feminist linguistic theory
For those interested in feminism, linguistics or both, here's a summary of my latest read on the topic. It's Language and gender: making the difference, by Cate Poynton, OUP, 1985. I've found it quite interesting, so I thought I'd share.
Cate Poynton - Language and gender: making the difference
Chapter one. Language and the social construction of gender
Introduction
Contemporary feminism has focused much attention on the issues of socialisation into gender roles and of sexist discourse. Implicit meanings are undoubtedly more effective, insofar as they remain unquestioned and hence unproblematic. Feminists, in particular, have questioned social attitudes and social practice concerning gender. Feminists have seen women's interests as consistently subordinated to those of men, women's personalities systematically distorted in the service of the subordination, women's capacities underrated or denied, their desire for autonomy frustrated and ridiculed, their sexuality denied, feared, and exploited, and their image trivialised and sentimentalised.
The basis of such denial of the problematic nature of gender is usually that male and female are seen as natural, God-given categories; the social category of gender seen as deriving automatically and exclusively from the biological category of sex.
Sex: identification as female or male (biological). Gender: identification as feminine or masculine (social).
If gender is a social creation, then one should be able to find evidence that this is so, including evidence of the process of its creation and linguistic evidence. Difference is simply assumed, with no awareness of the extent to which adult behaviour creates that difference. 3 consequences of this differentiation in society: (1) Institutionalised inequality/inferiority of women, where they have been denied their right to the engage in certain activities and their activities and their very selves denigrated and trivialised. (2) Institutionalised channelling of human diversity along two paths: female and male. (3) Institutionalised hostility between male and female.
These issues are of importance to all members of society, but esp. to parents and educators.
Language and the making of meaning
Much of the discussion of language in relation to sexism has focused on words (lexis). Such an approach is inadequate: it does not get to grips with the real issues of language in relation to gender, and it makes it very easy for the whole matter to be trivialised.
Linguistic structures
Language can be considered in terms of grammatical structure (lexico-grammar), physical substance (phonology, graphology), construction of texts (discourse).
Higher level semiotics
There are three kinds of constraining factors, each of which will be regarded here as a semiotic (meaning-making) system in its own right: register, genre and ideology. These systems do have meanings of their own, but have no means of expression: they have to 'borrow' linguistic forms in order to realise their meanings.
Understanding the meaning involves knowing what the words refer to, understanding how what is said relates to the context in what it's said (register meanings), what the goal of purpose of the talk is (genre meanings) and what beliefs and values are implicated (ideological meanings).
The first semiotic plane above language is register. The concern of register is with what Malinowski called context of situation: institutional context (field), relationship between speaker and addressees (tenor), and what channel (mode). Field is realised by experiential choices, tenor by interpersonal choices, and mode, by textual choices.
Halliday: the text is the basic unit of meaning. There is a kind of structuring of texts whereby they go somewhere in terms of having a beginning-middle-end structure, and in terms of having a goal or point.
Genres are the structures or staged ways of getting things done by means of language in a particular culture. They are identifiable by means of the particular linguistic choices that realise their elements of schematic structure (beginning-middle-end structure). Some of these realisations are characteristic, but most of them will be probabilistic. Genres are not only realised directly by language: they may also be realised through register.
Ideology: beliefs, attitudes, and values are at the heart of ideology. Most expressions of attitude or evaluation which may be explicit or take the more implicit form of denying, or attempting to discredit, meanings that threaten the status quo.
Ideology deals in evaluation, probably always in relation to binary oppositions such as female/male, capitalism/socialism, war/peace; in its dynamic aspect it involves favoured genre, register and language choices in relation to particular issues. It is not merely a matter of coherent system of ideas, or 'false consciousness', or any other political or sociological account of ideology. No culture, and no individual within a culture, functions without ideology.
