POW Chapter 5: Gender and Communication

Robin Lakoff hypothesized that: Social hierarchy causes men to use more assertive speech because they have power, whereas women use more tentative speech because they lack power.

Tentativeness:

• Disclaimers: Phrases such as “I may be wrong, but…”

• Hedges: Phrases such as “sort of” that weaken or soften a statement

• Tag question: a short phrase added to a sentence that turns it into a question

• Intensifiers: usage of adverbs such as very, really, and vastly → Add little content to a sentence and actually reduce the strength of the statement, so they contribute to tentativeness.

Criticisms of Lakoff:

• Lakoff exaggerated and overemphasized gender differences without giving adequate attention to power and status.

• Reflects more stereotyping than empirical evidence

• Created a female deficit interpretation: labels women’s communication as deficient in respect to men’s communication. Tentative speech can be more effective speech, reflecting interpersonal sensitivity.

Research found that women used more tentative speech, but gender differences were small so Lakoff’s claim is supported but not strongly.

• Interpretations are that women display greater interpersonal sensitivity.

• If gender differences in tentative speech reflect issues of power and assertiveness, then they should be largest in mixed-gender groups, with men dominating and women being tentative.

  • Yet gender differences in tentative speech were actually larger in same-gender groups (d = −0.37) vs. in mixed-gender groups (d = −0.21).

Tag questions are intended to encourage communication rather than to shut things down with a simple declarative statement, helps maintain conversation + encourages other opinions.

Deborah Tannen: Book about gender differences that popularized the belief of differences in communication patterns between men and women; proposed that gender differences in communication are so substantial that it is as though women and men come from different linguistic communities or cultures.

• Different cultures hypothesis: Tannen’s perspective that gender differences in communication are so different that it is as though women and men come from different linguistic cultures.

• Gender differences in communication stem from different goals rooted in gender roles:

  The female role emphasizes nurturing and relationships, whereas the male role emphasizes dominance and power. Women engage in conversation maintenance, whereas men engage in conversational dominance. Tannen claimed that women display tentative and affiliative speech, whereas men display assertive and authoritative speech.

Affiliative speech: Speech that demonstrates affiliation or connection to the listener and may include praise, agreement, support, and/or acknowledgment

• Data shows that girls and women are somewhat more affiliative relative to boys and men. Among children, the gender difference is small and the difference shrinks even more in adulthood.

Assertive speech: Speech that aims to influence the listener and may include providing instructions, information, suggestions, criticism, and/or disagreement.

• Data examining if boys and men are more assertive finds that gender differences are tiny. The evidence suggests that male speech patterns are only marginally more assertive than female speech patterns.

In the first mixed-gender presidential debate (2016), the male candidate interrupted the female candidate a total of 106 times, while the female candidate interrupted the male candidate 27 times.

• One study found that gender differences in interruptions are found only in mixed-gender conversation pairs; women interrupted women about often as men interrupted men and women very seldom interrupted men, whereas men frequently interrupted women.

• The gender difference is interpreted as indicating that men are expressing power and dominance over women

• Researchers have found that women engage in more supportive interrupting (like expressing agreement), particularly when they are in all-female groups, while men engage in more dominance interruptions (disagreement + changing the subject)

Anderson and Leaper found that the gender difference in interruptions was d = 0.15, indicating that men interrupt more often than women. Effect sizes for intrusive interruptions (i.e., interruptions that display dominance, such as a change in subject or expression of disagreement) were considerably larger, d = 0.33.

gender-linked language effect: Anthony Mulac in 2006 found patterns of gender differences where the verbal communication of girls and women tends to be rated as more socially intelligent and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the verbal communication of boys and men is rated as more dynamic and aggressive.

Gender similarities in communication: Mulac conducted a series of studies in which the speech of men and women (or boys and girls) is transcribed, masked as to the identity of the speaker, and then presented to university students to see whether they can tell whether the speaker was male or female.

• If Tannen’s hypothesis is correct, the task should be a snap and students should be able to identify the gender of the speaker with a high degree of accuracy.

• Students performed no better than chance on the task.

• Other studies: Significant differences between women’s and men’s speech when highly trained coders look for specific details such as intensifiers, tag questions, and references to emotions.

  • The differences are detectable by scientifically trained coders but not by the average person.

Effect on written language:

• First task: Participants wrote descriptions of landscape photographs and the research team coded those descriptions for 13 features of language that have been shown to differ between men and women.

  • Only six of those features showed gender differences.

  • For example, men tended to make more references to quantity (e.g., “60 feet tall”) and use elliptical sentences (e.g., “great picture”), whereas women tended to write more words overall and make more references to emotion (e.g., “a somber scene”).

  • Many features of tentative language, such as hedges and intensifiers, showed gender similarities.

• Second task: Researchers asked the participants to write descriptions of more photographs, this time under the guise of specific genders. Participants were asked to describe the photographs “as a man” and “as a woman.”

  • The results showed that schemas were somewhat consistent with the actual gender differences found in the first task: Gender differences in the second task matched four of the six features that showed gender differences in the first task, including references to quantity and emotion.

  • Participants had clear gender schemas about language, and these schemas were fairly accurate.

