GENDER, POLITENESS AND STEREOTYPES

Women’s language and confidence

Example 1

‘. . . a girl is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. If she refuses to talk like a lady, she is
ridiculed and subjected to criticism as unfeminine; if she does learn, she is ridiculed as unable to
think clearly, unable to take part in a serious discussion: in some sense, as less than fully human.
These two choices which a woman has – to be less than a woman or less than a person – are highly
painful.’

Social dialect research focuses on differences between women’s and men’s speech in the areas of
pronunciation (such as [in] vs [ing]) and morphology (such as past tense forms), with some attention
to syntactic constructions (such as multiple negation). Robin Lakoff shifted the focus of research on
gender differences to syntax, semantics and style. She suggested that women’s subordinate social
status in US society is indicated by the language women use, as well as in the language used about
them. She identified a number of linguistic features which she claimed were used more often by
women than by men, and which in her opinion expressed uncertainty and lack of confidence.

Example 2

1. Lawyer: What was the nature of your acquaintance with the late Mrs E. D.?

Witness A: Well, we were, uh, very close friends. Uh she was even sort of like a mother to me.

2. Lawyer: And had the heart not been functioning, in other words, had the heart been
stopped, there would have been no blood to have come from that region?

Witness B: It may leak down depending on the position of the body after death. But the presence of
blood in the alveoli indicates that some active respiratory action had to take place.

The speech of the two female witnesses in example 2 contrasts in that witness A uses features of
what Lakoff labelled ‘women’s language’, while witness B does not.

Exercise 1

Consider the following sentences. Put F beside those you think were said by a woman, M beside
those you think were said by a man and F/M beside those you think could have been said by
either.

(a) Close the door.

(b) That’s an adorable dog.

(c) Oh dear, the TV set’s broken.

(d) I’ll be damned there’s a friend of mine!

(e) I was very tired.

(f) Won’t you please get me that pencil?

(g) They did the right thing didn’t they?

(h) You’re damn right!

(i) I was just exhausted.

(j) My goodness, there’s the Prime Minister!

(k) I was so mad.

(l) Damn it, I’ve lost my keys!

Features of ‘women’s language’

Lakoff suggested that women’s speech was characterised by linguistic features such as the
following.

(a) Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.

(b) Tag questions, e.g. she’s very nice, isn’t she?

(c) Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really GOOD.

(d) ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.

(e) Precise colour terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.

(f ) Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much.

(g) ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.

(h) ‘Superpolite’ forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphemisms.

(i) Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.

(j) Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance.

Example 3

‘The final syntactic category is imperative constructions in question form, which are defined as
alternatives to simple and direct ways of ordering action. They are questions which are substituted
for commands. “Will you please close the door?” instead of “Close the door” is an example of an
imperative in question form.’

This quotation illustrates the kind of statement which betrayed lack of linguistic expertise among
these early investigators of Lakoff’s claims about women’s speech. No linguist would describe ‘will
you please close the door?’ as an imperative construction, and the expression ‘imperative
construction in question form’ confuses form and function. (It is an interrogative construction
expressing directive function.) Yet this was not untypical. Many of the categorisation systems
devised by non-linguists to measure features of ‘women’s language’ seem rather odd or arbitrary to
linguists. Another study, for instance, made a distinction between ‘fillers’ and ‘hedges’, with sort of
classified as a hedge, while well and you see were described as ‘meaningless particles’ and assigned
to the same category as ‘pause fillers’ such as uh, um and ah. But this is a complicated area where
form alone is never an adequate guide for classification, and function and meaning need careful
analysis.

Nor did Lakoff claim her list was comprehensive. But because they ignored the underlying functional
coherence which unified Lakoff’s list of features, many researchers treated it as definitive. The
internal coherence of the features Lakoff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two
groups. Firstly, there are linguistic devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of
an utterance. Secondly, there are features which may boost or intensify a proposition’s force.
Researchers who recognised this functional unifying factor included in their analysis any form which
had a hedging or boosting effect on an assertion.

Exercise 2

Allocate as many as possible of the features in the list provided by Lakoff ( Features of ‘women’s
language’) to one of the following columns.

Features which may serve as:

Hedging devices Boosting devices

Example 4

Lawyer: And you saw, you observed what?