Language and the construction of reality
'Speaking the same language': manifestations of personality. Something much larger than a particular skill, shared between speakers; a whole world-view, a set of beliefs about the way things are and ought to be (in particular about things knowable and things sayable), a body of knowledge about what is real and what isn't. Language plays a crucial role in the construction of the shared view of reality held by speakers of a common language in three interrelated ways:
1. By naming aspects of the physical and social reality speakers inhabit that are seen as significant in a particular culture,
2. Through the ways of speaking that are characteristic of a particular culture, insofar as they make possible the enactment of social institutions and social values,
3. Through covert grammatical categories, particularly when these form congruent sets (grammatical conspiracy).
Naming reality
Naming is essentially a matter of lexis. A gap, or hole, involves the total absence of any kind of lexical item referring to a particular aspect of experience. Some gaps seem to be quite accidental and arbitrary. Some gaps only open up under changed circumstances. Others only begin to be seen as gaps when resistance to the pressure of a powerful ideology begins to bring about the questioning of the status quo. Thus, aspects of social reality that come to be perceived as oppressive by those who are oppressed may come to be named by them.
Kress and Hodge: naming leads to familiarity with, and easier classifications and memory of, what is named; but only what has some name can be shared. What we habitually do say becomes what we see.
Experiment: anger/fear: classification of female and male that habitually as associate certain attributes with one gender but not the other. Such habitual associations are coded linguistically.
Ways of speaking
Halliday: ordinary spontaneous conversation has the power of constructing and organising social situations, and creating and modifying the structure of reality. He demonstrates how the actual linguistic choices are realisations of acts of meaning that are the realisation of choices at some higher level, somewhere in the semiotic systems of the culture.
Bernstein: differential access to meaning dependent on class and the educational of consequences of this.
Covert grammatical categories
Whorf: cryptotypes: hidden or covered grammatical features related to aspects of the culture.
Martin: grammatical conspiracies: sets of categories which cumulatively oriented speakers in a certain direction.
Kress and Hodge: English does not have an overt category of gender but it does have a covert category revealed in ways such as:
1. Pronoun choice with reference to certain common nouns (e.g. countries, ships, and some cars are she). Antecedents of he tended to be strong, active, brave, wise, clever and mischievous, while antecedents of she tended to be weak, passive and foolish.
2. Adjective choice with reference to males or females, or products associated with them: feminine or masculine valency.
3. Personal names, familiar or diminutive forms of words.
Halliday: Society, language and mind are indissoluble; society creates mind, mind creates society, and language stands as mediator and metaphor for both these processes.
Male vs. female: the ideology of gender
The nature and genesis of ideology
Ideology: the body of ideas characteristic of a particular society or sub-culture.
Kress and Hodge: ideology is a systematic body of ideas, organised from a particular point of view.
Smith: cosmology: set of beliefs concerning how things are. Identical with world-view. Not merely knowledge but also value and attitude systems.
Marx: ideology is that systematic distortion in the service of class interest, which functions to legitimate power relations based on class.
The identification of such apparently biologically based categories as gender, and presumably also race, as sources of ideology is important for understanding the social construction of reality. The naturalness and inevitability of power relations based on class is a construct of ideology as a legitimating mechanism.
The form of ideology
Ideology is a process of ideologising, the process of creation of meanings within a society characterised by certain patterns of control. Ideological meanings emerge out of particular power configurations. They mirror the society back to itself to reinforce its own identity. When the power configuration is challenged, ideology becomes visible as ideology. What becomes visible will be a pattern derivable from a myriad instances of meanings being made to fit a particular kind of social organisation, a pattern involving some kind of opposition or dichotomy and an evaluation of the terms of that dichotomy such that one term is more highly valued than the other.
Male: reason, active, instrumental, knowledge, competence, action, culture.
Female: emotion, passive, expressive, ignorance, incompetence, speech, nature.
The evaluation proceeds in two stages. There is an absolute evaluation, which on the whole values more highly the terms associated with the male by seeing these as fundamental to Western culture. The second layer of evaluation is a conditional one, valuing the terms associated with the female only insofar as these are not set up as counter-values challenging the ascendancy of the dominant values.
In personal terms, conditional evaluation means that a subordinate group is only evaluated positively insofar as it lives out its subordination in the ideological terms that have been set up for it.
Sexism: the ideology of gender as inferiorization (attitudinal and actual) of women with respect to men.
