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Posted on Mar 25, 2022

(ii) Beyond the seven examples Tannen gives us in her reading, what might be another example of how gender role expectations inform conversational rituals?

(ii) Beyond the seven examples Tannen gives us in her reading, what might be another example of how gender role expectations inform conversational rituals? Feel free to draw upon personal experience. Does your example mirror what Tannen finds in her research on men and women in the workplace?

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The head of a large division of a multinational corporation was running a meeting devoted to performance assessment Each senior manager stood up reviewed the individuals in his group and evaluated them for promotion Although there were women in every group not one of them made the cut One after another each manager declared in effect that every woman in his group didnt have the selfconfidence needed to be promoted The division head began to doubt his ears How could it be that all the talented women in the division suffered from a lack of selfconfidence In all likelihood they didnt Consider the many women who have left large corporations to start their own businesses obviously exhibiting enough confidence to succeed on their own Judgments about confidence can be inferred only from the way people present themselves and much of that presentation is in the form of talk The CEO of a major corporation told me that he often has to make decisions in five minutes about matters on which others may have worked five months He said he uses this rule If the person making the proposal seems confident the CEO approves it If not he says no This might seem like a reasonable approach But my field of research sociolinguistics suggests otherwise The CEO obviously thinks he knows what a confident person sounds like But his judgment which may be dead right for some people may be dead wrong for others Communication isnt as simple as saying what you mean How you say what you mean is crucial and differs from one person to the next because using language is learned social behavior How we talk and listen are deeply influenced by cultural experience Although we might think that our ways of saying what we mean are natural we can run into trouble if we interpret and evaluate others as if they necessarily felt the same way wed feel if we spoke the way they did Since 1974 I have been researching the influence of linguistic style on conversations and human relationships In the past four years I have extended that research to the workplace where I have observed how ways of speaking learned in childhood affect judgments of competence and confidence as well as who gets heard who gets credit and what gets done The division head who was dumbfounded to hear that all the talented women in his organization lacked confidence was probably right to be skeptical The senior managers were judging the women in their groups by their own linguistic norms but womenlike people who have grown up in a different culturehave often learned different styles of speaking than men which can make them seem less competent and selfassured than they are What Is Linguistic Style Everything that is said must be said in a certain wayin a certain tone of voice at a certain rate of speed and with a certain degree of loudness Whereas often we consciously consider what to say before speaking we rarely think about how to say it unless the situation is obviously loadedfor example a job interview or a tricky performance review Linguistic style refers to a persons characteristic speaking pattern It includes such features as directness or indirectness pacing and pausing word choice and the use of such elements as jokes figures of speech stories questions and apologies In other words linguistic style is a set of culturally learned signals by which we not only communicate what we mean but also interpret others meaning and evaluate one another as people Consider turn taking one element of linguistic style Conversation is an enterprise in which people take turns One person speaks then the other responds However this apparently simple exchange requires a subtle negotiation of signals so that you know when the other person is finished and its your turn to begin Cultural factors such as country or region of origin and ethnic background influence how long a pause seems natural When Bob who is from Detroit has a conversation with his colleague Joe from New York City its hard for him to get a word in edgewise because he expects a slightly longer pause between turns than Joe does A pause of that length never comes because before it has a chance to Joe senses an uncomfortable silence which he fills with more talk of his own Both men fail to realize that differences in conversational style are getting in their way Bob thinks that Joe is pushy and uninterested in what he has to say and Joe thinks that Bob doesnt have much to contribute Similarly when Sally relocated from Texas to Washington DC she kept searching for the right time to break in during staff meetingsand never found it Although in Texas she was considered outgoing and confident in Washington she was perceived as shy and retiring Her boss even suggested she take an assertiveness training course Thus slight differences in conversational stylein these cases a few seconds of pausecan have a surprising impact on who gets heard and on the judgments including psychological ones that are made about people and their abilities Every utterance functions on two levels Were all familiar with the first one Language communicates ideas The