May 1, 2002
Gendered Verbal & Non-verbal Communication
Language and nonverbal behaviors play critical roles in creating and perpetuating gendered identities and social patterns.
Verbal and nonverbal communication reflect and shape cultural understandings of masculinity and femininity.
1. Language Defines Gender -
The most fundamental implication of symbolic ability is that symbols define phenomena. We use symbols to name objects, people, feelings, experiences, and other phenomena. The names we apply emphasize particular aspects of reality and neglect others. What we emphasize is guided in part by cultural values, so that we name those things or aspects of things that are important in society's perspective.
Our language negates women's experience by denying and dismissing women's importance and sometimes their very existence. In so doing, it represents men and their experiences as the norm and women and their ways as deviant. This marginalizes women.
Example: Male generic language excludes women. Male generic language purports to include both women and men, yet specifically refers only to men. e.g. mankind
Research demonstrates conclusively that masculine generics are perceived as referring predominantly or exclusively to men. example urban man vs. urban life.
One of the effects of male generic language is that it makes men seem more prominent and women less prominent than they are in real life.
Male generic language reduces awareness of women and tends to result in perceiving women as excluded or exceptions to the rule. This affects comprehension of language, views of personal identity, and perceptions of women's presence in various spheres of life.
Spotlighting - which is the practice of highlighting a person's sex. Terms such as "lady doctor" and women lawyer define women as the exception in professions and thereby reinforce the idea that men are the standard.
Female suffixes - hero-heroine, steward-stewardess, and actor-actress. There is one semantic areas in which the masculine is not the base or more powerful word. This is in the area dealing with sex and marriage. When someone refers to a virgin, a listener will probably think of a female, unless the speaker specifies male or uses a masculine pronoun. The same is true for prostitute.
In relation to marriage, there is much linguistic evidence showing that weddings are more important to women than to men. The word bride appears in bridal attendant, bridal gown, bridesmaid, bridal shower, and even bridegroom. The importance of marriage to a woman is also shown by the fact that when a marriage ends in death, the woman gets the tile of widow. A man gets the derived title of widower.
Think of the difference between old maid or spinster and bachelor.
Women are defined by appearance and relationships; men by their accomplishments. - Women much more than men tend to be defined by appearance and/or relationships with others. Aileen Nilsen says women are sexy; men are successful. The eponyms - words that have come from someone's name - Bartlett pear, diesel engine, Franklin stove, gattling gun, Winchester rifle. These are words of accomplishment. The only common eponyms taken from American women's names that Nilsen could find are Alice Blue (after Alice Roosevelt Longworth), bloomers after Amelia Jenks Bloomer and a Mae West jacket (lifejacket).
In our culture girls often have names taken from small, aesthetically pleasing items, Ruby, Jewel and Pearl, Stella, Vanessa (butterfly). Boys are more likely to be given names with meanings of power and strength. Richard (strong king) Martin (from Mars, the God of War).
The cultural association of women with relationships is explicitly expressed in the words Miss and Mrs., which designate, respectively, unmarried and married women. There are no parallel titles that define men in terms of whether they are married.
The still-prevalent tradition of a wife adopting her husband's name on marrying. Symbolically, she exchanges her individual identity for one based on her relationship to a man: Mrs. Roger Keller
Reluctance to use titles and occupations for women -example - difficulty in addressing Mr. and Dr. Keller
2. Language names what exists. We attend to what we name and tend not to recognize or reflect on phenomena we leave unnamed. Spender argues that not to name something is to deny it exists or matters, to negate it. examples - sexual harassment and date rape, domestic violence, child abuse, elder abuse.
3. Language Organizes Perceptions of Gender
We use language to organize experience and perceptions. Because language is abstract, not concrete, we can classify, phenomena and think in terms of generalizations.
The organizing function of language expresses cultural views of gender by stereotyping men and women and by encouraging polarized perceptions of gender. Women are passive; men are active, etc.
Stereotyping gender - Because symbols are abstract, they allow us to think in general ways and to understand broad concepts like democracy, freedom, religion, and gender.
While our ability to think in broad categories is useful in many ways, it is also the source of stereotypes that sometimes misrepresent individuals.
A stereotype is a broad generalization about an entire class of phenomena based on some knowledge of some aspects of some members of the class. Verbal communication groups men and women, masculine and feminine into broad stereotypical categories. Women are classified as emotional, while mean are classified as rational; men are defined as strong, while women are stereotyped as physically weaker. Because cultural stereotypes promote these views of men and women, they restrict perceptions of others and of ourselves.
