Gendered Speech Differences

[MusicNerd]

so, since y'all always seem to have really cool and interesting things to say about gender-related things, I wanted to ask: what are folks' experiences with gender and conversation/discussion dynamics in different spaces (ex. jobs, classrooms, etc.)? how has gender affected the way your speech was received or responded to in different situations? i'm also very interested in knowing how gender nonconforming folks have been affected by gendered speech differences in different situations as well, since that barely ever gets talked about!

i'm only asking this because of a situation that irked me today which i wrote about in a facebook status in the quote box below. lol

you know, i'm like *really* over sexist speech pattern differences

so, in a class of ~25-30 people i was the only woman who spoke today. at all. this happens a lot in this class (where only one woman, if any, will speak), and women comprise roughly half of that class. so it's not like i was the only woman there and that that's why i was the only one who spoke today.

for anyone who's dabbled in looking at studies of gendered speech differences (which unfortunately operates within the gender binary, as in most fields of research), many times it's shown that: 1. women typically aren't comfortable speaking up unless other women speak too, 2. women are more likely to be interrupted while talking (even by other women), and 3. women are seen as "talking too much," even when they take up considerably less than half of the speaking-time in many situations-- and they're still seen as talking too much because they're talking at all.

so, about 5-7 dudes had spoken before me in class, and the one time i speak up in a debate against a dude in the class, i'm interrupted by a male professor. none of the other dudes who spoke before me were interrupted at any point in class, even though they had quite a lot to say whenever they talked.

the one time i speak, what i'm debating is interrupted by the professor to make a random joke directed at me (which didn't sound like a joke so i was thrown off) and it was entirely irrelevant to what i was talking about. and, though it was probably unintentional and not consciously done on his part, it made the rest of what i had to say seem like it should be dismissed. as if what i had to say was unimportant in a "oh, you firey, spunky, young-lady-who-has-an-opinion, i was ~just joking~ *waves hand dismissively*" kind of way. which, of course, made the other dudes in the class laugh and temporarily made me lose my train of thought.

i'm really over being interrupted (especially by men), being taken less seriously, or having subconscious sexism affect speech dynamics in classrooms (or really any space). i'm tired of sexism affecting how comfortable women are in speaking up and taking up space. i'm so over our thoughts, or who we ourselves are, being made into jokes that detract from what we have to say.

and i know this seems like a tiny thing i'm salty about, but: this kind of shit (read: microaggressions) builds up over time, and after having this happen a countless number of times throughout my entire life, i'm just so. fucking. over it.

/rant

so yeah, i'm super interested in what folks of all genders have to say about their experiences with this kind of stuff! also, 'cause i'm a total sucker for gender-based linguistics studies (i find it super fascinating even though i'm not a linguistics student haha)

[Karyn]

I'm not a linguist either, but I totally geek out over language and gender stuff (my PhD research is actually about homophobic language, so not totally the same, but in a similar sort of area).

Personally, as a cis woman, I get interrupted a LOT (including the time I was interrupted while explaining, no joke, how women are more likely to be interrupted). What I find really interesting is that this tends to happen even in spaces where I would expect people to be more aware of the gendered patterns of conversation: the research centre where I'm a student, for example, or when I'm hanging out with other gender and sexuality geeky friends. Which I guess just illustrates that patterns like this can be learned so early that they sort of get taken for granted as "normal" or go unnoticed a lot of the time.

[al]

Hi MusicNerd!

Nice to run into you again on the boards

I also think that these types of gendered speech patterns are really interesting. I've often found that things like body language and speech patterns say lot to say about bias, prejudice, and perceived power dynamics when you look at them closely. For example, I attended a women's college that also allowed us to take classes on neighboring co-ed campuses, and it was such a striking difference between the experiences we had on different campuses. My classes that were only comprised as self-identifying women tended to show students trying their best to be respectful even if they disagreed, apologizing if they interrupted each other, and asking each other questions in a respectful way to learn more about each other's point of view. My co-ed classes on other campuses, on the other hand, tended to be dominated by the self-identifying men in the classroom, even if they were in the minority. Discussions would turn into arguments, where the tone would turn aggressive and conversations were dominated by interrupting/being louder than the other person. Everyone would usually stay quiet and/or lose interest because they would be shut down if they tried to speak up (or call out the often microaggressive things they were saying). And male professors would usually do nothing about it. That's one of the reasons I really preferred my mostly-feminine environment because there were a lot less aggressive power dynamics going on (at least overtly). I completely agree that this is incredibly frustrating, and, in my opinion, damaging to the learning process.

