Language Does More: “women”
Picture the type of language that is most typically used in a business setting. What communication style would you use when pitching an idea to a board, or asking for a raise?
It’s safe to assume that most people would adopt an assertive way of speaking that can clearly convey what they are looking to accomplish. However, this style of speaking does not come naturally to everyone. Because of the gender roles imposed on boy and girls as they grow up, men and women often wind up having very different communication styles.
According to Linguist Deborah Tannen in this Harvard Business Review article, because of the different ways that children are socialized to use language: “...women and men tend to have different habitual ways of saying what they mean, and conversations between them can be like cross-cultural communication: You can’t assume that the other person means what you would mean if you said the same thing in the same way.” In other words, because of these different communication styles, there is likely to be more misunderstandings between men and women, as they often do not say their ideas in the same way.
Being aware of how socialization impacts our speech patterns can make a world of difference in understanding what someone is trying to say, and being willing to listen and be patient when others communicate differently can help bring all sorts of new perspectives into the workplace.
Take these two sentences for example: one person says something along the lines of “I’m not sure about the direction we are going, I was wondering if you think it would be a good idea to try this instead”. Similarly, a different person could say, “I don’t like the direction we are going, and we should do this instead”. Both phrases mean the same thing, but if a man were to say one and a woman were to say the other, which phrase would belong to who? Based on the research from Tannen, most people would say that a woman would say the first one, as women, linguistically, tend to be more indirect and polite, while a man would say the second, as men are often more direct and forward.
It goes without saying that these gendered speaking patterns are not universal, but they do reveal some general ideas about the way that we interact with one another, and uncover the possible areas miscommunications stem from. And as it turns out, there is some statistical truth to men and women generally using more (or less) of certain linguistic speech patterns. When people with different communication styles converse, there are bound to be issues that arise.
And because the workplace has been historically male, it’s no surprise that communication issues at work often follow people who have a more feminine communication style. Consider what' you’ve been taught about “professionalism”: how does a professional person speak? Are they direct or indirect? Are they assertive or conciliatory? are they confident or questioning?
Language is, in some ways, the final frontier of overt gender bias in the workplace: we want women in leadership roles, but generally, the corporate world still strongly prefers that they “sound” like men — or have adopted a masculine communication style.
For example, the idea of the “double bind”, introduced by Janet Holmes and Maria Stubbe in their book Power and politeness in the workplace: A sociolinguistic analysis of talk at work from 2006. The “double bind” is the idea that the “male” speech pattern is the default in the workplace, and women in the workplace are trapped in the “double bind” where they are perceived as weak if they appear feminine, but are seen as aggressive if they are too masculine. Because of this, women are doing double the linguistic work to both change their speech style away from being too “feminine”, while also making the effort not to come off as abrasive.
2006 may seem like a lifetime ago, but todays leaders were early in their careers at that time…being trained and influenced within the linguistic framework Holmes and Stubbe describe.
When it comes to women in the workplace, the question most organizations ask is this: “how do we train women to become good leaders?” But linguistics tells us to ask different, BETTER questions: “What do we expect leaders to sound like? Is this expectation inclusive? Can women at our organization be themselves and become C-suite leaders? Or do we require that women who become leaders sound like men?”
I hope this article inspires you to pause and question the way you’re training (or being trained as) female corporate leaders. The next time you hear, “be more confident” or “stop apologizing", consider how language bias might be contributing to professional development at your organization.