Encouraging polarized thinking. - A second implication of language's organizing function is encouraging polarized thinking. Polarized, or dichotomous, thinking involves conceiving things as opposites. English emphasizes polarities. This makes it difficult for us to think in terms of variation and range.
Women are sexy; men are successful.
Women are passive; men are active.
Women are connected with negative connotations; men with positive connotation
4. Language Evaluates Gender - Language is not neutral. It reflects cultural values and is a powerful influence on our perceptions. Related to gender, language expresses cultural devaluations of females and femininity. It does this by trivializing, deprecating, and diminishing women and things defined as feminine.
Semantic Derogation - the process by which the meaning or connotations of words are debased over time.
Women are often trivialized by language. They are frequently demeaned by metaphors that equate them with food ( dish, cookie, cupcake, hot tomato) and animals (fox, chick, pig, dog, cow, bitch) or as possessions (his wife, secretary). If a man is called a fruit, his masculinity is being questioned. Animal metaphors also illustrate the different expectations for males and females. Men are referred to as studs, bucks and wolves while women are referred to with such metaphors as kitten, bunny, beaver, bird, chick and lamb.
Some animal metaphors used predominantly with men have negative connotations based on the size and/or strength of the animals: beast, bull-headed. Negative metaphors used with women are based on smaller animals, mousy, catty, social butterfly.
Matron and Patron (from the Latin mother and father) have changed over years. Matron now connotes a woman who oversees the bathrooms or the prison. A patron connotes a powerful supporter, eg a patron of the arts.
The Armed Forces are aware of the trivialization, and therefore develops words to hide the association of tasks with the feminine and thus, the inferiority of the task.
Waitress changes to Orderly
Nurse to medic or corpsman
Secretary to clerk-typist
Assistant to adjutant
Dishwasher or kitchen helper to KP (kitchen police)
Women are also deprecated by language that devalues them. 220 terms for sexually permissive women but only 22 for sexually promiscuous men.
Sir and madam. Sir is a term of respect, while madam has acquired the specialized meaning of a brothel manager. Something similar has happened to master and mistress. Another example call boy and call girl.
Women are connected with negative connotations; men with positive connotations.
She's a shrew. He is a shrewd businessman.
Tom Boy vs. Sissy.
Other terms that show how negatively we view old women as compared t young women are old nag as a compared to filly, old crow or old bat as compared to bird, and of being catty as compared to becoming kittenish. There is no matching set of metaphors for men.
Nilsen - "The chicken metaphor tells the whole story of a woman's life. In her youth, she is a chick. Then she marries and begins feathering her nest. Soon she begins feeling cooped up, so she goes to hen parties where she cackles with her friends. Then she has her brood, begins to henpeck her husband and finally turns into an old biddy. "
5. Language Enables Hypothetical Thought- ("What if?")
Symbols allow hypothetical thought, i.e. to think about things that do not exist in the moment. This enables us to think of past, present, and future and to conceive of alternatives to current states of affairs.
6. Language Allows Self-Reflection - This final implication of symbolic ability is especially relevant to thinking about our own gendered identities. If we don't like the self we see, we are able to change it- to alter how we act and how we define our identity. We do this by combining our capacities to think hypothetically and to self-reflect. Androgynous people identify with qualities the culture defines as masculine and feminine, instead of identifying with only those assigned to one sex.
Second issue of language: Sociolingistics is the field that investigates language variation that is socially conditioned. Do women and men speak different languages? Because males and females tend to be socialized into distinct speech communities, they learn different rules about the purposes of communication and ways to indicate support, interest, and involvement. Because women and men have some dissimilar rules for talk, they often misread each other's meanings and misunderstand each other's motives.
Gendered Speech Communities - also called female register or male register - linguists use the term "register" to indicate a variety of language characteristics defined according to its use in social situation.
Speech communities - exist when people share understandings about goals of communication, strategies for enacting those goals, and ways of interpreting communication.
In many ways women and men operate from dissimilar assumptions about the goals and strategies of communication.
Women's speech - For most women, communication is a primary way to establish and maintain relationships with others. For women talk is the essence of relationships.
Consistent with this primary goal, women's speech tends to display identifiable features that foster connections, support, closeness, and understanding.