Witness C: Well, after I heard – I can’t really, I can’t definitely state whether the brakes or the
lights came first, but I rotated my head slightly to the right, and looked directly behind Mr Z, and I
saw reflections of lights, and uh, very very instantaneously after that I heard a very, very loud
explosion – from my standpoint of view it would have been an implosion because everything was
forced outward like this, like a grenade thrown into the room. And, uh, it was, it was terrifically
loud.

Witness C is a male witness who uses a relatively high number of hedges and boosters. These
researchers suggested the forms be relabelled ‘powerless forms’ to emphasise a point made by
Lakoff herself, that the patterns she had noted were characteristic of the speech of the powerless
in society rather than of women exclusively. (It is also worth noting that one could argue the
witness was simply being cautious about his claims.)

Lakoff’s linguistic features as politeness devices

1. express uncertainty

Susan is a university student. She is telling her friend and flatmate about her experiences at
school.

I did my exams in sixty-three, was it.

2. an easy entrée into a conversation

Margaret is holding a small party to introduce a new neighbour, Frank, to other people in the street.
She introduces Frank to an old friend, Andrew.
Margaret: Andrew this is our new neighbour, Frank. Andrew has just changed jobs, haven’t you.

Andrew: Yes I am now a well-paid computer programmer instead of a poorly paid administrative
assistant.

3. makes it easy for the child to participate

Mrs Short is a primary school teacher working with a group of 5-year-olds. They are preparing for a
nature walk by looking at pictures of birds, flowers and leaves that they hope to see on their walk.

Mrs Short: Here’s a pretty one what’s this one called Simon?

Simon: Mm, erm [pause]

Mrs Short: See its tail, look at its tail. It’s a fantail, isn’t it?

Simon: Mm a fantail. I seen one of them.

4. soften a directive or a criticism

Zoe and her mother Claire have just come home from the supermarket. Zoe empties the
shopping basket all over the kitchen floor.

Claire: That was a bit of a daft thing to do, wasn’t it?

5. as confrontational and coercive devices

A police superintendent is interviewing a detective constable and is criticising the constable’s

performance:

A: . . . you’ll probably find yourself um before the Chief Constable, okay?

B: Yes, Sir, yes, understood.

A: Now you er fully understand that, don’t you?

B: Yes, Sir, indeed, yeah.

Table 12.1 Distribution of tag questions by function and sex of speaker

Function of tag Women Men

% %

Expressing uncertainty 35 61

Facilitative 59 26

Softening 6 13

Confrontational – –

Total 100 100

N 51 39
Exercise 3

Using the contextual information together with the information provided on intonation, how would
you characterise the functions of the tags in the following examples?

(a) The teacher is talking to Sam, a pupil who is looking at a picture of a butterfly in a cocoon in a
book:

Teacher: What’s this called Sam?

Sam: No answer.

Teacher: It’s a cocoon, isn’t it?

(b) Conversation in kitchen between flatmates:

Thomas: This isn’t Bridget’s egg beater, is it?

Michael: No, it’s ours. We still haven’t found hers.

(c) Older child ‘tutor’ to younger child who is reading to her:

Fran: That’s not right, is it? Try again eh.

(d) To visitor who has called in for a chat with a group of neighbours:

Sally: Ray had some bad luck at the races yesterday, didn’t you Ray?

(e) One friend to another in a relaxed conversation at her home:

Fiona: But then it would pass on to the rest of your family, wouldn’t it?

Jim: No, not necessarily.

Interaction

Example 5

‘A good guiding dinner party principle is given by Mrs Ian Fleming. She says that guests can be
roughly divided into “shouters” and “listeners”, and the best assortment is three shouters to five
listeners.’

Despite the widespread stereotype of women as the talkative sex, and proverbs which characterise
women as garrulous (‘Women’s tongues are like lambs’ tails; they are never still’), most of the
research evidence points the other way. In a wide range of contexts, particularly non-private ones
such as television interviews, staff meetings and conference discussions, where talking may
increase your status, men dominate the talking time.

Interruptions

Example 6
Wanda: Did you see here that two sociologists have just proved that men interrupt women all
the time? They –

Ralph: Who says?

Wanda: Candace West of Florida State and Don Zimmerman of the University of California at
Santa Barbara. They taped a bunch of private conversations, and guess what they found. When two
or three women are talking, interruptions are about equal. But when a man talks to a woman, he
makes 96 per cent of the interruptions. They think it’s a dominance trick men aren’t even aware of.
But –

Ralph: These people have nothing better to do than eavesdrop on interruptions?

