Some considerations in response to the article you read about male and female (mis)communications by Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker. Maltz and Borker were writing about U.S. mainstream patterns and not about men and women everywhere.

(A ‘pattern’ means that there are social tendencies, not that everyone in a society behaves or thinks exactly the same way. In the U.S., for example, diversities of male and female communication styles exist, but general patterns remain identifiable in many social circumstances. Remember that your personal experience is not everyone’s experience and cannot be applied universally without careful study and comparison. Age, class, education, regional differences, ethnic diversity, etc. are always factors to be considered.)

In order to understand gender communication styles and patterns, we would need to understand cultural and historical circumstances going back several generations, and we would need to pay attention to how and why changes occurred. Even though men and women speak differently now than they did 100 years ago, the ways they speak are linked to past cultural conditions.

The following are some generalizations or patterns that Maltz, Borker, Deborah Tannen, and others have identified in mainstream North American culture.

•Questions: women see questions as part of maintaining conversation. Men see them as requests for information.

•Linking: women’s rules value acknowledgment and connection to what has been said. Men seem to have no such rule and often ignore previous comments.

•Aggression: women see overt aggressiveness as personally directed and negative. Men see it as part of organizational strategy for conversation.

•Topic flow and shift: men seem to narrowly define topic in conversation and adhere to a topic until it is finished up. Their shift to another topic is often abrupt. Women more often develop topics progressively and gradually.

•Problem sharing: women tend to discuss problems with one another, share experiences and reassure each other. Men hear women’s and other men’s expressions of problems as requests for solutions. So men often give advice, act as experts, or lecture.

Which of the tendencies do you see in your social groups? Which are less identifiable? Why? How would you evaluate these tendencies as part of your parents’ or grandparents’ conversations? Are they more or less prominent at home or at work? What happens when men and women get together and expect different language rules?

Gender and communications

•To the extent that the lives of males and females differ, it is to be expected that the forms of language they use will also differ.

•In societies where males and females are largely segregatedfrom each other or where there are significant differences in their exposure to education, it might be expected that the linguistic differences will be great.

•Segregation is not just physical. It includes different access to political, educational, and economic discussions and spheres. Not that long ago, for example, women in North Americawere discouraged from working outside of the home. When they did work outside the home, their choices of jobs were associated with female roles such as nursing, teaching, cleaning, and secretarial duties. Until recently, in the scope of U.S. history, women could not get bank loans to start their own businesses. Until recently, few women could own property.

Segregation also includes mental categories.

In the United States, full-time women workers earn 80.2% of what full-time men workers earn. One of the primary reasons that women earn less is job segregation by sex. Jobs themselves are gendered, such that women have a tendency to enter feminized occupations and men have a tendency to enter masculinized occupations. How severe is job segregation by sex? A new report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, newly updated for 2009, reports that about four in ten women and men work in jobs that are 75% female and male respectively.

Overall, masculinized occupations pay more. (This is a different kind of sexism, a sexism against feminine-coded things instead of against women, but sexism nonetheless… for example.) Job segregation, then, contributes to the pay gap between men and women.

The figure below shows how this has changed over time. The y axis is an “Index of Dissimilarity.” Basically, a score of one indicates complete segregation and a score of zero means that the job is 50/50 male and female.

The white line, labeled “civilian labor force” shows that, overall, sex segregation has been going down over time. It also shows, however, that most of the decrease occurred in the ’70s and ’80s. It has changed little since then.The lines above and below the white line on the above chart show that sex segregation correlates with education level. People who have at least a bachelors degree are in less sex segregated jobs, while people who did not attend or finish college tend to be in more segregated jobs. This means that, insofar as sex segregation at work contributes to a wage gap, it is more extreme for working class people than for others.

In the above examples we have been talking about mainstream patterns. However, it is always dangerous to generalize. The following is one of many case studies that show how language differences between men and women depend a great deal upon the subcultures people are part of.

Class, age, regional conditions, ethnic group affiliation, and education are among circumstances that influence how men and women speak differently.

Penelope Eckert is a linguistic anthropologist who looked at how social class influences gender communication styles differently. She studied students and how they used language in a Detroit high school.

A few of Eckert’s many publications include:

2004. Variation and a sense of place. In Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections (Carmen Fought ed.). OxfordUniversity Press.

1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press.

1)In her study of Detroit high school students, Eckertwanted to test the theories of other linguistic researchers who concluded that U.S.women at the lower end of the socioeconomic hierarchy use more prestigious or formalized language than do men. Men in low status groups are more likely to use slang and other less prestigious language. These linguists concluded that women use more prestigious language because they have less access to advancing their status and power through other venues. Standard language becomes a means for maintaining face in interactions in which women are powerless.

2)Eckert wanted to study what happens when language changes. How do changes affect males and females differently? If women use more formal and prestigious language, are women less likely to incorporate slang and other language changes?

3)Eckert also wanted to re-assess the conclusions that male and female communication styles are more alike in higher class populations and that male and female communication styles are less alike in lower class populations.

The central premise underlying Eckert’s questions is as follows:

Gender differentiation is greatest in those segments of society where power is scarcest – at the lower end of the socioeconomic hierarchy, where women’s access to power is the greatest threat to men.

