Gender differences in conversation topics, 1922?1990

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1992

We investigated gender differences in conversational behavior in an experimental setting. Twenty men and 20 women were randomly paired in 20 dyads and were asked to discuss a given topic. We examined the transcripts through a varied range of behavioral variables. First we analyzed the sequential ordering of utterances in order to establish the way male and female speakers take the floor and get involved in the sequence and topic structuring of dialogues. Second we coded the male and female utterances according to the language functions they expressed. Contrary to what has often been claimed, it was found that males' and females' conversational behavior betrays more similarities than differences. The discrepancies between these findings and those of previous studies are discussed relative to methodological and situational differences across studies

2011

This collection is composed of ten essays which explore connections between gender and interactional language usage and point to the importance of viewing these connections within a larger study of sociolinguistics. Tannen states in her introduction that the goal of this text, and hopefully of the further research it will stimulate, is to "point the way for a future generation of studies that will be based on [a] more sophisticated understanding of how language works in conversational interaction" and to "broaden and deepen our understanding of gender, language, and of the interaction between them"(p. 11). Tannen and her fellow authors are ultimately successful in reaching this goal because their studies take into account the often complex relationship between gender and language. Unlike less sophisticated studies which oversimplify the effects of gender on language, these studies reveal that while gender is itself an important variable, other variables such as age, personality, environment, etc., may alter gender's effect on language usage. The collection of essays is divided into four major sections: (1)TalkingAmong Friends,

Studies of workplaces frequently focus on gender, investigating and challenging inequality. In that many studies start with 'gender' as a taken-for-granted category, measuring gender differences in organizational life, or interviewing participants to elicit accounts of their employment experiences, they exaggerate and even create stereotypical 'common knowledge' about gender. In contrast, this paper illustrates a conversation analytic approach which can show if, when, and how, gender becomes consequentially relevant within any given communicative encounter. Drawing on a large corpus of institutional interaction, the paper demonstrates two things: that (1) robust claims about the gendering of social life can be made once those claims are grounded in what people actually do; and (2) systematic patterns in people's endogenous orientations to gender can be found in communication. Finally, the paper showcases a real-world application of conversation analytic work, demonstrating the impact and relevance of such research programmes for understanding everyday gendered social life.

If humankind had listened to Plato's advice and had tried to lay the foundations of the ideal state, in which women would have had the same equality of status as men and where sex wouldn't have been a criterion for discrimination, I wouldn't be presenting this paper today.

Discourse & Society, 2001

gender and language from a feminist perspective. In so doing, we engage in the recent series of exchanges about conversation analysis (CA) and other strands of discourse analysis that have been published in Discourse & Society. We consider talk from two sets of discourse data, focusing on participants' orientation to gender categories as they crop up in the interactions. We suggest that a CA approach produces a rich understanding of the links between discourse and gender. However, we are critical of several, often unexamined aspects and conundrums of conversation analytic methodology. First, we consider the extent to which the 'analytic stances' of feminism and conversation analysis are compatible. Second, we question whether, as Schegloff (1997) suggests, it is fruitful to rely on descriptions of and orientations to gender solely in participants' terms, as well as problematizing the notion of 'orienting to gender' itself. Finally, while we propose CA is a useful tool for making claims about the relevance of gender in conversational interaction, and that such claims are grounded in speakers' orientations, we suggest that culture and common-sense knowledge, of both members and analysts, are largely unacknowledged and unexplicated resources in CA.

Human Communication Research, 1976

The present study represents a contemporary test of traditional assumptions about sex effects in social interaction. An experiment was conducted to assess the independent and interactive effects of communicator sex, listener sex, and interpersonal distance on temporal measures of conversational interaction. Results demonstrated that the average duration of speech acts was significantly longer for females than for males; that communicators, regardless of sex, speak for a greater proportion of the total conversation when the listener is female as opposed to male; and that within the sex-same male dyads, far interpersonal distance is associated with significantly greater simultaneous speech when compared to the near condition. Results are interpreted as refutation for traditional notions of male dominance.

Applied psycholinguistics, 1990

It is a widely held belief that women talk more than men; but experimental evidence has suggested that this belief is mistaken. The present study investigated whether listener bias contributes to this mistake. Dialogues were recorded in mixed-sex and single-sex versions, and male and female listeners judged the proportions of talk contributed to the dialogues by each participant. Female contributions to mixed-sex dialogues were rated as greater than male contributions by both male and female listeners. Female contributions were more likely to be overestimated when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably female than when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably male. It is suggested that the misestimates are due to a complex of factors that may involve both perceptual effects such as misjudgment of rates of speech and sociological effects such as attitudes to social roles and perception of power relations.

Pragmatics, 1997

I would like to thank Benoit Ouellette for the translation of the present article. 1 Our translation. 2 Data supplied in Bouchard's article and "revisited" here by taking gender into account.