second level is mostly invisible to us but it plays a powerful role in communication As a form of social behavior language also negotiates relationships Through ways of speaking we signaland createthe relative status of speakers and their level of rapport If you say Sit down you are signaling that you have higher status than the person you are addressing that you are so close to each other that you can drop all pleasantries or that you are angry If you say I would be honored if you would sit down you are signaling great respector great sarcasm depending on your tone of voice the situation and what you both know about how close you really are If you say You must be so tiredwhy dont you sit down you are communicating either closeness and concern or condescension Each of these ways of saying the same thingtelling someone to sit downcan have a vastly different meaning In every community known to linguists the patterns that constitute linguistic style are relatively different for men and women Whats natural for most men speaking a given language is in some cases different from whats natural for most women That is because we learn ways of speaking as children growing up especially from peers and children tend to play with other children of the same sex The research of sociologists anthropologists and psychologists observing American children at play has shown that although both girls and boys find ways of creating rapport and negotiating status girls tend to learn conversational rituals that focus on the rapport dimension of relationships whereas boys tend to learn rituals that focus on the status dimension Girls tend to play with a single best friend or in small groups and they spend a lot of time talking They use language to negotiate how close they are for example the girl you tell your secrets to becomes your best friend Girls learn to downplay ways in which one is better than the others and to emphasize ways in which they are all the same From childhood most girls learn that sounding too sure of themselves will make them unpopular with their peersalthough nobody really takes such modesty literally A group of girls will ostracize a girl who calls attention to her own superiority and criticize her by saying She thinks shes something and a girl who tells others what to do is called bossy Thus girls learn to talk in ways that balance their own needs with those of othersto save face for one another in the broadest sense of the term Boys tend to play very differently They usually play in larger groups in which more boys can be included but not everyone is treated as an equal Boys with high status in their group are expected to emphasize rather than downplay their status and usually one or several boys will be seen as the leader or leaders Boys generally dont accuse one another of being bossy because the leader is expected to tell lowerstatus boys what to do Boys learn to use language to negotiate their status in the group by displaying their abilities and knowledge and by challenging others and resisting challenges Giving orders is one way of getting and keeping the highstatus role Another is taking center stage by telling stories or jokes This is not to say that all boys and girls grow up this way or feel comfortable in these groups or are equally successful at negotiating within these norms But for the most part these childhood play groups are where boys and girls learn their conversational styles In this sense they grow up in different worlds The result is that women and men tend to have different habitual ways of saying what they mean and conversations between them can be like crosscultural communication You cant assume that the other person means what you would mean if you said the same thing in the same way My research in companies across the United States shows that the lessons learned in childhood carry over into the workplace Consider the following example A focus group was organized at a major multinational company to evaluate a recently implemented flextime policy The participants sat in a circle and discussed the new system The group concluded that it was excellent but they also agreed on ways to improve it The meeting went well and was deemed a success by all according to my own observations and everyones comments to me But the next day I was in for a surprise I had left the meeting with the impression that Phil had been responsible for most of the suggestions adopted by the group But as I typed up my notes I noticed that Cheryl had made almost all those suggestions I had thought that the key ideas came from Phil because he had picked up Cheryls points and supported them speaking at greater length in doing so than she had in raising them It would be easy to regard Phil as having stolen Cheryls ideasand her thunder But that would be inaccurate Phil never claimed Cheryls ideas as his own Cheryl herself told me later that she left the meeting confident she had contributed significantly and that appreciated Phils support She volunteered with a laugh It was not one of those times when a woman says something and its ignored then a man says it and its picked up In other words Cheryl and Phil worked well as a team the group fulfilled its charge and the company got what needed So what was the problem I went back and asked all the participants they thought had been the most influential group member the one most responsible for the ideas that had been adopted The pattern of answers was revealing The two other women in the group named Cheryl Two of the three men named Phil Of the men only Phil named Cheryl In other words in this instance the women evaluated the ... blur-text-image