Wanda: – but women make ‘retrievals’ about one third of the time. You know, they pick up where
they were left off after the man –

Ralph: Surely not all men are like that Wanda?

Wanda: – cuts in on what they were saying. Doesn’t that –

Ralph: Speaking as a staunch supporter of feminism, I deplore it Wanda.

Wanda: (sigh) I know, dear.

Ralph here illustrates a pattern for which there is a great deal of research evidence. The most
widely quoted study, and the one referred to by Wanda in example 6, collected examples of
students’ exchanges in coffee bars, shops and other public places on a tape-recorder carried by
one of the researchers. The results were dramatic. In same-gender interactions, interruptions were
pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-gender interactions, almost all the
interruptions were from males.

These researchers followed up this study with one which recorded interactions in sound- proof
booths in a laboratory. The percentage of male interruptions decreased to 75 per cent in this less
natural setting, but there was no doubt that men were still doing most of the interrupting. In
other contexts, too, it has been found that men interrupt others more than women do. In
departmental meetings and doctor–patient interactions, for instance, the pattern holds. Women
got interrupted more than men, regardless of whether they were the doctors or the patients. In
exchanges between parents and children, fathers did most of the interrupting, and daughters were
interrupted most – both by their mothers and their fathers. And a study of pre-schoolers found that
some boys start practising this strategy for dominating the talk at a very early age. Women are
evidently socialised from early childhood to expect to be interrupted. Consequently, they generally
give up the floor with little or no protest, as example 7 illustrates.

Table 12.2 Average number of interruptions per interaction

Interruptions

Same-sex interaction
Speaker 1 43

Speaker 2 57

Cross-sex interaction

Woman 4

Man 96

Example 7

A conversational interaction between a man and a woman.

Woman: How’s your paper coming?

Man: Alright I guess. I haven’t done much in the past two weeks.

Woman: Yeah. Know how that G can J

Man: [Hey] ya’ got an extra cigarette?

Woman: Oh uh sure (hands him the pack) like my G pa- J

Man: [How] ’bout a match

Woman: ’Ere ya go uh like my G pa- J

Man: [Thanks]

Woman: Sure. I was gonna tell you Gmy-J

Man: [Hey] I’d really like ta’ talk but I gotta run – see ya

Woman: Yeah.

(The words within the square brackets were uttered simultaneously.)

Table 12.3 Turns speaking time, and interruptions in seven staff meetings

Speaker Average turns Average no. Average Average

per meeting of seconds ‘did interrupt’ ‘was interrupted’

per turn per meeting per meeting

Woman A 5.5 7.8 0.5 3.0

Woman B 5.8 10.0 0.0 3.0

Woman C 8.0 3.0 1.0 3.2

Woman D 20.5 8.5 2.0 7.5

Man E 11.3 16.5 2.0 2.6

Man F 32.3 17.1 8.0 6.7

Man G 32.6 13.2 6.6 6.3

Man H 30.2 10.7 4.3 5.0

Man I 17.0 15.8 4.5 2.5

Feedback

Example 8

Mary: I worked in that hotel for – ah eleven years and I found the patrons were really really you
know good

Jill: Mm.

Mary: You had the odd one or two ruffian’d come in and cause a fight but they were soon dealt
with.

Jill: Right, really just takes one eh? To start trouble.

Mary: Yeah, and and it was mostly the younger ones

Jill: Mm.

Mary: that would start you know.

Jill: Yeah.

Mary: The younger – younger ones couldn’t handle their booze.

Jill: Mm.

Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is the evidence that
women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than men do.

Explanations

In an interesting range of this research, it seems to be gender rather than occupational status,
social class or some other social factor which most adequately accounts for the interactional
patterns described. Women doctors were consistently interrupted by their patients, while male
doctors did most of the interrupting in their consultations. A study of women in business
organisations showed that women bosses did not dominate the interactions. Males dominated
regardless of whether they were boss or subordinate. The societally subordinate position of
women indicated by these patterns has more to do with gender than role or occupation. For this
data at least, women’s subordinate position in a male-dominated society seems the most obvious
explanatory factor.

The linguistic construction of gender

The final section considers ways in which individuals draw from a range of linguistic resources to
construct particular social identities, including gender identity. We generally treat gender as ‘given’
and unalterable, automatically classifying every person we encounter as female or male without a
moment’s reflection. Sometimes, however, our assumptions are challenged and we have to re-think.

