Gender
Three key models
- The dominance model: men are more dominant in language.
- The deficit model: women’s language is inherently weak
- The difference model: women and men communicate differently
Dominance
Pamela Fishman
- Women are left to do the ‘conversational shitwork’ in communication with men.
- If they do not do it, the conversation will fail.
Dominance
Holmes - gendered metaphors
(3)
- Metaphors to describe women are largely derogatory
- Women are often referred to as food or animals. For example, bird, sugar, sweetie.
- Often portray women as sweet and helpless, whereas metaphors for men make them appear strong (stag do vs hen night)
Dominance
The Bechdel test
This judges whether a piece of work (book, film, theatre, TV etc) has:
* Two women
* Who talk to each other
* About something other than men
Many pieces of work fail this test!
Dominance
Zimmerman and West
Found that men interrupt women 96-100% of the time in mixed-sex conversations
Dominance
Beattie
(2)
- Argues that Zimmerman and West’s study wasn’t accurate because their sample size was too small.
- Beattie performed a similar study with 10 times as many participants and found that men and women interrupt with equal frequency.
Dominance
Spender
(2)
- Introduced the idea of the ‘male as norm’ - women are extensions of men.
- For example, men are always introduced first (Mr and Mrs)
Deficit
Lakoff
- Believes that women’s language contains many different features which make it weak.
- Women’s language use contributes to their inferior place within society.
For example:
* Intensifiers/degree modifiers - ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘really’
* Hedging - expressing weak opinions - ‘sort of’
* Weak adjectives - adjectives which contain a small value, for example ‘nice’
Deficit
Jesperson
Women’s language is littered with non-fluency features because they speak before thinking.
* E.g half finished sentences because they haven’t thought about what they are going to say.
* Women have a smaller vocabulary.
But this is only based on his perception.
Difference
All male conversations are competitive whereas all female conversations are co-operativeTannen
six different ways that men and women communicate.
There are six different ways that men and women communicate differently.
* Advice vs understanding
* Conflict vs compromise
* Independence vs intimacy
* Information vs feelings
* Orders vs proposals
* Status vs support
Difference
Coates
All male conversations are competitive whereas all female conversations are co-operative
Difference
Tannen
report vs rapport orientated
- Male talk is report-orientated - they want to report the facts.
- Female talk is rapport-orientated - they do it to maintain friendships.
