GENDER AND CONVERSATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

1. GENDER AND CONVERSATIONAL BEHAVIOUR

2. Who talks more??? • The common assumption is that women talk more than men • However, research (eg Fisman 1990) has suggested that in mixed-sex interactions, men talk for TWICE the amount of time as women.

3. Conversational Support • Women tend to be more supportive than men. • Women’s approach tends to be more co-operative. • Men’s approach tends to be more competitive.

4. Women tend to: • Ask more questions (expressing interest and encouragement). • Give more supportive feedback as listeners (through back-channel noises such as ‘mm’ and expressions of agreement and understanding like ‘Yes’, ‘I know’ etc) • Pay more compliments

5. Women tend to: • Initiate more topics of conversation. (In conversations analysed by Fishman (1978), 62% topics introduced by women. • Make more effort to involve others in conversation. • Use ‘you’ and ‘we’ more often – ie they address others more and involve them more in what is being said. • Develop the ideas of previous speakers more than men do.

6. Men are more likely to • Interrupt • Express disagreement • Ignore the other person’s utterances • Show reluctance to pursue topics initiated by others.

7. Interruptions Research has suggested that men are more likely to interrupt than women Zimmerman and West (1975) found: Same sex exchanges: interruptions generally quite evenly distributed Mixed sex interactions: 96% of the interruptions were from men, 4% from women.

8. Parent-child interactions Fathers do most of the interrupting. Daughters are interrupted more than sons by both their fathers and mothers

9. Women in business organisations • Women are interrupted less when they are managers than when they are subordinates. • Overall, women in business are still interrupted more than men.

10. Topics of conversation • Some evidence for stereotyped notions of gender difference arise here. • Women: talk about feelings, focus on personal experiences, relationships and problems. • Men: talk about ‘things’, their conversations are more concrete, relating to information, facts, objects and activities (eg sport, cars, computers, possessions etc)

11. Explanations of differences? • Dominance • Women occupy less powerful positions in society than men so conversation is less assertive and less confident. • Men are dominant within society and tend to dominate mixed-sex conversations. • It is argued that women are used to male dominance and as a result of social conditioning will generally be polite and respectful when talking to men.

12. Difference • There are differences in male and female attitudes which derive from childhood when we form, and are influenced by, single-sex peer groups. • Studies of children’s play have found that in boys’ games more emphasis is placed on competition and confrontation; while girls’ games are more co-operative • In adulthood, women’s talk often focuses on personal feelings and problems. • This helps to explain why women’s approach is more sympathetic and co-operative.

13. Robin Lakoff (1975) • Argued that because of their social position, women's speech is more tentative, evident in their use of indirect expressions such as ‘would you mind?’ and ‘could you possibly?’ and of tag questions. • She also identified other characteristics more common in women’s speech: • Hedges and fillers (‘sort of’, ‘you know’) • Tag questions (questions added to the end of statements) • Indirect request forms (‘would you mind closing the window?)

14. Further differences • Standard English • Women tend to use standard English more than men do. • Research by Peter Trudgill (1983) and Jenny Cheshire (1982) • Cheshire investigated speech of adolescents at an adventure playground and found similar patterns to those that exist among adults. This suggests that differences in male and female language emerge during childhood. • Examples of differences include: • Men are more likely to: drop the ‘h’ sound at the beginning of words such as house and hat; drop the final ‘g’ sound in words such as going or swimming; use ‘ain’t’; use ‘seen and ‘done’ as past tense forms eg I seen him yesterday; use multiple negatives eg ‘I don’t know nothing about it’.