Ideological structures are merely formalisations of patterns of behaviour characteristic of a particular society. As long as individuals participate in the institutions of that society, they must perforce act ideologically. Hence as long as the four key structures of women's situation (production, reproduction, sexuality and the socialisation of children) remain substantially unchanged, the ideological meanings of man and woman will remain unchanged. Those meanings arise in the first instance from the activities of men and women including, most importantly, their talk about themselves and each other, and the activities of both.
Chapter 2. Using language to achieve social goals
Introduction
Genre needs to be examined first because it deals with the question of goals, with what are recognised and socially sanctioned as possible ends or purposes within a particular society. In being socialised into particular cultural identities, involving nationality, ethnicity, class, and gender, individuals learn the set of genres that are available to them and appropriate for them in terms of that national/ethnic/class/gender identity. And in learning the genres, they learn what are possible goals for them.
In the case of gender, the blocking of access has often been quite blatant. In our society (as in most), access to and participation in prestigious genres, and consequently evaluation of genres themselves and of genre performance, has historically been determined largely by class and by gender. Where women are recognized as having competence in a genre, that genre will tend to have lower prestige or to be distinguished in some way that enables it to be taken less seriously or even pejoratively. Even more seriously, some genres in which women do have competence are not even recognised as such: they are in effect invisible. An adequate characterisation of all the genres would involve specifying their internal organisation as staged activities having a schematic structure.
The world of home and informal interaction
Girls are sensitised to, and socialised into, the interactive genre of conversation at a very early age while boys are likely to be less developed in this respect. Everyday conversation is crucial in the construction and maintenance of social reality in terms of what is made explicit but also in terms of what is simply taken for granted. Both these kinds of saying, the explicit and the implicit, need to be mastered if the genre itself is to be mastered, and the construction of the self as part of the social reality that is in a constant stage of reconstruction is an inevitable consequence of such learning.
The response of some males to what they would designate 'women's talk' topics can range from verbally deriding such choices to refusing to participate in any discussion involving feelings, to the extreme response of getting up and walking out of the room. Such behaviour is obviously important in reinforcing the negative self-image many women have of themselves and in socialising girls and boys from a very early age into such negative evaluations of women and women's talk.
Males and females use conversation differently. Maltz and Borker: while women use conversation primarily for negotiating and expressing a relationship (interactionally), men use conversation as display. For males, getting and holding the floor is of prime importance, while for females it isn't. What's problematic is getting and keeping people engaged, maintaining the conversation and the interaction. The consequence is male-female miscommunication, since the verbal strategies and different interpretations of the same strategies lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
Women seem to be the obvious losers in that their conversational goals and strategies are consistently devalued by males and in that in interaction with males they regularly suffer the indignities of being talked over and at. In developmental terms, learning to interact cooperatively is hardly the kind of verbal skill needed to function successfully in positions of power and influence in our society. If women do succeed in these positions, which involves mastering the kind of talk that is necessary to do the job, then the final touch is that their womanliness or femininity is called into question. If one values cooperative talk, however, then men who only participate in 'performance' talk are the losers.
The world of school
The family is the first major social institution that all but a few children experience. School is the second. Both these institutions, as experienced by children, have profound effects on their gender identities. By the age of 4, children have a firm knowledge of sex identity and are well able to perceive distinctions of gender role.
Teachers, teaching, knowledge and gender
As one progresses up the education hierarchy from kindergarten to university the following observations can be made:
1. A steadily decreasing number of teachers are women.
2. Specialisation of knowledge steadily increases and specialised knowledge is considerably more prestigious.
3. The preferred mode choice for teachers steadily shifts from dialogue to monologue.
4. Though the relationship of teacher to students remains one of more powerful to less powerful, the basis of the teacher's power shifts from authority to expertise, ie, comes to be based on knowledge rather than control.
What is probably involved is a set of closely related teaching or instruction genres rather than a single genre. Teaching at these different levels differs in terms of specific field, tenor and mode choices. The goal of all teaching would seem to involve the administration of rites of passage that have to be successfully negotiated by students if they are to enter into the adult world with particular degrees of standing.
