Chapter: “The Display of (Gendered) Identities in Talk at Work,” by Deborah Tannen
IN: Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse, edited by Mary Bucholtz, A. C.
Liang, and Laurel A. Sutton, Oxford University Press, 1999.
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce a new approach to understanding gender,
language, and power. She merges her own approach to gender and hierarchical relations with
Goffman’s (1974) theoretical construct of ‘framing.’ Tannen’s main points of argument are as
follows:
 Linguistic strategies are both ambiguous and polysemous
 Framing is the best way to understand language and gender; it involves simultaneously
balancing the dimensions of status and connection
 Status and connection are orthogonal
Sex-class-linked framing
It is impossible to disentangle biology and environment: “It’s logically, mathematically,
philosophically impossible to pull them apart,” says Stephen Jay Gould. The distinction between
gender (culturally constructed differences) and sex (biologically-created differences) just
reinforces a false ideology. Tannen prefers Goffman’s idea of “sex-class-linked” ways of talking.
Sex class is the class of women or the class of men. These are social categories. The biological
categories are “women” and “men.” This allows her to say that the association between sexclass-linked ways of talking is real, but it does not mean that every individual in the class will
exhibit those behaviors.
Another of Goffman’s terms that Tannen appreciates seems relevant for the click paper.
He talks about alignment. He says:
Displays don’t communicate in the narrow sense of the term; they don’t enunciate
something through a language of symbols openly established and used solely for
that purpose. They provide evidence of the actor’s alignment in the situation. And
displays are important insofar as alignments are.
Alignment, then, is a kind of framing. By talking in particular ways, speakers display their
attitudes toward interlocutors, the situation, and the material being talked about. Bronwym
Davies and Rom Harré (1990) call this positioning: how ways of speaking demonstrate and
create the context and the relationships among speakers.
Tannen believes that the best way to look at language and gender is to observe how the
interaction is framed (in Goffman’s terms, what alignments speakers are taking up; in Davies and
Harré’s terms, how speakers are positioning themselves with respect to the situation), and then
ask where men and women tend to fall in this framing. She reports a couple of studies:

Frances Smith (1993) looked at the sermons of 4 women and 10 men in a preaching lab at
a Baptist seminary. One woman and 4 men “foregrounded” their authority. They put
themselves “on record” as authorities and called attention to the fact that they were in the
position of authority, interpreting the text for the audience. The other 3 women
‘backgrounded’ their authority.

Elisabeth Kuhn (1992) examined classroom discourse of professors at American and
German universities. The female professors were more assertive in giving their orders at
the beginning of the semester, which was initially surprising. Upon closer inspection,
though, she discovered that the women were talking in terms of “the requirements of the
course” as if they were handed down directly from the university, whereas the men
tended to say “I have 2 midterms and a final. And I added this first midterm rather early
on to get you going on read so that you will not fall behind.” She concluded that women
often create and display their authority in ways that downplay rather than emphasize it.
Status and Connection
Tannen proposes a multidimensional model of status and connection:
hierarchy
closeness
distance
equality
Americans tend to put business relations in the upper right quadrant, and family and close
friendships in the lower left. In contrast, Japanese, Chinese, and Javanese tend to put professional
relationships in the lower right, and intimate family relationships in the upper left.
Workplace Examples
Using portions of transcribed office conversations, Tannen shows the differences in the
ways men talk to men and women talk to women. Her points are as follows:
Man to man: When the boss (John) begins the chat with a vulgar term (he calls his
computer a shitburner), the subordinate (Dan) feels free to follow up with another vulgar term.
John makes a passing comment about a bad computer, and Dan offers a complaint about his own.
John then moves into “fix-it” mode, which Dan responds to as a grilling. After several turns, Dan
breaks the tension by offering a little challenge, as a joke, to which John responds. Then, to
restore another balance, Dan shifts the conversation abruptly to John’s previous stomach ailment.
While this is initially confusing to John, he immediately goes along with it. They speak in a
graphic way and John concludes by saying he’s glad he didn’t have a girlfriend around, because
that would have been worse. Tannen interprets this conversation as a dance of power. After
having suffered the grilling, Dan wants to subordinate John in a way, so he focuses on John’s
embarrassing physical ailments. When John goes along with this and discusses them in detail, he
is treating Dan as an equal. MY note was about the pronouns. It was very very striking! When a
speaker was in a subordinate position, the transcript was loaded with “I” while the dominant
speaker used “you.”
Woman to woman: Three women were talking, and a mail clerk enters the room and says
hello. One of the 3 women (Tina) is the office manager and daughter of the company’s owner,
therefore she has the greatest amount of power. When the mail clerk (June) enters, Tina stops the
conversation she was having and immediately focuses on June’s hair and clothing,
complimenting her furiously. The other women join in the compliments, too, in hierarchical
order. The woman of the lowest rank (Janice) says the least, and only restates what the others
have said.
Tannen notes that the man-man conversation is characterize by vulgarity; play challenge;
displays of helping, expertise and needing no help, and bonding against women. The womanwoman conversation is characterized by lengthy complimenting; focus on clothing and shopping;
balancing of display and gaze; and expressive intonation. She suggests that imagining either
conversation taking place among speakers of the other gender would be hilarious. She says that
these patterns are typical patterns found among men and women in the workplace.
Tannen’s main point is that it is impossible to single out status and connection as
individual variables. They intertwine and are constantly present, and men and women have
different patterns of navigating this interplay.
References
Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Kuhn, Elisabeth D. (1992). Playing down authority while getting things done: Women
professors get help from the institution. In Kira Hall, Mary Bucholtz, & Birch Moonwomon
(eds.), Locating power: Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Women and Language Conference.
Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group, 318-325.
Mühlhaüsler, Peter, & Rom Harré (1990). Pronouns and people: The linguistic
construction of social and personal identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.