1. Equality between people is generally important in women's communication. To achieve symmetry, women often match experiences to indicate "You're not alone in how you feel." - "I've felt that same way." Growing out of the quest for equality is a participatory mode of interaction in which communicators respond to and build on each other's ideas in the process of conversing.
2. Also important in women's speech is showing support for others. example - "I think you did the right thing."
3. Related to these first two features is women's typical attention to the relationship level of communication. You will recall that the relationship level of talk focuses on feelings and the relationship between communicators rather than on the content of messages. In conversations between women, it is common to hear a number of questions that probe for greater understanding of feelings and perceptions surrounding the subject of talk. example - "How did you feel when it occurred?" Probes that help a listener understand a speaker's perspective.
4. A fourth feature of women's speech style is conversational "maintenance work". This involves efforts to sustain conversation by inviting others to speak and by prompting the to elaborate their experiences. Women, for instance, ask a number of questions that initiate topics for others: "How was your day?" Communication of this sort opens the conversational door to others and maintains interaction.
5. Tentativeness. this may be expressed in a number of forms. Verbal hedges - "I kind of feel you may be overreacting."
In other situations they qualify statements by saying "I'm probably not the best judge of this, but..."
Another way to keep talk provisional is to tag a question onto a statement in a way that invites another to respond: "That was a pretty good movie, wasn't it?"
Question intonation in declarative contexts: In response to question, "When will dinner be ready?" "Around six o'clock?" as though seeking approval and asking whether that time will be acceptable."
Tentative communication could also be viewed as positive rather than weak. It leaves open the door for others to respond and express their opinions.
Controversy about tentativeness in women's speech. R. Lakoff who first noted that women use more hedges, qualifiers, and tag questions than men claimed these represent uncertainty and lack of confidence. Calling women's speech powerless, Lakoff argued that it reflects women's socialization into subordinate roles and low self-esteem. Others say it expresses women's desires to keep conversation open and to include others. It appears that the situation is important, example, a female lawyer and male lawyer's language in court are more similar.
Another form of female register is the use of intensifiers (speaking emphatically as if in Italics) example: "He's so wonderful." and what Lakoff refers to as "empty" adjectives or adverbs. Some of these could be contained in a word list that is distinctively female. "This is a divine party." "Such a darling room," A study by McMillan and her colleagues (1977) indicates that in group discussions women use six times more intensifiers than men. An exclusive pattern for woman is that they often literally intensify the intensifier by heavily emphasizing and elongating the word. "it was so-o-o- wonderful." An emotional overtone is added to a simple declarative sentence.
Vocabulary - women express a greater range of words for colors, textures, food and cooking. When parents talk to their children about emotional aspect of events, they use a greater number of "emotion" words with daughters than with sons.
6. Finally, female register includes forms of speaking that are more polite and indirect.. Hypercorrect grammar and careful enunciation.
Socialization into language forbids profanity in general, but more so for females. Men tell "dirty" jokes, and women are often the targets of them.
Women tend to use substitute expletives that are deemed more acceptable (Oh darn)
Women often seem to lack a sense of humor. Inability to tell a joke; frequently "missing the point " in jokes told by men.
Men's Speech - Masculine speech communities tend to regard talk as a way to exert control, preserve independence, and enhance status. Conversation is often seen as an arena for proving oneself and negotiating prestige.
1. men often use talk to establish and defend their personal status and their ideas, by asserting themselves and/or by challenging others.
2. when they wish to comfort or support another, they typically do so by respecting the other's independence and avoiding communication they regard as condescending.
3. To establish their status and value, men often speak to exhibit knowledge, skill or ability. Equally typical is the tendency to avoid disclosing personal information.
4. A second prominent feature of men's talk is instrumentality - speech is used to accomplish instrumental objectives. As we have seen, men are socialized to do things, achieve goals. In conversation, this often expressed through problem-solving efforts that focus on getting information, discovering facts, and suggesting solutions.
5. Another feature of men's communication is conversational command. Despite jokes about women's talkativeness, research indicates that in most contexts, men talk more than women. Further, men engage in other verbal behaviors that sustain prominence in interaction. They may reroute conversations by using what another said as a jump-off point for their own topic, or they may interrupt. Men use interruptions to control conversation by challenging other speakers or wresting the talk stage from the, , while women interrupt to indicate interest and to respond.
6. Men tend to express themselves in fairly absolute, assertive ways. Compared with women, their language is typically more forceful, direct, and authoritative.