There seems to be a set of connections between specialised knowledge, high status knowledge, and masculine knowledge, legitimating men as the most appropriate possessors of such knowledge. Control of children is one legitimated area of power for women (though in both family and school, the ultimate authority figure is commonly male).
Women are doubly disadvantaged as authority figures, and bear a double burden as a consequence. Culturally, women are not seen as authority figures and the patterns of interaction they are socialised into are fundamentally cooperative, rather than coercive. Women not only bear the brunt of this psychological stress but also the opprobrium heaped on them because of the truly terrible things that do happen to children in schools. The negative attitudes generated by such experiences are generalised not merely to teachers but to women, and are less often seen as deriving from the nature and organisation of the institution of school itself, much less the ideologies that sustain it.
Teacher-student talk in the classroom
Predominantly boys talk and are talked to. Teachers interact more with boys on every one of the four major categories of teaching behaviour: approval, instruction, listening to the child, and disapproval. Thus, it appears that boys receive more of the teacher's active attention. More open-ended questions are directed to boys and more yes/no questions, to girls. Thus, boys are allowed, more than girls, to develop their verbal abilities as well as their power of self-motivation and imagination. Female silence is exploited by educational institutions and contributes to the over-representation of males and the under-representation of females in those who achieve educational success. Boys' interests must be taken into account in choosing reading materials, themes or topics within subject areas, and even the content of textbooks, because boys will not tolerate 'girls' topics' but girls will not actively protest at 'boys' topics'.
If the education system by and large fails to accommodate female interests and topics, then 3 options are available to women: opt out asap, attempt to beat the males at their own game, or learn about themselves and other women through women's studies courses etc.
It is vitally important for women to start to talk but it is not necessary that we emulate the habits of men. Men talk more, they exert more control over talk, and they interrupt more. Women listen more, are more supportive when they do talk, and have greater expertise in terms of sustaining conversations. It is precisely these qualities which have been neither valued nor acknowledged. It would seem to be preferable if men were to listen more and to be more supportive of the conversation of others.
Children writing
Boys may talk in class, and be approved for it; girls write. Boys and girls differ in what they write (genre) and what their write about (field). In the very early stages of learning to write, these are the predominant genres employed by both girls and boys:
1. Picture description (description of a picture including exophoric demonstrative).
2. Observation/comment (specific observations and optional expression of attitude).
3. Recount (temporal sequence of events without a crisis).
4. Report (descriptions, usually of generic participants). Boys produce more Reports than girls when asked simply to write.
Within the context of primary school, the most highly valued genre is Narrative. What distinguishes the girls' from the boys' texts is that girls produce single Complication-Resolution structures, where boys have a preference for repetitive (serial) structures, which girls almost never produce; and girls write about topics that their teachers can approve of, while boys' topics can and do upset teachers.
The positions of real power and influence in our society need command of genres for which boys' educational experience provides an appropriate preparation and girls' doesn't. Even in terms of the written genre of most significance in secondary and most tertiary education --Exposition (explanations provided in support of a generalisation)-- girls' genre competence at primary school is not merely irrelevant but positively disabling.
Home and school as preparation for what?
That totally blocking access is no longer socially acceptable does not mean that women (and men) who want to move out of traditional roles have it easy. They frequently have to cope with their sexual identity being impugned. And women find that they have to be better than their male colleagues in order to make it at all because women's performance is consistently evaluated as inferior to men's. Even women seem to think that men are better at everything, including female fields. Teachers discount girls' competence and classify it as not genuine ability. Spender: When boys ask the right questions, it shows that they are bright; when girls ask them it shows that they know what is expected of them.
Women as linguistic performers are consistently downgraded by men as well as women; women's talk is gossip or chat, while men's is discussion; women novelists write women's novels, about non-universal people, while men novelists write novels, about universal people; women speaking or writing with passion about controversial issues are shrill and hysterical, epithets seldom applied to men simply because one disagrees with them.
The expectation that women will be actively involved in only some of the major social institutions and marginally involved (if at all) in others means that women are linguistically prepared only for a restricted range of social processes and thereby denied the possibility of organising discourse to achieve the full range of culturally validated goals. Where males feel a lack in genres, leading to the attempt to acquire 'female' genres, then such learning is likely to be seen as extension of the male preserve rather than trespass on the female preserve, unlike the situation of the woman learning a 'male' genre, who is made very conscious that she is an intruder.
