Men vs. Women
Language
Zimmerman and West
 Zimmerman and West created the
Dominance and Different theory. In the
following slides, we will show that some
parts of their theory is true, and some is
false.
Women gossip, men ‘talk shop’
 There is a widespread belief that women
talk more than men, yet research findings
consistently contradict this. Men have
been shown to talk more than women in
a settings.
 When asked to describe three pictures,
male subjects took on average 13.00
minutes per picture compared with 3.17
minutes for female subjects (Swacker
1975).
 Women are more ready to let other
speakers into the conversation or to allow
another speaker to dominate the discussion.
 Women send out and look for signs of
agreement and link what they say to the
speech of others. They are careful to
respect each other's turns in speaking and
tend to apologise for talking too much.
 Women are generally co-operative and noncompetitive.
 A study of children at play in a Philadelphia
street (Goodwin: 1980; 1988; 1990) found
that girls tended to use mitigated directives,
i.e. when they wanted to get the group to do
something they used suggestion rather than
a direct command.
 However, this study was created in 1990;
times have changed since then, and women
have more rights and are more out-spoken.
So what does this tell us?
 This information tells us that Zimmerman and
West’s subjects were of the norm as men were
more dominant and women are seen as the
weaker sex; from when they are young girls,
they hesitate to make demands and instead
make suggestions. The researchers all create
their theories after Z&W’s, and their research
mostly agrees with Z&W.
Men
 Boys tend to have more hierarchically
organised groups than girls and speech
is often used to assert dominance.
Goodwin's study found that boys used
aggravated, or explicit directives to get
what they wanted, e.g. 'Get off', 'Gimine',
'I want'. This type of command
establishes status differences.
 Men tend to jump from topic to topic,
vying to tell anecdotes about their
achievements. They rarely talk about
their feelings or their personal problems.
This is because men are ‘men’. They don’t
need to talk about feelings or their
problems; they can handle them on their
own without any help because they are
‘men’ and so are strong. This could be
taken from the ideology of past years of
which men are the leaders and should
show no weaknesses.
 Men compete for dominance, with some
men talking a lot more than others. They
don't feel the need to link their own
contributions to others. Instead, they are
more likely to ignore what has been said
before and to stress their own point of
view.
What does this tell us?
 From young ages, boys are thought to be
more dominant; they make demands and
use directives to get what they want.
 They use anecdotes to show that they
are the best and have achieved
something proudly.
So what happens between
mixed-sex conversations?
 Lack of Communication is one of the
most frequently given reasons for
breakdown of marital relations.
 Traditionally, it has been seen as the
woman's responsibility to initiate
conversations on topics likely to be of
interest to men, and to maintain the
conversation.
 Pamela Fishman taped daily conversations
of three young American couples (fifty-two
hours of speech). She found that women
asked the vast majority of questions: 263 out
of a total of 370. This may reflect women's
relative weakness in interactive situations:
they exploit questions and answers in order
to force a response and keep the
conversation going.
 In mixed-sex conversations men interrupt
women more, with the result that women
are less able to complete their turns at talk
and tend to talk less.
 As a result, men tend to dominate topics of
conversation and women tend to take on
the role of listener.
 This information all supports Z&W’s theory
that men are more dominant in mixed-sex
conversations, and are more likely to
interrupt than women.
Our Results
In our first recording, we found:
 The male was more dominant in conversation than
females, including having control of the
conversation topic, and interrupting three times.
 Even though the male was the most dominant, the
older woman did make an attempt to interrupt him
and take control of the conversation. This could
show that women do have the power to interrupt
and control, but prefer to just listen and follow the
rules of turn-taking most of the time.
 However, there are other factors that may
influence why men seem to interrupt more
than women. For instance, age and
experience, personalities as well as interest
in the conversation.
 Zimmerman and West may have used
subjects of the same age with the same
likes.
 In other conversations we recorded, men
interrupted and overlapped the same
amount in conversations with each other, as
they did in mixed sex conversations.
However in just male conversations they did
not make an attempt to change the subject
of the conversation, as they did in the mixed
sex conversations.
 This could show men want to link to other
males’ contributions but contradict or
challenge women’s, and want to attempt to
have control with women.
 In a conversation with just females, turntaking was more apparent, as they all
listened to each others responses more.
 However, they did overlap sometimes
when they wanted to agree with a point
the woman was making. However it was
normally done in a supportive way.