Troubles Talk" Linguist Deborah Tannen identifies talk about troubles, or personal problems, as a kind of interaction in which hurt feelings may result from the contrast between most men's and women's rules of communication. - Some women are often frustrated because men do not respond to their troubles by offering matching troubles, men are often frustrated because women do. Some men not only take no comfort in such response, they take offense.
"I'll fix it for you." Women and men are both often frustrated by the other's way of responding to their expression of troubles. Men are frustrated by women's refusal to take action to solve the problem they complain about. "Troubles" is intended to reinforce rapport by sending the metamessage "We're the same; you're not along." Women are frustrated when they not only don't get their reinforcement but, quite the opposite, feel distanced by the advice which seems to send the metamessage "Were not the same. You have the problems; I have the solutions."
The Point of the story - Another instance in which feminine and masculine communication rules often clash and cause problems is in relating experiences. Typically, men have learned to speak in a linear manner in which they move sequentially through major points in a story to get to the climax. Their talk tends to be straightforward without a great many details. The rules of feminine speech, however, call for more detailed and less linear storytelling. Whereas a man is likely to provide rather bare information about what happened, a woman is more likely to embed the information within a larger context of the people involved and other things going on. Women include details not because all of the specifics are important in themselves but because recounting them shows involvement and allows a conversational partner to be more fully part of the situation being described.
However, many scholars are concerned that this discussion of differences leads to a belief that there is something "essential" about the manner of men and women's speech.
William O'Barr -
We must be careful to avoid "essentializing" these differences. Not every woman, not every man speaks in a particular way. Second, it is language socialization, not biology, that gives rise to the differences between male and female patterns in language. O'Barr and others link the different patterns to social structure. They are interested in how a particular linguistic practice may de distributed socially. Do differences between language patterns help perpetuate differences between men and women with regard to power, influence, and income?
O'Barr studied gendered language in court. He found that many of the characteristics Lakoff had noted do indeed occur in court, but they did not characterize the speech of all women, nor were they limited to women. He reformulated the phenomenon and called it powerless language to describe its deferential nature.
The characteristics in courts of law that were found included:
Abundant use of hedges
Hesitation forms: Words and phrases that carry no substantive meaning but only fill possible speech pauses such as "uh", "Um" or "well."
Overuse of polite forms
Question intonation in declarative contexts
Frequent use of intensifiers.
These characteristics often occur together. Linguists use the term speech style to refer to a set of features that tend to occur together and constitute a constellation of linguistic features. It was found more often among women than men but also more often among people of all sorts who were in relatively powerless social situations such as being poorly educated or occupying low-status jobs.
Anne Roiphe "Talking Trouble" considers both sides of the essentialist/social constructionism debate about the origins of men's and women's differing communication styles. In the essentialist camp is Robin Lakoff, Deborah Tannen and pop psychologists like John Gray. As Roiphe summarizes this perspective: "Men are the people of the ladder and women are the people of the circle." Supposedly, women and men are socialized differently which produce different styles in communication.
In the social constructionism camp are people like Mary Crawford. She says that the essentialist proponents fail to analyze the power issues involved in speech and the difference that role and status make in how people use language. Crawford attacks the idea that there is something essentially female in submissive, blurred language. She does not accept the notion that little girls' groups are inclusive and nonhierarchical, arguing that the gender-difference proponents are ignoring factors of age, social class and sexual orientation. She asserts that speech patterns depend more on social status and the power relation between the speaker and listener than on gender.
Rozanne Rideway "Job responsibilities can dictate style."
Cynthia Fuchs Epsetin argues that most gender distinctions are socially constructed and superficial. In fact all the evidence indicates that there is more variation between people than between sexes. "The notion at the base of this debate is that women have a single personality." Sheila Wellington is concerned that "The inevitable effect of the 'feminine' style will be stereotyping. And in the end, all stereotypes are limiting be they positive or negative."
Nonverbal Communication
Like language, nonverbal communication is learned through interaction with others. Like verbal communication, nonverbal behaviors reflect and reinforce social views of gender and encourage individuals to embody them in distinctive feminine and masculine styles.
Artifacts - personal objects that influence how we see ourselves and express the identity we create for ourselves. The first gender artifact - pink and blue. Parents send artifactual messages through the toys they give to sons and daughters.
One implication of sex-differentiated toys is that they cultivate different cognitive and social skills.
Other artifacts - clothing - make-up, jewelry
Advertisements for food, homemaking, and child rearing feature women, reiterating the view of women as mothers and the view of men as uninvolved in parenting.