Communication therapy: For many trans people, voice and communication therapy is often a component of their transition. This therapy might include working with a speech and language therapist to change such speech features as vocal pitch, resonance, intonation, volume, articulation, and others so that their speech is more aligned with their gender identity.

• These modifications can improve the quality of social interactions and may help to prevent painful misgendering experiences in which others misidentify their gender identity

Gender stereotypes are that women are more nonverbally expressive than men, and women’s faces, voices, and hands tend to be more expressive than men’s

Some evidence indicates that men tend to suppress their nonverbal expressions, beginning around adolescence, whereas women tend to amplify their expressions.

• Women are also more accurate at decoding or reading others’ nonverbal cues. The gender difference in decoding exists even in childhood, though it is somewhat larger in adults.

• Patterns of gender differences in encoding and decoding suggest that men and women differ because they face pressure to adhere to different gender roles. The female role entails communality, or establishing and maintaining social relationships, which requires interpersonal sensitivity.

Women smile more than men: According to meta-analyses, this gender difference fluctuates across the lifespan. In infancy and childhood, it is nonexistent, d = –0.01, but in adolescence, the gender difference swells to d = –0.56. The gap then declines, such that d = –0.30 in middle adulthood and d = –0.11 in older adulthood.

• Some evidence suggests that gender differences seem to vary as a function of ethnicity; the pattern is more characteristic of White women than African American women.

Why people smile: indicates positive affect, such as happiness.

• Smiling has been called the female version of the “Uncle Tom shuffle”, rather than indicating happiness or friendliness, it may serve as an appeasement gesture, communicating, in effect, “Please don’t hurt me or be mean.”

• A person who is smiling is not likely to be perceived as threatening.

A status indicator: Dominant people smile less and subordinate people smile more, so women’s smiling might reflect their subordinate status. Although women consistently smile more than men in these studies, lower status people do not smile more than higher status people.

Women’s smiles do not necessarily reflect positive feelings and may even be associated with negative feelings and pressure to adhere to the female role and “put on a happy face.”

A meta-analysis found that the gender difference was more than twice as large when participants knew that they were being observed (d = –0.46) than when they did not know they were being observed.

Perceived femininity: both gender and race:

• In a pair of experiments, non-Black research participants were asked to quickly identify the gender of targets in photos who varied according to target gender (male vs. female), race (Black vs. White), and facial expression.

• In the first experiment, participants were more accurate in identifying a Black woman’s gender if she was smiling; yet, this effect did not exist for targets who were White women or Black men.

• In the second experiment, participants gave ratings of the targets’ femininity.

• Relative to women with neutral facial expressions, smiling women were rated as more feminine. This effect was stronger for Black women than for White women.

In many countries, including the United States, it seems that men tend to prefer a greater distance between themselves and another person, whereas women tend to be comfortable with a smaller distance between themselves and others.

• False signaling about sexual interest: It is a significant gender role violation for a heterosexual man to signal sexual interest in another man.

Effects of gender, gender role identification, and sexual orientation on interpersonal distance:

• The researchers first administered the Bem Sex Role Inventory to a sample of British college students who were diverse in terms of their sexual orientation (but not in terms of race/ethnicity).

• Then they assigned participants to interact with one another in a structured conversational task: Every 2 minutes, participants moved around to different stations or zones in the research lab.

• Results indicated significant effects of gender: Female–female pairs stood significantly closer to one another than did male–male or female–male pairs.

• Effects of gender were completely eliminated when the researchers considered gender role identification.

• Self-reported femininity and masculinity were far more important than gender in determining interpersonal distance: Feminine people stood closer to their conversational partner, and masculine people stood farther away from their conversational partner.

• Sexual orientation had minimal effects on interpersonal distance.

Contractive posture: sitting or standing with legs together and arms close together

Expansive posture: sitting or standing with limbs extended away from body; power posing.

Female-as-the-exception phenomenon:

Natural gender languages: type of language in which most personal nouns are gender-neutral (ex: student)

Grammatical gendered languages:

Genderless languages:

Sexist language and sexist attitudes go hand in hand:

Men are generally more supportive of sexist language while women are more supportive of nonsexist language because men prefer social inequality and believe that gender inequality is fair.

Whorfian hypothesis: The theory that the language we learn influences how we think. Gendered language perpetuates gender inequality.

• One study found that using a grammatical gender language may promote sexist attitudes

• In another study, gender differences in self-efficacy

Effects of sexist language on children: Study found that when children hear he in a gender-neutral context, they think of a boy or man.

• In another study children rated men as more competent in a situation where they are wudgemakers, but the pronoun has a big effect on how women were rated as wudgemakers.

Phrase “he or she”: women end up second, may make women more visible, but makes nonbinary people invisible.

Gender-neutral pronouns: one set that has been proposed is tey for he or she, tem for him or her, and ter for his or her.

Titles such as Mr., Ms. can be problematic because they identify gender even when gender may not be relevant. Using these titles carries the risk of misgendering people. These terms are considered by many to be outdated and condescending to women.

• Miss is often used in an infantilizing manner, more people have begun to adopt the use of the gender-neutral title Mx; this title isn’t an abbreviation of an existing word in English.

Use of nonsexist language in publications: most textbooks use nonsexist language and most recently are working on using inclusive and unbiased language.