Language and Gender (23-Feb-2004)

Absolute Differences between Men and Women

For the purposes of linguistics, sex and gender are separate, albeit overlapping, ideas: sex refers to biological, or physiological differences between men and women, and can have have an effect on linguistic processes - e.g. men tend to have voices of a lower pitch than women. In some cases people may raise or deepen their voices to sound more feminie or masculine. Gender refers to the stereotypes that go along with social perceptions of the roles for men and women. Gender also has a grammatical connotation, with certain languages having "masculine" and "feminine" forms for certain words.

Some languages have different words for the same thing depending on whether the speaker is male or female (see handout for examples). There is evidence that the female forms are "older" forms, which suggests that women are more conservative then men in adopting new word forms.

In languages such as French, a speaker will say different things depending on the sex of the speaker or the referent:

The only remnant of this in English is the third pronoun "he/she", and this is only used in reference to the sex of the person being referred to - other languages, e.g. French, German, use these forms for objects which to an English person have no gender (tables, chairs).

There do seem to be gender assumptions in our perception of prototypes. Asked to imagine "a student", more people picture a male student than is justified by the real ratio of male/female students. The kind of words we use affects this perception, which is one reason why words such as "fireman" are replaced, e.g. with "firefighter": the original word leads you to expect that the prototypical firefighter is a man, and that women are inferior or invalid subtypes. There also seems to be a general perception of the prototypical human as being a man, with women being classified as "an extra".

Sex-preferential use

Research in different societies consistently shows that "prestige" features of language (e.g. postvocalic /r/ in Detroit) are not only more frequent in higher social classes across genders, but that in all classes women seem to use the feature more than the men in any given class. In other words, women seem to speak like the men in the next social class up. This seems to imply some kind of aspirational aspect to their speech.

Trudgill suggests that these findings may be explicable in terms of overt and covert prestige (see Trudgill p74-77)

When asked to rate their own performance, Trudgill found that women are more likely to over-report their use of non-standard features, and men more likely to under-report. Additionally, men use non-standard features less than women. Trudgill cites this as evidence that men feel covert prestige associated with the non-standard form, and are happy to be thought of as using them; women are less happy to use or be thought of as using them.

Interactional Style

There is a stereotypical view of woman as being talkative, chatterboxes, gossips etc., compared to the strong, silent male. But studies of mixed-sex conversations show that men talk around twice as much as women. This happens even in school classrooms, and so is a problem for schools. But when women contribute as much as 50% of men, they are judged to be "dominating" the conversation.

Graddol & Swann (see handout) suggest that women are happy to take the lead in conversation from men who lead it into certain topics, while men are less likely to respond to cues provided by women for new subjects of discussion.

In their studies, Zimmerman and West found that women were much less likely to interrupt than men (5% vs. 75%)

Lakoff suggested that women's use of tag questions showed that they were more uncertain than men; subsequent investigation by e.g. Janet Homes eems to indicate that in fact tag questions are more geared to involving the other person - they're not just looking for reassurance - note the number of "facilitative" tags in the following data:
 Female   Male 
 express uncertainty  35% 61%
 facilitative  59% 26%
 softening  6% 13%
 confrontational  0% 0%
 total samples  51 39
The above data (and others) suggest that women are better partners in a conversation than men.

Key Points (from handout)

Language in the Individual and in Society notes index