Proximity and Personal Space -
Proxemics - refers to space and our use of it. As researchers began studying space, they realized it is a primary means through which cultures express values and shape patterns of interaction.
Personal space - reserved for friends and acquaintances that extends from about one and a half to four feet Intimate distance - extends to about 18 inches.
Space is a primary means by which a culture designates who is important, who has privilege. Those who are more powerful have more space.
For example - women not allowed to own property - women are literally denied space. (India denied inheriting property - mid-1990s)
Consider who gets space in our society - Executives have large offices - secretaries have cubbyholes.
In the house - women have no room of their own.
Men sit at the head of the table.
Men have "off-limits" areas
Example - who controls the arm rest in an airplane
Territoriality - refers to ours sense of personal space or our private area that we don't want others to invade. Yet not everyone's territory is equally respected. People with power tend to invade the spaces of those with less power. Men invade women's spaces more than women invade men's spaces. Invasion of space are sometimes interpreted as sexual harassment because too much closeness communicates a level of intimacy that may be perceived as inappropriate in work and education situations.
Men tend to respond negatively and sometimes aggressively to defend their territory while women tend to yield space or free their territory rather than challenge the intruder.
Haptics - touch - Parents tend to touch sons less often and more roughly than they touch daughters. Daughters are handled more gently and protectively. Early tactile messages teach boys not to perceive touching as affiliative, while girls learn to expect touching form others and to use touch affiliatively.
While women are more likely than men to initiate hugs and touches that express support, affection, and comfort, men more often use touch to direct others, assert power, and express sexual interest. These gendered patterns of proxemic and touch behavior are linked to the problem of sexual harassment. The meaning of touching depends on more than touch per se. - How we interpret touch depends on factors such as its duration, intensity, and frequency and the body parts touching and being touched.
Men rarely touch one another, especially in what would be seen as an emotional display. Men shake hands. Fairly intimate displays of physical contact in sporting events - but this has its limits. International Federation in Zurich - soccer players were admonished for their "excessive and inappropriate" kissing. (In the 1980s)
Kinesics (Facial and Body Motion) - bodily movement, posture, and general demeanor, eye contact
This area of nonverbal communication reflects a number of gendered patterns, for example, Smiling (check your high school yearbook)
check your yearbook.
In addition women tend to tilt their heads in deferential positions, condense their size, and allow others to invade their spaces. Women - facial restraint in showing anger - often gets masked by crying which is more acceptable. In decoding nonverbal cues, not only do women rely more on facial information than do men but women also exhibit a greater variety of facial expressions. Men too tend to enact patterns they were taught by displaying less emotion through smiles or other facial expressions, (other than anger)
Using larger gestures, taking more space and being more likely to encroach on others' territories. In combination, these gender-differentiated patterns suggest that women's facial and body motions generally signal they are approachable, friendly, and unassuming. Men's facial and body communications, in contrast, tend to indicate they are reserved and in control.
Men and women tend to differ in how they use their eyes to communicate. Women signal interest and involvement with others by sustaining eye contact, while men generally do not hold eye contact. These patterns reflect lessons form childhood in which girls learned to maintain relationships and boys learned to view for status - to show interest in others may jeopardize your own position. Women not only give but also receive more facial expressions of interest and friendliness.
Men - the eye challenge.
Paralanguage
In general, woman use higher pitch, softer volume, and a lot of inflection. I'm soooo happy.
Men tend to use their voices to assert themselves and command the conversation which means they use lower pitch, harder volume, and limited inflection. Further, men discourage others from talking by interrupting and responding with minimum and delayed "umms"
Implications of Gendered Nonverbal Communication -
Nonverbal communication expresses cultural views of gender, and men and women learn different style of nonverbal interaction. Social definitions of women as deferential, decorative, and relationship-centered are reinforced though nonverbal communication that emphasizes their appearance, limits their space, and defines them as touchable. Views of men as independent, powerful and in control are reflected in nonverbal behaviors that accord them larger territories and greater normative rights to invade others by entering their space and touching them.
Consistent with how nonverbal communication defines men and women are differences in how they use it. While women tend to embody femininity by being soft-spoken, condensing space and yielding territory, and being facially responsive, men are likely to command space and volume, defend their turf, and adopt impassive facial expressions to keep feelings camouflaged. These differences grow out of socialization in distinctive speech communities.
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