Another observation I've made is on a personal level - when my partner and I go out to eat somewhere, sometimes our host/server will automatically address me or hand me the check/change rather than her. She tends to present more femme, and I always present pretty masculinely, and we've often wondered if that has something to do with it. Even though I'm just butch and not a cis man, it seems like there's sort of an assumption that I am the one that "takes charge" in the relationship - making orders, paying the bill, etc. when that's not actually true. Sometimes I find myself panicking a little and falling into it - they'll ask me how our food is or whether we need anything, and I'll answer kind of definitively without checking in with her. I'm working on pausing so that she can answer instead, or at least saying "My food's great, how is yours?".
We've talked about how this affects us, and it's been a good lesson for me in terms of some of the privilege that masculinity carries, even for people assigned female at birth. The reality is that my butch appearance does tend to carry a little bit of weight when we go out in public, and I think it's my responsibility to push back against that and show people that my femme partner carries just as much power and authority as I do.

Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this stuff! I wish we could get a linguist in here to give us more info and back us up!

[Redskies]

I heard a linguist bat-signal! I've never been a researching linguist or an expert at a high level, but I've studied it some, and particularly dug into feminist linguistics and language & gender, so, here I am

First off, it's not like any of you actually need studies or an expert to tell you that yes, the experiences you've had were experiences you've had.

Other important point: at least when I last seriously looked into this kind of thing - maybe 2-3 years ago - I found linguistics as a field pretty behind the times per current concepts and discussions of gender. There are some operational reasons why it'd be challenging to do good studies and get meaningful data on language usage across the whole 3D spectrum of gender, but even apart from that, many of the people and publications in the field just seemed woefully clueless about anything other than the cisgender binary. I found that feminist linguists overall were great and very incisive on the (cis)gender axis, but seemed to feel that queer theory was at odds with feminist theory and didn't address orientation or "queered" genders at all, so, um, not really a complete picture there. Too, it often takes a few years from the first concept of a study through it being carried out, analysed and published, so there's some inbuilt time-lag. So, we have (probably) a bunch of researchers who are very blinkered, and correspondingly incomplete data and information about actual human language usage, and so then when we talk about the information we've got, it's reductive and excluding. Meh. But maybe it's developed a little since I last really read around? I would be excited to read a radical feminist linguist who was also a radical cutting-edge(ish) queer; that would be, like, gold dust Please tell me if such a person exists!

From memory, there have been a bunch of studies that show that in mixed-gender groups, if women have half the talking time, the men and the women report their experience of the group that women spoke for considerably more than half the time. When women spoke for about 30% of the time, men and women believed that women had spoken for half the time. There have also been classroom studies where the teachers/lecturers didn't have any overt bias, but still called male students to speak more often and for longer than female students, all the while believing they were treating everyone equally. I recall (wish i could remember where!) reading about one case where they put a monitor in the classroom who recorded the exact figures for number of turns and time taken per (m/f) gender; the teachers/tutors couldn't believe it at first, and when they were just told the facts of the reality, they made basically no progress towards improving it even though they thought they were. Over time and with evidence from every class, they improved the balance, even though they reported feeling like the women were getting much more time than the men even when they were still getting less.

There have also been studies done on interrupting and how it relates to gender. This is muddier, because interrupting - and the kind of interrupting that is considered normal or acceptable for whichever kind of interaction - is very, very cultural, and even if gender is taken out of the picture, nobody's been able to construct an adequate theory for quite how interruption works even within one geographic or sociolinguistic culture, because it's so complex. So, it's hard to do comprehensive studies because how do you control for variables that you don't yet know are variables?! But anyhoo, no surprise here, as far as can be made out, yep there's a gendered effect of interrupting: in short, women get interrupted by men much more! it's not quite clear why that is or the whole picture of who-interrupts who, gender-wise.

I agree it's very disheartening how much embedded and unconscious sexism there is, even in language. It's not surprising, though, because language usage is a behaviour, and a social behaviour: if you think that sexism can affect and and infest any behaviour, then it would in language behaviour, too.

A thorny knotty problem which I love (and have no answer to!): how much is language itself inherently sexist, and how much is the sexism "imported" from social roles and assumptions?

[Heather]

Redskies: was so glad to see the note about interrupting and culture. In both Italian and Jewish culture, as well as a lot of working class culture, period, interrupting is just how we talk! In fact, even calling it interrupting would be off. Our idea of what interrupting even is tends to differ from - as one example of my experience - what WASPish folks call interrupting. Their interrupting is often just our energetic conversation!

That said, even in my own cultural experience where "interrupting" is just the order of the day, cis men STILL talk over everyone else a lot, usually just by being louder.