Example 9

Helen describes her daughter’s attempt to learn to swim.

Helen: she looked like a goldfish you (laughs) know there’s a little head a – a rolling in the water
(laughs) and legs sort of sagging in the water and breaststroking away you know

One of the more obvious ways in which people construct particular kinds of social identity is
through their narratives of personal experience. In answer to a question about her father’s health,
one woman, Helen, gave her friend an account of what she had been doing all day, including the
information that she had visited her father. Helen’s long story constructs a very conservative
gender identity for herself. She recounts that she had taken her children swimming, encouraged
her younger daughter’s attempts to swim (example 9 is a snippet from the story), persuaded her
oldest daughter to cook her grandfather’s lunch, and put her own needs consistently last. The
identity constructed is ‘good mother’ and ‘dutiful daughter’. The discourse style is characterised by
interactive pragmatic particles such as you know and you see, appealing to shared experience,
hedges like sort of and even rather ‘feminine’ adjectives such as cute, little and sweet to describe her
daughters. In other contexts, however, Helen constructs a more contestive and less conformist
gender identity. At work, for instance, where she is a senior manager, she often challenges ideas
she disagrees with, using a very assertive discourse style characterised by very few hedges and
unmitigated direct questions.

In recounting her story, Helen constructs not only her own gender identity, but she also presents
very ‘gendered’ identities for her daughters. Example 9 presents Helen’s youngest daughter,
Andrea, as a sweet little girl, gamely swimming along with her admiring mother alongside. Andrea
wasn’t present when the story was told, but 4-year-old Ian was part of the audience in the next
example.

Example 10

June and Mike are Ian’s parents. Mary is his auntie who is visiting them after work.

Mary: Hi Ian what have you been up to today?

June: Oh he’s been just terrible (laugh). Unbelievable. First he emptied all the kitchen cupboards
before we were even out of bed – absolute chaos with everyone rushing round trying to get ready
for work – pans and soap powder all over the floor. (General laughter) Then he got himself into the
bathroom and what does he do? He empties all my expensive bubble bath into the bath with the
water running. So we’ve got bubbles everywhere – the bathroom was just full of soap (laugh). Mike
nearly broke his neck just trying to switch off the tap. He’s just too much – a real monkey (laugh).

Mike: (Laugh) Yes he’s a real little rascal – a real bad lad – eh Ian!

The linguistic construction of sexuality

Sexist language

Language conveys attitudes. Sexist attitudes stereotype a person according to gender rather than
judging on individual merits. Sexist language encodes stereotyped attitudes to women and men. In
principle, then, the study of sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both
negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. In practice, research in this area has
concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative attitudes to women.

Can a language be sexist?

Feminists have claimed that English is a sexist language. At first sight, it may seem odd to suggest
that a language rather than its speakers are sexist. Sexism involves behaviour which maintains social
inequalities between women and men.

Example 11

The chicken metaphor tells the whole story of a girl’s life. In her youth she is a chick, then she
marries and begins feeling cooped up, so she goes to hen parties where she cackles with her friends.
Then she has her brood and begins to hen-peck her husband. Finally, she turns into an old biddy.

Animal imagery is one example of an area where the images of women seem considerably less
positive than those for men. Consider the negativity of bitch, old biddy and cow, compared to stud
and wolf. Animal imagery which refers to men often has at least some positive component (such as
wiliness or sexual prowess). Birds are widely regarded as feather-brained and flighty! Even the more
positive chick and kitten are sweet but helpless pets.

Women may also be described or referred to in terms of food imagery, which is equally insulting.
Saccharine terms, such as sugar, sweetie, honey, are mainly, though not exclusively, used for
addressing women. Less complimentary terms such as crumpet and tart, however, are restricted to
female referents. They illustrate a common evolutionary pattern in the meaning of words referring
to women. Terms which were originally neutral or affectionate eventually acquire negative
connotations as they increasingly refer only to women and as their meanings focus on women as
sexual objects. By contrast, there appears to be less food imagery which is appropriate for referring
only to men, though there are insulting terms such as veg and cabbage, and, according to one 11-
year-old, parsnip, which may be used to abuse girls or boys!

