Group items tagged

"The women reported giving 37% more apologies than the men did... The diary data suggest that women offer more apologies than men do because women have a lower threshold for what constitutes offensive behavior... [T]here was no gender difference in how men and women apologized." A comprehensive study, unfortunately not available online, although this post is pretty detailed.

Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer, two linguists who have been studying the Disney princess franchise, have discovered that, in the average "modern" Disney princess movie, male characters have three times as many lines as women in Disney princess movies. Though Snow White has a nearly equal split, Cinderella actually features more women, and Sleeping Beauty gives almost three-fourths of the lines to women. On the other hand, The Little Mermaid has 68% of lines delivered by males, Beauty and the Beast males have 71%, Aladdin males have 90%, Pocahontas males have 76%, and Mulan males have 77%. Fun Fact: Frozen has two heroines, but women still have only 41% of the lines.

In a 2011 survey, Renee Engeln, Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and a colleague found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk - despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another, 2014 survey, she canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman's practice, she found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes of women. Engeln notes that fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Engeln also found that fat talk was contagious. She ran an 2012 experiment where young women, "confederates" secretly working for the researchers, joined two other young women seated at a table to discuss magazine advertisements. The ads started out innocently enough. One was for an electronics store. Another was for a water purifier. But the third was a typical fashion ad showing a model in a bikini. In the control condition, confederates commented on the visuals in the background of the fashion ad, but avoided any mention of the model or her appearance. In the "fat talk" condition, the two confederates (neither of whom was overweight) commented on the model. One said: "Look at her thighs. Makes me feel so fat." The other responded: "Me, too. Makes me wish my stomach was anywhere near flat like that." Then it was our subjects' turn. In the control condition, when neither of our confederates engaged in fat talk, none of our subjects fat talked. But when our confederates engaged in fat talk, almost a third of the subjects joined in. These subjects also reported higher levels of body dissatisfaction and shame at the end of the study than did their counterparts in the control condition.

the micro-nuances of their speech patterns, and how voters, and viewers, hear them - can also provide a fascinating window into how we perceive authority and who occupies it. Women and men tend to have different speech patterns, linguists will tell you. Women, especially young women, tend to have more versatile intonation. They place more emphasis on certain words; they are playful with language and have shorter and thinner vocal cords, which produce a higher pitch. That isn't absolute, nor is it necessarily a bad thing - unless, of course, you are a person with a higher pitch trying to present yourself with some kind of authority. A 2012 study published in PLoS ONE found that both men and women prefer male and female leaders who have lower-pitched voices, while a 2015 report in a journal called Political Psychology determined, in a sample of U.S. adults, that Americans prefer political candidates with lower voices as well. Lower voices do carry better, so that's not entirely without basis, said the linguist Deborah Tannen.

"Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like "bitchin' " and "ridic," or the incessant use of "like" as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity. ... But linguists - many of whom once promoted theories consistent with that attitude - now say such thinking is outmoded. Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang ... the idea that vocal fads initiated by young women eventually make their way into the general vernacular is well established."

The idea that men and women use language differently is conventional wisdom-appearing everywhere from Cosmo and Glamour to The Journal of Psychology and Anthropological Linguistics. Recent research, though, suggests that the most important variable is not the sex of the person doing the talking, but that of the person being spoken to.

Essay/study by Deborah Tannen: "So the key to why having sisters makes people happier - men as well as women - may lie not in the kind of talk they exchange but in the fact of talk. If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier." See also discussion on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2739 (they advise us to be wary of overstating the significance of the results)

Language is not static but dynamic, constantly evolving to suit the fashions of the time and this results in shifts in pronunciation and pitch. In the UK, for instance, far fewer people talk with "received pronunciation" these days - and even Queen Elizabeth II's voice has lost some of the cut-glass vowels of her youth. This is thought to reflect a more general shake-up in Britain's social hierarchies, leading to a kind of linguistic cross-pollination between the classes that has even reached Her Majesty. Women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.