A. Femininity:

-Is often aculturally-defined form of mitigation or denial of power

-In Western society this is illustrated with the greater emphasis on femininity in the southeastern states, where regional economic history has domesticized women and denied them economic power to a greater degree than in the industrialized north.

-Femininity is associated with small size, clothing and adornment that inhibit and or do not stand up to rough activity, delicacy of movement, quiet and high pitched voices, friendly demeanor, politeness, and an underlying belief that politeness is connected to powerlessness.

B. Middle class to upper class men

-Politeness and friendliness in men’s behaviors appear increasingly as one moves up the socioeconomic hierarchy.

-In the upper classes, what is called effeminacy may be seen as the conscientious rejection of physical power by those who exercise real global power. Those with real global power are able to usethe physical power of other, lower status, men to their own advantage. (Higher powered men do not have to use their own physical power or perform hyper masculinity because they can send lower status men to war to fight. As a result higher powered men gain economic and political advantages by using the brawn of those with less power.)

C. Masculinity and working class men

-Masculinity is an outlet for affirming power for men who have less economic and political power. Thus, what is deemed masculine behavior becomes intensified in populations where men have less global power.

-In groups where power must be expressed through hyper masculinity, feminine mannerisms are rejected by men as inappropriate for male behavior. What is deemed feminine behavior is given less status. As such, women in segments of society where power is scarcestare denied power even more than women at the higher end of the socioeconomic hierarchy.

This means that gendered differences in communication styles are likely to beintensified in some groups compared with other groups.

What did Eckert find in her study of high school students in Detroit?

Adolescents are quite aware of gender differences

-by the time they arrive in high school, adolescent girls are getting over the early shock of realizing they do not have equal access to power.

-whether or not they wielded direct power in their childhoods, adolescent girls know that their only hope is through personal authority

-this authority is closely tied with popularity

-boys are also concerned with popularity but need it less in order to exert influence

-by high school most girls and boys have already accepted that to some extent they will have different routes to social status

Boys

-will often gain power and status through the simple performance of tasks or display of skills

-being a star athlete regardless of character and appearance can gain status

Girls

-there is little that a girl lacking in social or physical gifts can do that will accord her social status

-it is enough for a boy to have accomplishments of the right sort, but a girl must be a certain sort of person

-a boy must show off his accomplishments, a girl must display her persona

-so girls in high school are often more socially constrained than boys. Girls monitor their own behavior and that of others more closely, and they maintain more rigid social boundaries

-the threat of being associated with the wrong kind of person is far greater to the individual whose status depends on who she appears to be rather than what she does

How do these differences in how to attain status influence language?

This difference plays itself out linguistically in the context of class-based social categories

-two social categories dominate adolescent social life in U.S. public high schools, according to Eckhart

1) Jocks are those who participate in school activities and embrace the school as the center of their social activities and identities. They constitute the middle-class culture. In Detroit,students were called Jocks whether or not they were athletes as long as they made school the center of their activities and identities and were part of the middle class. They identified themselves in opposition to the ‘burnouts.’

2) Burnouts were part of a working-class culture oriented to the blue collar marketplace

- did not accept the school as the center of operations

- rebelled to some extent against school activities and authority

- oriented themselves to the local, and the neighboring urban area

- hangouts were local parks, neighborhoods, bowling alleys, and strips

- valued adult experience and prerogatives and pursued a direct relation with the adult community that surrounded them

(I think there are more categories of groups in high school since Eckert did her study. For example, now there are geeks etc. who don’t seem to be either jocks or burnouts. However, the jocks and burnouts still seem to be present as well. We might ask whether or not these ‘new’ categories ultimately fit into the definitions of jocks or burnouts.)

‘Jock’ and ‘burnout’ girls had to devote a good deal of their activity to developing and projecting a ‘whole person’ image designed to gain them influence within their own social category.

Jock girls

-develop an image which is essentially friendly, outgoing, active, clean-cut, All-American

Burnout girls

-must aggressively develop a burnout image

-tough, urban, ‘experienced’

The symbolic differences between jocks and burnouts are clearly more important for girls than for boys

-there is less contact between the two categories among girls (burnouts and jocks keep their distance from each other)

-for girls there is far greater attention to maintaining symbolic differences on all levels in clothing and other adornments, in demeanor, in publicly acknowledged substance use, in language use, and in sexual activity

Eckert discovered that because it was more important for jock girls to differentiate themselves from burnout girls in order to maintain their status, and because burnout girls worked hard to differentiate themselves from jock girls to build their status in another direction, these two groups worked harder to use language differently.

Jock boys were not as concerned about being different from burnout boys, and so the two male groups did not work to use language differently.

In this case – in a public high school setting:

-it would appear membership differentiation is more salient to members of one sex than the other

-girls are asserting their category identities through language more than are boys

In her study, Eckert demonstrated that not all groups of girls and women adhere to prestigious or formalized language styles in comparison to boys and men.

Class and other social/cultural circumstances influence how language becomes a tool for differentiating power and prestige between women, between men, and between men and women.

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