Actually, men and women are both from earth

Today's Chronicle Review has an interesting brief piece on a new book about language differences between men and women (I think it's pay-only, so my apologies if you're not a subscriber). Pace Deborah Tannen, in The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? (Oxford University Press, 2007), Deborah Cameron, a professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford argues that in fact, the idea that men and women speak different languages is "one of the great myths of our time." Instead, she demonstrates that differences in language patterns result much more from social position and what one does in society - which is often gendered - than directly from gender itself.

For instance, it is more likely to be the case that women will be in the frontline customer-service jobs and men will be in high-level decision-making jobs. There are numerical tendencies in who does what in the workplace, and those will have some kind of effect on how people talk. It's not gender directly having an effect; it's what people are doing in what level of the hierarchy. So if women and men are doing the same things, you don't find there's a men's style and a women's style. You find that there are perhaps distinguishable styles, more direct and no-nonsense versus more collaborative, but men and women both span the whole spectrum.

I must confess that I read this and went, Thank GOD someone's finally researched this! Because this argument makes much more sense to me than the idea that we're completely hard-wired for difference. (Not that I don't think that there isn't hard-wiring involved in differences between men and women. But we can never actually get at that hard-wiring outside the gendered expectations of our own society anyway.)

I was also very relieved to read:

Perhaps the most enduring [myth] is that women talk more than men, which is repeated endlessly and sometimes with actual numbers. There's never been any evidence to support this, and now there is quite full evidence to show that it isn't so. There's a lot of evidence that in more formal situations where status is a factor, it tends to be men who talk more than women — not because they're men, but almost certainly because the real correlation is the status.

Now, as a medievalist, I find this fascinating, because one of the most persistent (and misogynistic) assumptions about women in the Middle Ages is that they talk too much. They chatter, they gossip (did you know that "gossip" comes from the Middle English godsib, meaning godparent / god-related?), they run on at the mouth, they can't keep secrets - in short, they can't be controlled. They might not be stronger or more physically powerful than men, but by God, can they talk.

(This also makes me think about modern research about who gets called on more in the classroom, boys or girls; I read once that when one teacher decided to keep very careful track of who she called on, and made sure that she called on boys and girls in equal numbers, after a few days the boys in her classroom erupted in protest at how unfair it was that she was calling on the girls all the time!! This article included a great line to the effect that to the boys, equality was perceived as a loss. So I have to think that in a society in which women aren't actually supposed to speak, at least authoritatively, to men - medieval Christians knew their 1 Timothy 2:12 - any instance of women's speech is going to seem excessive.)

Along these lines, it was also really interesting to see this part of the Q & A (the Chronicle's question is in bold):

I love the anecdote in the book about the women in Papua New Guinea: When they get annoyed with their husbands, they deliver long, angry monologues for their neighbors to hear. Could that work for the rest of us?

Women can be obscene and abusive in all cultures, but I think the difference is, we tend to think of those women as taking on masculine attributes. Whereas people in Gapun [a village in Papua New Guinea] believe that screaming abuse for 45 solid minutes is exactly what women do. So it's a different set of beliefs about what's appropriate for men and women.

Because the thing is, that screaming abuse for 45 solid minutes (hypothetically speaking) also seems to have been what women did in medieval Europe. At least, given contemporary prosecutions for scolding, which was a crime for which people - that is, women - were prosecuted, especially in the later Middle Ages. (This and this are good studies of the phenomenon.) Scolding seems to have been something that women did, to men and to other women, and far from being seen as masculine, it was just another nail in the coffin of women's inferiority - because again, it was a flaw inherent to women that they talked, and that they talked irrationally, uselessly - like scolding. It sounds like Cameron's suggesting that women in Papua New Guinea employ their monologues to good effect, to shame their husbands into acting according to their wishes, and that there isn't a social stigma attached to so doing. In the Middle Ages, there was a social stigma, at least given that communities were willing to prosecute women for being scolds. I wonder, though, if communities only prosecuted women as scolds with whom they disagreed. If a woman berated her husband for being useless, and the rest of the community agreed with her, was she a scold?

