Gender Conversational Patterns in the Workplace
Recent linguistic research has centered its attention on the difference between the way men and women communicate in the workplace. Deborah Tannen, Ph.D. has extended her interest in the manner women and men communicate as expressed in You just don't understand (1990). In Talking from 9 to 5 (1994) Tannen scrutinizes how women's and men's conversational styles at work affects "who gets heard, who gets credit, and what gets work done". Tannen's research focuses on conversational rituals, apologies, indirectness, authority and status. Tannen emphasizes that the way people talk influences who attains power. "The ability to influence others, to be listened to, to get your way rather than having to do what others want" defines power (Tannen, 1994, p. 317). Tannen suggests that to learn more about gender conversational patterns in the workplace is to acquire power or to edge that much closer to it.
A 1994 study "Gender and workplace dispute resolution: A conceptual and theoretical model" which was published in the Law and Society Review contends that the manner in which workplace disputes are settled repeatedly reinforces the disparity that often causes their occurrence in the first place (Gwartney-Gibbs, 1994, p. 293). This finding reinforces Tannen's observation that to know how power is structured and articulated is to more easily acquire it and learn how to leverage it. Gwartney-Gibbs' study characterizes work disputes as having three components: origins, processes, and outcomes (1994, p. 268). Yet these three components are further complicated by patterns of "gender roles, sex segregation in jobs and institutionalized work structures" (Gwartney-Gibbs, 1994, p. 290). Here gender differences as manifested at the workplace are shown to be integrally related to institutional practices and perhaps even biases. Gwartney-Gibbs' research indicates that if a certain population...