February 16, 2005 Communicating Gender: Language and non-verbal communication
Language and nonverbal behaviors play critical roles in creating and perpetuating gendered identities and social patterns.
Understanding the gendered nature of language:
Julia T. Wood
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 “woman lawyer” define women as the exception in professions and thereby reinforce the idea that men are the standard. Spotlighting is also used when men are defined as the exception in other professions, e.g. “male nurse.”
Female suffixes - hero-heroine, steward-stewardess, and actor-actress. There are two semantic areas in which the masculine is not the base or more powerful word i.e., in the areas 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. We think of prostitutes as females; when the individual is male, we spotlight, i.e. “male 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.
Unmarried status for a woman is still seen in a negative light; not the same for a man. Think of the difference between “old maid “ or “spinster” and a “confirmed bachelor.”
Women much more than men tend to be defined by appearance and/or relationships with others.
In our culture girls often have names taken from small, aesthetically pleasing items or characteristics, Lilly, Jewel, Ruby, Precious, Desiree, 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), etc.
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 pay attention to what we name and tend not to recognize or reflect on phenomena we leave unnamed. Examples of phenomena that remained nameless and then became visible through the naming include: sexual harassment, date rape, domestic violence, child abuse, and elder abuse.
3. Language Organizes Perceptions of gender. We use language to organize experience and perceptions. The organizing function of language expresses cultural views of gender by stereotyping men and women and by encouraging polarized perceptions of gender. e.g. women are passive; men are active. Etc.
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, his secretary). An exception: 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.
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, e.g. 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.
Women are connected with negative connotations; men with positive connotations.
She's a shrew. He is a shrewd businessman.
Second issue of language: Do women and men speak different languages? Socio-linguistics is the field that investigates language variation that is socially conditioned. Some researchers believe that 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 - or speech style - 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.
Some researchers feel that women and men operate from dissimilar assumptions about the goals and strategies of communication.
Conventional perspectives on women’s speech:
Female Register or Style –
Goal: 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.
Characteristics of female register. Tentative style:
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.
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.
Conventional thinking about 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.
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. “I’ll fix it for you.” (Deborah Tannen)
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. Men tend to express themselves in fairly absolute, assertive ways. Compared with women, their language is typically more forceful, direct, and authoritative.
Other perspectives about men and women’s speech:
William O'Barr cautions, “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 studied gendered language in court. He found that many of the characteristics Lakoff had noted do indeed occur in court. The characteristics of language that Barr and his colleagues found in courts of law 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.
However these characteristics were not found in 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.
He concluded that powerless, deferential language is related to gender because women tend to occupy relatively powerless positions in society, not because of their biology or some essential characteristics of women.
He and his colleagues also wanted to know what effects this powerless language had. So they conducted courtroom simulations. They conducted controlled experiments in which the same factual information was presented in a powerless or powerful style. They did this for both male and female witnesses. Then they examined credibility ratings of the testimony presented in different styles. They found strong and significant differences between the credibility of powerful versus powerless versions of the same testimony. As O'Barr notes "...Justice is blindfolded, but her ears remain uncovered."
Further O'Barr notes that both men and women jurors reached similar conclusions about stylistically powerless testimony. Even those who speak in powerless language devalue it in others.
He and his colleagues also studied the discourses that take place in the court. They did this by how language is framed. They studied small-claims courts where witnesses testify without lawyers and where the rules of legal procedure are different than in other courts of law.
They termed the contrast between discourses rule-oriented versus relational. In rule-oriented accounts, litigants state claims, explain they laws they consider violated and present evidence in support of their claims. In relational accounts, the claims are state more broadly, may have dubious connection tot he law, and are not supported with adequate evidence. The logic of the relational accounts follows a different logic. They take into consideration the fact that conflicts and claims have social contexts. Women more often gave relational accounts that men.
O'Barr, says that both powerless style and relational accounts are more characteristic of women than men and the law devalues both.
He also notes that the structure of the law is patriarchical. The lawyers control the flow of information; asks the questions, are highly trained in linguistic techniques that can intimidate and discredit a witness.
He notes that women often suffer by this structure for example, in rape trials.
Even when conflict resolution techniques are used, for example in mediation, women don't fair as well since women have been more likely socialized to manage and facilitate relations and compromise. Men hare more often socially conditioned to be more assertive and demanding. Evidence suggests that women more often acquiesce in divorce mediation.
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.
As Connell notes, our bodies are arenas themselves. They are artifacts that signal our gender and they are shaped by our society. How are bodies are viewed are tied to our identity and self-worth. Both men and women's bodies are situated in their society. Some bodies are more valued than others. Women's bodies are more controlled and evaluated than men's bodies.
This is why Fatema Mernissi calls Size 6 the Western Woman's Harem. She says that feminine beauty images and practices are as hurtful and humiliating to women as the enforced veiling of women in Islamic nations. She says that the Islamic man uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena while the Western man manipulates time and light. In order for a Western women to be beautiful she must look very young and very slim. When a woman looks mature and self-assertive or is not slim she is considered ugly.
This quest for looking young and being slim to tied to big business - $33 billion a year diet industry, $20 billion cosmetic industry, $300 million cosmetic surgery industry and a $7 billion pornographic industry.
Beyond the insecurity and lack of self-worth and the cost that has been created, it controls women temporally. It takes time to "look good" - time that could be spent in other endeavors. It can also result in physical problems - examples, podiatric problems for wearing high heels (the foot-binding of the Western World) and bulimia, anorexia nervosa and its accompanying physical problems.
Proximity and Personal Space -
Proxemics - refers to space and our use of it.
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.
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
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; maybe, they pat one another on the back. Fairly intimate displays of physical contact in sporting events - but this has its limits.
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 ) is more likely in women.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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