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Chapter Five
Gender and Language
Gender and Language
• “Women are the decorative sex. They never
have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.”
– Oscar Wilde
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Gender Differences
in Language Use
Gender Differences in Language Use
• Linguist Deborah Tannen (1991)
– Different cultures hypothesis: communication between
women and men is as difficult as communication
between people from different cultures
– Different goals in communication
• Women: conversation maintenance; establish and maintain
relationships
• Men: conversation dominance; display knowledge, avoid
disclosure
– What do the data say?
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Gender Differences
in Language Use (cont’d.)
• Tentativeness
– Tag questions: a short phrase added to a sentence, which turns
it into a question
• E.g., “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”
• Women use slightly more tag questions than men
• How do we interpret this finding?
– Are women communicating uncertainty or weakness?
– Or, are women trying to encourage communication?
– Disclaimers and hedges
• Disclaimers: phrases such as “I may be wrong, but…”
• Hedges: phrases such as “sort of” that weaken or soften a
statement
• Women use more disclaimers and hedges than men when in mixedgender (but not single-gender) groups
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Gender Differences
in Language Use (cont’d.)
• Intensifiers: adverbs such as very, really, or vastly
– Women use intensifiers more than men
– What does this difference mean?
• Interruptions
– Men interrupt women more than women interrupt men
– Interruptions have multiple meanings:
•
•
•
•
•
Express power, control
Request clarification
Express agreement or support
Express disagreement
Change the subject
– Context is important when interpreting interruptions
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Gender Differences
in Language Use (cont’d.)
• Children’s Speech
– Girls are only slightly more talkative than boys
• Girls engage in more affiliative speech (e.g., praise or
agreement) than boys
• Boys engage in more assertive speech (e.g., criticisms) than
girls
• Differences are very small
• Can You Tell Who’s Speaking?
– Gender differences in speech are not found by
university students, but are detected by highly trained
coders
– Gender-linked language effect
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Gender Differences
in Language Use (cont’d.)
• Electronic Talk
– Gender differences in e-mail?
• Women express more emotion, disclose more personal
information, use more hedges and intensifiers
• No differences in insults, self-derogatory comments, and
oppositions
• Participants respond differently to a fictitious netpal
depending on gendered content from netpal’s communication
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Body Language:
Nonverbal Communication
Body Language: Nonverbal
Communication
• Interpersonal distance
– Men prefer larger interpersonal distance than women do
– How do we interpret this finding?
• Smiling
– Women smile more than men do, d= -.41
– Why do we smile?
• Communicate friendliness?
• Communicate subservience?
• Part of female role
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Body Language: Nonverbal
Communication (cont’d.)
• Eye Contact
– Reflects patterns of power and dominance
– Visual dominance ratio: the ratio of the percentage of
time looking while speaking relative to the percentage
of time looking while listening
– Men show higher visual dominance, but:
• When women have power, they become visually dominant
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How Women are
Treated in Language
How Women are Treated
in Language
• Male as Normative
– Male is regarded as standard, norm
• E.g., use of he for a neutral pronoun
– Language becomes ambiguous
– Female-as-the-exception phenomenon: if a category
is considered normatively male and there is a female
example of the category, gender is noted because the
female is the exception; byproduct of androcentrism
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How Women are Treated in
Language (cont’d.)
• Parallel Words
– Parallel words for males and females often have different
connotations:
• Dog vs. bitch
• Master vs. mistress
• Stud vs. slut
• Euphemisms
– We avoid using “woman” and use euphemisms such as lady, girl
to be polite or less threatening
• Infantilizing
– Women are called by terms that make them less mature than
they are; e.g., girl, baby
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How Women are Treated in
Language (cont’d.)
• How Important is All This?
– Language reflects thought processes
• Sexist language is a symptom of larger problem
• If we change how we think, language will follow
• Alternatively…
– Whorfian hypothesis: theory that the language we
learn influences how we think
• Using sexist language shapes our thoughts about women
and men
– Both processes occur to some extent
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How Women are Treated in
Language (cont’d.)
• Hyde’s Wudgemaker
study (1984)
– Children’s ratings of the
competence of women and
men as wudgemakers, as a
function of the pronoun
they heard repeatedly in
the description of the
wudgemaker
• Pronoun choice affects
how children think about
women, women’s
occupations
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Some Practical Suggestions
Some Practical Suggestions
• Toward nonsexist Language
– Eliminate the use of generic masculine forms
• When a doctor prescribes birth control pills, he should first
inquire whether the patient has a history of blood clotting
problems
• When doctors prescribe birth controls, they should first
inquire whether the patient has a history of blood clotting
problems
• A doctor prescribing birth control pills should first inquire
whether the patient has a history of blood clotting problems
• When a doctor prescribes birth control pills, he or she should
first inquire whether the patient has a history of blood clotting
problems
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Some Practical Suggestions (cont’d.)
• Institutional Change
– Textbook publishers, American Psychological
Association, Webster’s Dictionary have policies of
avoiding sexist language
• Language, Women, and Careers
– Women who use tentative rather than assertive
speech are more influential to men
– Women who use assertive rather than tentative
speech are more influential to women
– Women must strike a delicate balance in speech
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In Conclusion
In Conclusion
• Tannen’s different cultures hypothesis
– Gender differences in communication styles are
actually small and depend on context
– The meaning of gender differences is unclear
• Male-as-normative language pattern may
contribute to early social construction of gender
for children
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