In fact, I'm not so sure that screaming abuse for 45 minutes is actually seen today as masculine. What about the stereotype of the fishwife? Where else does the adjective "shrill" come into play? I suppose if you're talking about Donald Trump dressing-down a subordinate, it's masculine. Maybe that's what the women of Papua New Guinea are doing. But in a western context, in which we still suffer the legacy of medieval misogyny, isn't screaming at your husband one of the few things that a woman has enough power to do?

Comments

[Aven]

If you're interested in the modern variants on the "talkative women" myth -- and how pseudo-science is used to support utter nonsense -- you should look at the blog Language Log. Specifically, any of the posts about Louise Brizendine, like this one: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003419.html
or about talkativeness:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003419.html
The authors of the Language Log have been tearing apart the pseudo-science on linguistic differences between women and men; they point out that most of the 'facts' that are quoted are either completely made up, result from statistical ignorance, or grossly over-interpreted.

You may already know the site, of course.

[wolfa]

Besides the constant harping on this topic from the Language Loggians (especially Mark Liberman), Suzette Haden Elgin (http://ozarque.livejournal.com) also writes about it regularly.

Not all of her posts are categorized, but the ones that are:

http://www.livejournal.com/tools/memories.bml?user=ozarque

Offhand, they'd be under various forms of linguistics (Tannen, Englishes, gender and language, language and gender), but you can probably google some also. She links a lot to language log for this topic, too.

The point is really that lots of people have researched it, and it's been researched for a long time. But the results are never front page news; when they are, the results are obfuscated to sound like they say something entirely different.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

What, you mean the Chronicle is behind the times in reporting on this research? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked! ;-) I'll have to check out those links, thanks!

[helen]

Great post, New Kid. I look forward to clicking through all the links and reading all this stuff myself.

[Belle]

I'm not surprised that equality is perceived as a loss for boys. Equality is also seen as a loss in much of American culture and seems to be perpetuated in popular culture. I wonder if there is significant research that supports that.

[Historiann]

This is a great post. Words like "scold" and "shrill" imply that the person speaking doesn't actually have any authority to upbraid or correct anyone else. Little wonder they're used to describe angry women's speech, not angry men's speech. In my own research, I kept finding the word "insolent" and "insolency" used by English colonists in describing Indian speech, which similarly suggests that any utterance from an Indian is an absurd presumption of authority rather than words that need to be respected and heeded.

About Deborah Tannen--my impression wasn't that she argued that the differences she found were hard-wired, I thought she had a feminist cultural understanding of the origins of the differences she found. More important and interesting, though, are the questions you raise--why is an angry woman merely a "scold," but an angry man someone we need to pay attention to? Why is equality perceived as a loss of status for men? (I suppose because it IS a loss of status!)

[Richard Scott Nokes]

New Kid, I find this post excessively long, and your tone scolding. Tsk. Just like a woman.

Now please excuse me, I've got to go remove my tongue from my cheek.

[Susan]

NK, thank you for this. But you left out the punishment for scolds -- ducking, or even the scold's bridle, or brank. They were disruptive of community peace, and therefore they really needed to be punished. And if anyone is inclined to trivialize the punishments, there's a brank in the Museum of London, and you really would not want to walk around with that on your head.

Of course the flip side of this is the implicit power of this unsanctioned speech.

[Notorious Ph.D]

I'm glad you brought up Venomous Tongues -- I just finished reading it, and I'm fascinated by the recent spate of research on women and speech -- and the linked phenomenon of speech as violence.

Really, we *must* get together and chat with each other sometime. (Because, you know, that's what we women do best, right?)

[nicola]

Language difference is largely gendered--not sexed. Gender is about power, sex about biology. Pretty different. Mind you, even those language differences that are 'sex-based' e.g. some brain pathways, the thickness of the corpus collosum and so on, can result from gender, that is, the social feedback that encourages/discourages variants on behaviour. It's all fascinating stuff.

And, oh, hello. /waving/ I'm new to this blog. I found myself here via twisty and looping byways (I'm writing a novel set in the 7th C. and am surfing every medieval blog I can find.)