet in public. Talk shows with an evenly split listenership of males and females most often find that most callers are male. The same is true of lectures, press conferences, city council meetings, and other public events.
Inversely, at home women speak more than men. They feel comfortable at home, in fact after a long day of keeping thoughts inside all day at work, they feel a need to talk. Men, having spoken their minds all day long, come home without much desire to speak and so are much quieter. It is this situation, which contributes to the common stereotype that women talk more than men.
Another factor which contributes to this stereotype is that people normally remember more women speaking than actually spoke. If there were a radio talk show which had an equal number of male and female callers and you were to ask people whether there were more male or female callers, most people would recall there being more female callers.
Another concept pioneered by Tannen is "cooperative overlap". Cooperative overlap occurs when one person makes an elaborating or supporting statement while another person is still talking. Tannen does not consider this to be interruption and does not consider interruption to be cooperative overlap. Instead, interruption and cooperative overlap are both considered types of overlap.
The subject of overlap ties in closely with the subject of "high involvment" and "high considerateness" speakers. These are actually the two extremes on the scale. A high involvement speaker fills silence quickly and interprets any pause as an invitation to speak. The high considerateness speaker gives the person he or she is talking to ample time to think and continue what he or she is saying.
The following table illustrates differences in speech styles noticed by Tannen in her work:
| Women | Men |
| Women talk too much | Men get more air time |
| private/small | public |
| build relations | negotiate status/avoid failure |
| English language spoken | English language written |
| overlap (see definition below) | one at a time |
| symmetry | asymmetry |
|
Taken from Susan Githens’ May 1991 thesis, Gender Styles in Computer Mediatated Communication |
|
All of these factors contribute to the misunderstandings had when communicating with the opposite sex. Men and women basically expect different things out of talking and confuse each other when they don’t get what they’re expecting. These confusions lead to dangerous misunderstandings causing anger, indignation, or other negative reactions.