Many words reinforce a view of women as a deviant, abnormal or subordinate group. For example,
English morphology – its word-structure – generally takes the male form as the base form and
adds a suffix to signal ‘female’: e.g. lion/lioness, count/countess, actor/actress; usher/usherette;
hero/heroine; aviator/aviatrix. This is true for a number of other European languages, such as
French and German, too. The male form is the unmarked form, and therefore, it is argued, implicitly
the norm. The use of an additional suffix to signal ‘femaleness’ is seen as conveying the message
that women are deviant or abnormal.

Example 12
Mountainland ecosystems are fragile, and particularly vulnerable to the influence of man and his
introduced animals . . . Life in the mountains is harsh. Storms are common, and temperatures are
low . . . Into this scene comes man, with his great boots, ready to love the mountains to death.

Man loves to hunt. He sees it as a tradition and a right. He believes that deer herds should be
managed so he, and his son after him, can hunt them. He cannot understand his brother’s claim that
deer diminish the range of plants. After all, his brother couldn’t name a single plant that deer had
made extinct.

The use of man as a generic form has a long history. But its generic use is no longer acceptable
to many English speakers because this meaning has become overshadowed by its masculine
meaning. Others avoid it as clumsy or misleading for the same reason: man has become
increasingly ambiguous between the generic and the masculine meaning. In a sentence such as
Man loves to hunt, for instance, readers may be genuinely unsure whether women are meant to be
included or not.

Some writers adopt the strategy of using he and she in alternate chapters or even in alternate
paragraphs. Others use she consistently as a generic ‘to even things up’ or draw attention to the
sexist implications of using he. (Note this is interesting evidence that people are not just passive
language users; some demonstrate ‘agency’ or active engagement with language for social and
political reasons.) Generic they is by far the most widespread solution, and it has been used by well-
established authors including Shakespeare, Chesterfield, George Bernard Shaw and Doris Lessing. It
was opposed virulently by some nineteenth-century grammarians who were delighted when an Act
of Parliament in 1850 legislated that in all acts ‘the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to
include females’. Nevertheless, they is nowadays the most frequently heard generic pronoun in
informal speech, and it is spreading to more formal contexts too, as indicated above. Its use is not
always problem-free, however, as the following example illustrates.

Example 13

Someone who, like me, is trying to eliminate gender-laden pronouns from their speech altogether
can try to rely on the word ‘they’, but they will find themself in quite a pickle as soon as they try to
use any reflexive verbal phrase such as ‘paint themselves into a corner’, and what is worse is that no
matter how that person tries they will find that they cannot extricate themself gracefully, and
consequently he or she will just flail around, making his or her sentence so awkward that s/he
wis/hes s/he had never become conscious of these issues of sexism. Obviously using ‘they’ just takes
you out of the frying pan into the fire, since you have merely exchanged a male–female ambiguity
for a singular– plural ambiguity. The only advantage to this ploy, I suppose, is that there is/are to my
knowledge, no group(s) actively struggling for equality between singular and plural.

Exercise 4

The following examples are based on material from textbooks and a newspaper. Translate the
sentences below into non-sexist terms?

(a) Alone among the animals man uses language to communicate.

(b) ‘Speech’ wrote Benjamin Lee Whorf ‘is the best show man puts on’ . . . Language helps man
in his thinking. The average student might hear 100,000 words a day. If he has a modest reading
speed he would cover 90,000 words a day. He could easily be exposed to three quarters of a billion
words a year. And anyone could easily increase that if he wanted.

(c) Man has been civilized for centuries. He no longer needs to hunt for food for his women and
children.

(d) The two Oxford Union debaters most ably supported by a woman debater from Victoria made
entertaining contributions.

(e) The pioneers who established the farms of this country, who toiled together with their wives
and children to break in the land, knew little of what was happening in the towns.

Exercise 5

(a) Job adverts in New Zealand may not specify the gender of the required employee unless
aspects of the job require the attributes of a particular gender: e.g. wet-nurse, sperm-donor. Do you
think that the suffix -man could be regarded as generic in such adverts, or is it an example of sexist
language? Consider postman, milkman, fireman, salesman, foreman, warehouseman, storeman.
What alternatives would you suggest?

(b) Do you consider phrases like master plan, master key, to man the desk and a princely sum to
be sexist? Why (not)?

(c) Can a woman be addressed as dude? mate? bro? If not, could these be considered examples of
sexist address terms or are they simply sex-specific like girl and sheila?