Gender and Language
Cultural and situational factors deeply affect our thinking and perception of gender roles. Gender roles, in turn, are often inscribed with “different languages” for the masculine and the feminine (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988). The idea that men and women speak entirely different languages is popular fodder for comedy, talk shows, and pop psychologists, so let’s identify what actual differences have contributed to that view.
In Deborah Tannen’s classic 1992 analysis of men and women in conversation, she found that women primarily saw conversations as negotiations for closeness and connection with others, but men experienced talk more as a struggle for control, independence, and hierarchy.
Indeed, social expectations for masculinity and femininity might play out in men’s and women’s conversation styles, particularly when people are negotiating who has more control in a given relationship. We may use powerful, controlling language to define limits, authority, and relationships. We may use less controlling language to express affection. Let’s look at a few examples.
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Interruptions. The situation and the status of the speakers can affect who interrupts whom (Pearson, Turner, & Todd-Mancillas, 1991). For example, female professors can be expected to interrupt male students more often than those male students interrupt the professors, owing to the difference in power and status. But when status and situation are neutral, men tend to interrupt women considerably more often than women interrupt men (Ivy & Backlund, 2004).
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Intensifiers. Women’s speech patterns, compared with men’s, contain more words that heighten or intensify topics: (“hot pink,” “so excited,” “very happy”) (Yaguchi, Iyeiri, & Baba, 2010). Consider the intensity level of “I’m upset” versus “I’m really upset.” Attaching totally to a number of verbs and adjectives is a popular way to express intensity (“She’s totally kidding” or “He’s totally awesome!”).
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Qualifiers, hedges, and disclaimers. Language that sounds hesitant or uncertain is often perceived as being less powerful—and such hesitations are often associated with women’s speech. Qualifiers include terms like kind of, sort of, maybe, perhaps, could be, and possibly. Hedges involve expressions such as “I think,” “I feel,” or “I guess.” Disclaimers discount what you are about to say and can head off confrontation or avoid embarrassment: “It’s probably nothing, but I think . . .” or “I’m likely imagining things, but I thought I saw . . .” (Palomares, 2009).
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Tag questions. Another sign of hesitancy or uncertainty associated with feminine speech is the tag question, as in “That was a beautiful sunset, wasn’t it?” or “That waitress was obnoxious, wasn’t she?” Tag questions attempt to get your conversational partner to agree with you, establishing a connection based on similar opinions. They can also come across as threats (Ivy & Backlund, 2004): for example, “You’re not going to smoke another cigarette, are you?”
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Resistance messages. Differences in the way men and women express resistance can have serious consequences. Specifically, date rape awareness programs advise women to use the word no when a male partner or friend makes an unwanted sexual advance. But a woman might instead say, “I don’t have protection,” choosing vague or evasive language over the direct no to avoid a scene or hurt feelings. Men, however, sometimes perceive an indirect denial as a yes. Women’s use of clear messages, coupled with men’s increased understanding of women’s preference for more indirect resistance messages, can lead to more competent communication in this crucial area (Lim & Roloff, 1999; Motley & Reeder, 1995).
In summary, research has corroborated some differences in communication style due to sex (Kiesling, 1998), but many of those differences pale when we consider context, role, and task (Ewald, 2010; Mulac, Wiemann, Widenmann, & Gibson, 1988; Newman, Groom, Handelman, & Pennebaker, 2008). The lesson? While a person’s sex may influence his or her communication style, gender—the cultural meaning of sex—has far more influence. Furthermore, some studies have found that conversational topic, age, setting or situation, and the sex composition of groups have just as much influence on language usage as gender (Palomares, 2008). As Mary Crawford (1995) noted, studying language from a sex-difference approach can be misleading because it treats women (and men) as a homogenous “global category,” paying little attention to differences in ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and economic status.
In fact, in more recent work, Tannen (2009, 2010) focuses on how we present our “face” in interaction and how language choices are more about negotiating influence (power, hierarchy), solidarity (connection, intimacy), value formation, and identity rather than about sex (Tannen, Kendall, & Gorgon, 2007). Through decades of research, Tannen and others have shown that we are less bound by our sex than we are by the language choices we make. Thus, regardless of whether we are male or female, we can choose to use language that gives us more influence or creates more connection—or both.