Lavinia Floca Language and Gender Anglo-American Studies 2nd Year, 2nd Semester

Gender-related conversation analysis

Women and men are completely different in many ways. Men are mostly figured as "strong," while woman are "weak." Besides the biological difference, which is the most distinct one, men and women are also unlike in lots of things, such as style, behavior, language, and social life. The difference in language is somehow astonishing for most of the people who do not really take notice of the linguistic development. In fact, the dissimilarity in sexist language has been an important occurrence in linguistic problems. "As women derive from man in the biblical story of creation, women's words or anything linguistically associated with women can be seen as derivative of, and by implication inferior of, the masculine equivalent." 1 Many studies discover that not every conversation by a pair of man and woman always goes smooth. Those conversations often encounter some misinterpretation that is caused by gender based language inequities. The same sentence said by a man does not always have the same meaning and purpose as the same sentence said by a female. English is one of the languages that are struggling with this gender-based language problem. Worse, this disparity in sexist language is directly leading to gender discrimination, especially to the women. In this paper, I will discuss and show more about sexist language, the things affect it, the discrimination to women, ways to solve this problem and other things that are related to gender based language. Why can women and men's language possibly be so different? Men and women are speaking the same language, aren't they supposed to be familiar to each other? Many studies and research discover that there really exist deviations in gender language. The difference is in the habit or the way of speaking and the difference in vocabulary or word

Dennis Baron, Grammar and Gender, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, pg.129.

used by different sexes. The differences in the way of speaking or conversational style are mostly seen in the conversation done by a pair of a man and a woman. The definition of conversational style according to Tannen, is the way in expressing and interpreting meaning in conversation. She added that conversation style is mostly influenced by ethnic background or family communicative habits. Besides delivering the purpose and goal of the conversation, communicating style creates impression on the speaker. 2 In a conversation with a man, a woman typically listens while men do most of the talking; in other word, a man mostly dominates a conversation done by a pair of opposite sexes. A Man has a tendency to keep talking while whereas, woman tries to keep listening to man's talking. Women sometimes tend to stop in the middle of the conversation because they do not know what they are going to say next. "[W]omen 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"3. This sentence describes exactly how women often stop in the middle of the conversation without going any further. Miscommunication between men and women during conversation is unfortunately very common, as their rules for a friendly conversation differ significantly. From childhood, boys and girls learn to interact with one another in different ways. This learning essentially begins in the playground. Girls' talk as a way to establish and sustain a close relationship with their peers, whereas boys' use it to affirm a position of power. Girls' learn to criticize each other tactfully as not to intentionally hurt the feelings of others and also to accurately interpret the speech of their peers. Boys' use speech to attract and maintain an audience and also to confirm their status when others are speaking. These are the main ways in which girls' and boys' learn to use speech. When we apply these rules as adults, male - female conversations often turn into misunderstandings. Conversations between men and women often display a question-answer pattern with the female asking most of the questions. The woman will endeavor to maintain a conversation by encouraging others to elaborate and inviting others to contribute.
2

Deborah Tannen, Gender and Conversational Interaction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, pg 205. 3 Ibid.

Questions are seen differently by males and females. Women see questions as a way of keeping the conversation. They use them to establish and maintain a conversation, and also as a way of expressing interest and encouraging elaboration. However, a male would recognize a question as a straightforward request for information. Women also use tag endings, hedges and qualifiers frequently during conversation as a way to get a response from their fellow speakers and to keep the conversation open for others to join. Gender Differences in communication: every race, culture, civilization, and society on this planet shares two things in common: the presence of both the male and female sex, and the need to communicate between the two. The subject of gender differences appears to have engaged peoples curiosity for as long as people have been writing down their thoughts, from as far back as the writing of the creation of Adam and Eve, to its current popular expression in books such as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The assertion that men and women communicate in different ways, about different things, and for different reasons seems to go un-argued and is accepted as true by a vast majority of Americans. It is the reason why we communicate differently that conjures up quite a bit of debate and conversational turmoil. One of the most traditional hypothesis is the one John Gray wrote about in his book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which essentially points to differences in brain structure, hormones, and socialization as the cause of such an enormous gender gap in communication. But that was then and this is now, scientists throughout the world are working to learn more about gender differences in communication, and much has been discovered since the days of Mars & Venus. Deborah Tannen, a leading scholar of communication, also shares a view of gender and communication. She studied ethnic groups, which speak the same language using different styles, and found that the effect of gender on communication is miniscule compared to the effect of culture and socialization. In her research, Tannen asserts that the basic uses of conversation by women are to establish and support intimacy; while for men it is to acquire status. These styles and motives for communicating represent different cultural upbringings, and one is not necessarily better than the other. However, she also notes in her findings that men tend to interrupt more and ask questions less. In fact, the female tendency to ask more questions sometimes results in receiving lower grades from

male professors who view frequent questioning as proof that a student knows less than her male counter parts.4 The theory that differences are fabricated early in a childs life and are not biological does not account for everything. Since women are primarily responsible for child-rearing and therefore disproportionately responsible for teaching the species to speak, when is it that boys learn to speak in the male style? From a very early age, males and females are taught different linguistic practices. For example, communicative behaviors that are considered acceptable for boys may be considered completely inappropriate for girls Whereas a boy might be permitted to use rough language, a girl in the same situation might be reminded to use her manners and be lady-like. The research on women and language shows that women experience linguistic discrimination in two ways: in the way they are taught to use language, and in the way general language usage treats them. So, for example, women reflect their role in the social order by using tag questions, qualifiers, and fillers to soften what they have to say. Women exhibit their subordinate status through avoiding direct and threatening communication. While in recent years this gap has narrowed, our society retains a tendency to imply that maleness, after all, is the standard for normalcy. This unwritten standard society uses to judge people dates back thousands of years and is clearly depicted in the quotes of some of the most famous people in history. Aristotle described women as a deformity, a misbegotten male, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that god should not have created women, craniologists of the nineteenth century argued that womens smaller heads justified their subordinate position in society, and Freud believed women had little sense of justice, the list goes on. The history of male supremacy in communication and life is unfortunate, but it is past, what does the future hold? Only the media will tell. Mass mediated messages offer the most contemporary, powerful, technological and influential strategies for shaping cultural reality. The beauty, diet, and advertising industries are the most obvious, and the best researched examples of contemporary, self-conscious myth-makers who control cultural concepts and acceptable images of gender. These industries set the standard for true masculinity and femininity, offering the law on what is male and what is female behavior. As we begin the twenty first
4

Deborah Tannen, You just dont understand: Women and Men in Conversation, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pg..105

century we enter a world of rules and regulations, a world where what we say and do is controlled by cultural stereo-types, some age old, some contemporary, and some that are deciding factors in how we live our lives. Through recent research we have learned that gender differences in communication are not something that we are born with, theyre not due to differences in brain matter, and theyre certainly not due to the two sexes being from different planets. We are who we are and we communicate how we communicate because it is what society and culture demand of us. Although this sounds like a simple difference that can easily be resolved you might be surprised; disregarding everything youve ever learned about the difference between boys and girls is a mighty big task.