In Donald Trump's 2005 hot mic conversation with entertainment reporter Billy Bush, he confessed to kissing women and grabbing their genitals without their consent. I've previously noted how Trump, on the campaign trail, will often use the rhetorical strategy of reification (which comes from the Latin word for thing, res, and in this context means "to thingify") as a way to trivialize the humanity, dignity, needs or opinions of those with whom he disagrees. In his defense, Trump employed several rhetorical strategies: denial ("I didn't say that [I sexually assaulted women] at all"); bolstering, a strategy speakers use to associate themselves with something or someone that the audience views positively ("I respect women and women respect me"); differentiation, which speakers use to reframe what the audience already understands (It was just "locker room talk"); and transcendence, or arguing that the issue isn't really that big of a deal (We need to "get on to much more important things and much bigger things").

This article talks about how new meanings for words have been created by women such as "spring cleaning"

This study explores the use of filler words through the lens of gender. Filler words are more commonly associated with women due to the "valley-girl" stereotype. However, these researchers found that, while filler words were used more frequently by women in the past, men use tend to use more filler words than women present-day. This paper discusses how the shift in gender roles and social dynamics between the genders contributes to speech patters.

That's the conclusion of new research from the UK's Cambridge University Press, which has looked at the way we talk about men and women in sport. Analyzing over 160 million words from decades of newspapers, academic papers, tweets and blogs, the study finds men are three times more likely than women to be mentioned in a sporting context, while women are disproportionately described in relation to their marital status, age or appearance.

You know when you're searching for a word, or trying to say something more nicely than you actually mean it, or trying to make up your mind after you've already started speaking? Whether you reach for an "um" or an "uh" in those situations might depend on whether you're male or female. Our verbal pauses actually speak volumes: "Like," as eighth-grade English teachers will tell you, makes the speaker sound young or ditzy; "sort of" smacks of uncertainty. But according to the linguist Mark Liberman, who works at the University of Pennsylvania and blogs at Language Log, even a difference as subtle as the one between "um" and "uh" provides clues about the speaker's gender, language skills, and even life experience.

From drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans, the folk poetry called landay reflects Afghan life. Landay are two-line, 22-syllable poems in the oral tradition. The form is thousands of years old, thought to come from the caravan trains that arrived in the region in approximately 2,500 BC. Contemporary Afghan women are composing landay as a form of rebellion. Reporter Eliza Griswold studied these contemporary poems and discovered a complex world of rage, empowerment, sorrow and sex.

In the mid-1970s, sociolinguist John Gumperz was summoned to Heathrow International Airport to help make sense of an odd culture clash. The new hires in Heathrow's employee cafeteria (mostly women from India and Pakistan) and some of the baggage handlers at the airport - had grown to openly resent each other. Why? One word: gravy. British women cafeteria employees said the word with a rising intonation - gravy? - that was understood as "Would you like some gravy?" The Indian and Pakistani women, however, said it with falling intonation - gravy. That came across as, "This is gravy; take it or leave it." A mere surface intonational difference, yet the cause of major social misunderstanding.

Maltz and Borker argue that "American men and women come from different sociolinguistic subcultures, having learned to do different things with words in a conversation, so that when they attempt to carry on conversations with one another, even if both parties are attempting to treat one another as equals, cultural miscommunication results." Their article also provides a literature review of various studies examining male-female miscommunication. Here's the synopsis of the differences discovered in female vs. male conversation. Women generally 1. Display a greater tendency to ask questions. 2. Tend to facilitate and elicit interaction more. 3. Make greater use of positive minimal responses, e.g. "mm...I see", and insert them mid-conversation. 4. More likely to adopt a "silent protest" response to interruption 5. Greater tendency to use the pronouns "you" and "we", explicitly acknowledging the presence of the other. In contrast, men are 1. More likely to interrupt 2. More likely to challenge or dispute their partners' utterances 3. more likely to ignore the comments of the other speaker, that is, to offer no response or acknowledgment at all, or respond reluctantly 4. Utilize more mechanisms for controlling the topic of conversation 5. more likely to make direct declarations.

Researchers found that people tend to rate discoveries that came about "like a light bulb" as more exceptional than those that are "nurtured like seeds." These two metaphors are often used to describe scientific discovery and what we perceive as genius. Along with them come ingrained, subconscious associations that may have unintended consequences, according to a study published Friday in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Also, those metaphors had different effects depending on the gender of the idea's creator.

Sex-based differences in the form of English compliments and in the frequencies of various compliment response types are discussed. Based on a corpus of I,062 compliment events, several differences in the form of compliments used by women and men are noted. Further, it is found that compliments from men are generally accepted, especially by female recipients, whereas compliments from women are met with a response type other than acceptance.