Men dominate the talking time. In conversations
involving members of both sexes, men speak more than women do. When men talked
to men, the content categories of such talk focused on competition and teasing,
sport, aggression and doing things. In the other hand, when women talked to
women, the equivalent categories were the self, feelings, affiliation with
others, home and family. When ...
the two sexes interacted, men tended to take the
initiative in conversation, but there seem to be a desire to achieve some kind
of accommodation so far as topics were concerned: the men spoke less of
aggression and competition and the women reduced their amount of talk about
home and family. Men tend to explain things to women and in doing so to
patronize them, whereas women tend to apologize to men.
There are many features of interaction which
differentiate the talk of women and men: interruption behavior and
conversational feedback.
1.
Interruptions
In
the same sex-interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between
speakers. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from
male. It has been found that men interrupt others more than women do. Men
interrupt more, challenge, dispute, and ignore more, try to control what topics
are discussed, and are inclined to make categorical statements. Women are
evidently socialized from early childhood to expect to be interrupted.
Consequently, they generally give up the floor with little or no protest.
2.
Feedback
Another
aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is the
evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational
partner than men do. In cross-sex conversation, women ask more question than
men, encourage others to speak, use more signal like mhmm to encourage other to continue speaking, use more instant
of you and we, and do not protest as much as men
when they are interrupted. The mhmm a
woman uses quite frequently means only “I’m listening”, whereas the mhmm a man uses, but much less
frequently, tends to mean “I’m agreeing”.
The distinction between men’s and women’s language is
a symptom of a problem in our culture, and not primarily the problem itself.
Rather, it reflects the fact that men and women are expected to have different
interests and different roles, hold different types of conversations and react
differently to other people.
Men and women differ in the kinds of language they use
and how they use it because men and women often fill distinctly different roles
in the society. The more distinct the role, the greater the differences, and
there seems to be some evidence to support such a claim, for the greatest
differences appear to exist in societies in which are the roles of men and
women are most clearly differentiated.
