Communication Style and Gender

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Sociolinguistics - How gender influences the way people speak?

Definition of keywords

Sociolinguistics: This is a study of language in respect of social, class, regional, gender and occupational factors.

Gender: It is the condition of being a female or a male and is mostly used in relation to cultural and social differences.

Gender Equality: A condition in which the opportunities and rights are not affected by the change of gender.

Speak: To say in order to express or convey feelings or conversation (oxforddictionaries.com)

Within the study of discourse, comparative analysis of the way women and men use language has been a topic of interest for quite some time. However, to date no coherent framework for gender differences in language and its use has been established empirically, despite relatively extensive theorizing. One reason for this lack of framework lies in the absence of a consensus in how language, whether written or spoken, can best be analyzed.

Research into the existence and identity of gender differences has become a topic of extensive recent research. Differences in how women and men use language, whether spoken or written, have been of considerable interest. The popularity of this topic stems, at least in part, from the awareness that language is a fundamental phenomenon of our socialization and can thus provide insight into the different approaches to that world by women and men.

An increasingly common consensus of research findings indicates that males tend to use language as a means of conveying information more than females. Like in the video, the girl was quick in forming a conclusion and acting upon it, while the mal member were more informative and only spoke when giving information, "Actually it is the same cabin…passed on the name to your dad" (0:53) (Youtube.com). The use of verbal interactions in a more purely social manner, where conversation is the end goal, is more common for females (Newman, et al., 2008). Simultaneously, the absence of a meaningful distinction between the speech patterns of females and males has been proposed. In part, this disagreement may arise from the absence of an agreed upon metric of analysis for empirical studies of language that is commonly accepted.

In addition to body language and tone, there are text-based differences as well, whose recording instrument is not a camera, but paper, digital pads etc. There are numerous studies in which textual samples have been examined and used to make broad generalizations concerning language differences between men and women. Newman et al. (2008) explored gender differences in language use from a broad database of both spoken and written language using computerized textual analysis. They sought to provide resolution on an empirical basis to the issue of gender differences in language. Empirical evidence shows that men use language that can best be illustrated as influence-prone and women are more emotional in nature and submissive (Newman, et al., 2008). Men use language to exert influence, like in the video, the male protagonist says that 'if you're asking a man if he's tired talking about himself, you haven't been out much, have you?' (1:38). For men, talking about themselves and sharing their stories is a way to garner influence over other people. On the other hand, women are presumed for lesser roles in the society with power and influence residing strongly with men (Newman, et al., 2008). Like in the video, the female protagonist says that 'maybe it's all dull for you to telling this all to a housewife in the middle of nowhere (1:51).'

Gender differences in language use

Because there are extensive reviews of the empirical literature on differences between females and males, this report presents only a brief overview concerning gender differences in the use of language. One hypothesis concerning gendered differences in speech suggests that the semantic goals of women and men differ at the outset, at the point of actual sentence construction. Thus, for example, women were more likely to use questions such as "Is anyone hungry?" reflecting their intent to reach a consensus. In contrast, men were more like to use directives, such as "Let's go out for pizza." not seeking consensus but urging action in a manner that implied a leadership role and assumed cooperation. For example in the video, the woman simply states that "I need to find out who this imposter is," (0:49) (Youtube.com) while the male member directly decide to go saying "Yeah, let's go." (0:52) (Youtube.com). It has also been observed that younger male individuals are generally more likely to offer opinions than are women of the same approximate age. The study examined schoolchildren in the 12th, 8th, and 4th grades, over a population base of 96 children.

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In contrast, men are more concise in both verbal and written form than women, generally speaking.

In contrast, males tend to take more conversational 'turns', and generally use more words in their speech (Newman, et al., 2008) like in the video, the male members were first celebrating saying "All hail the conquering hero" while the next second took a turn and said "it is the same cabin that belonged to your grandfather…" (Youtube.com). Generalizations about the speech patterns of females and males do not hold across all media, that is, written expression by women and men may differ from their conversational expression. When e-mail communications were evaluated, both women and men were generally even in terms of their expression, which ranged from jokes and joking 'insults', to compliments, opinions, questions, and apologies. One study compared 50 male and 36 female managers in role-play about providing professional criticism. In this study, women used more directives and men asked more questions and were significantly more negative in their speech. This is contradictory to the results in previous studies, although women did tend to use longer sentences than men, while the men tended to higher level of verbiage. Newman et al. (2008) suggest that differences in the studies may arise from the contextual setting, which would impact both the directionality and the overall size of the observed gender differences.

Another approach to the examination of gender differences has been to look at word usage. For men, there tends to be more usage of references to location, use of swearing, use of articles, and use of longer or more complex verbiage. Like in the video, the male members used references to location words "grandfather's cabin', and long sentences like "Still consider what we did to your sister." (0:33) (Youtube.com) In contrast, women tended to use more phrases expressive of 'tentativeness', such as the use of but, could, and perhaps. Women also used more conjunctions, more intensive adverbs, and more modal auxiliary verbs, each of which results in rendering the words less rigid or directly affirmative, and more tentative.

While there is a clear-cut stereotype conveying the idea that women are more emotional than men, the actual usage of 'emotion words' may not concur. Referents to emotion are generally assumed, and have been reported, to be typical of women (Newman et al., 2008). Like in the video the female protagonist says, 'sometimes I do when there is a particular student who can make a difference (0:44).' She says this when she is asked that she must love teaching. She did not use the word "emotion" but she expressed her pleasant moments and experiences of teaching. Men on the other hand generally are reported to exert influence (Newman et al., 2008). Like in the video the male protagonist man says, 'this is your home, it isn't nowhere (1:56);' in response to the female protagonist describing herself in a disheartening loneliness, 'maybe it's all dull for you to telling this all to a housewife in the middle of nowhere (1:51).'

However, when role-play of an event requiring criticism was performed by managers, the reverse was observed. Newman et al. (2008) suggests the proposed gender difference is not in the use of emotion, but rather than men refer more to negative emotions, such as anger, whereas women referred more to positive emotions. This suggestion does, of course, concur with gender stereotypes, like in the video, the female member gave credit to everyone "We all did it" (0:15) (Youtube.com) while the male members were more emotional by giving her the entire credit "All hail the conquering hero."(0:13) (Newman, et al., 2008)

The psychology of women and men may also be explored with respect to gender differences when one examines the use of function words. While personal pronouns have been studied in terms of gender effect, function words have not been extensively studied to date. The British National Corpus, an enormous collection of spoken and written language samples (over 100 million words), was studied in an attempt to detect the gender of the author. The actual meanings of words were not considered. It was found as a result of this study, that when function words were used as a discriminatory basis, writing samples could be used to predict gender with an accuracy rate near 80%. The method involved a prediction equation derived….....

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