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

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ing reinforces the fact that although there are distinguishable variances in the patterned speech of men and women in their respective workplaces, not all modes of communication are dominated or exclusively used productively by one gender. In He says, she says: Closing the communication gap between the sexes (1992), Lillian Glass, Ph.D. begins with a cleverly structured true-false quiz which demonstrates how many of our preconceived biases about differences between the sexes and how they communicate are actually false (Glass, 1994, pp. 29-41). Glass indicates that women are not statistically shown to be more intuitive than men. However, they have been discovered to be more detail oriented in both their observations and descriptions of what they watched. Since women seem to have a greater sensitivity to "non-verbal communication" such as a person's body language, vocal tones and facial expressions, this often makes them "appear to be more intuitive" (Glass, 1994, p. 32). Although men characteristically command more attention when they are speaking, they are not symmetrically seen as better listeners. Women are (Glass, 1994, pp.32-34). Interestingly, both women and men remember better what it is that a male colleague told th
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Approximate Word count = 2510
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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