Chapter 3. Lexis and gender
Introduction
In English, the distorting effects of gender ideology on language as resource, as system, are most visible and blatant in lexis. But grammar, phonology and discourse do not remain unaffected by sexist ideology.
Personal titles
Asymmetry: while males are identified purely in terms or gender, females are distinguished in terms of their relationship to a male: either as daughter or wife. One possible response is Ms, for 'female'. But there are attempts to incorporate it into the original network (as 'unknown marital status', indicating women living in a de facto relationship, divorced, lesbian, etc), ie, still defining women in terms of marital status. Also for many people Ms has the much more specific meaning of 'feminist', so:
Pronouns
Issue of the masculine pronoun when referring to an unspecified or hypothetical individual.
One cannot draw any conclusions from the fact that languages range in their pronouns systems from those that make no gender distinctions. There is no basis for assuming that language that has grammatical gender is more or less prone to seeing the world through ideological lenses in relation to gender. It all depends on how the system is used.
The rule that the masculine pronoun included the feminine was first formalised in 1746 and in 1850 was enshrined in English law in the Acts Interpretation Act 1850: 'words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females'. Kramer et al: a prime example of the way in which language renders females invisible. Despite the claims made that the generic masculine includes females, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that this is simply not the case.
The next issue concerning pronoun choice involves its use in person if vacation. What pronoun choices are available for referring to a single human being? He, they, he/she, s/he. The 2nd is regarded by many as cumbersome and the 4th, while visually very neat in written English, has no spoken form and no comparable object form linking him and her.
Lexical resources: man and woman
In dictionaries, the ratio of men words to women words is nearly 3:1. In the Roget's Thesaurus, the entry for female is 150% the length of that for male, possibly because of sexually pejorative lexis referring to women. The (linguistically) unmarked term, the linguistic (and cultural) norm, and some fixed and modified forms of this norm represented a departure, a deviation. Supposedly generic man and compounds including it are perceived as male, not as unmarked with respect to gender. Males are simply more visible, creating the presumption that it someone is doing something is likely to be a male and less actually specified as female.
Three important issues concerning the structure of the lexicon. First is the question of asymmetry between male and female, gaps in the lexicon. Women are valued positively when they're young, beloved, married, and the producer/nurturer of children, but negatively when they are sexual, unmarried, verbally aggressive, demanding rights, or aspiring to govern themselves or others. Men are valued negatively when they are either excessively 'masculine' (macho) or insufficiently masculine (effeminate). Otherwise, they're mostly valued positively.
Proliferation of woman as prostitutes: Stanley is right in seeing man as the source of the lexical proliferation: the solidarity of males provides the interpersonal context for the proliferation of lexis about both women and men, as men interpret them ideologically. It would seem that it is not women's behaviour but rather men's fears and fantasies about women's sexuality, and their refusal to take women seriously as other than sexual beings, that has motivated such a consistent pattern of derogation.
Chapter 4. Speaking about men and women
Introduction
The experiential structures focus of this chapter occur in language with 2 degrees of specificity:
1. Relations between 'things' and 'events' may be spelled out in relation to one another in clause structure.
2. Relations between 'things' and 'events' may be handled in a more associational way, realised this attributes of someone or something, in nominal group structure.
Field
In the construction of texts, structures, and esp. the lexis used in them, cluster in characteristic configurations that signal that speakers are acting within or reflecting upon certain fields: portions of socially constructed experience recognised as discrete portions by members of that culture, commonly institutionalised to the extent of having a name (e.g. athletics, music) or maybe even to the extent of being identifiable as a formally constituted social institution (e.g. government, education).
The socially constructed world functions by distributing or restricting access to roles and activities in relation to what are regarded as relevant social characteristics such as age, gender, class, etc. One can expect this to show up linguistically in terms of differences in what people talk about, and how people are talked about.
Fields of discourse tend to differ for men and women and as a consequence of this topics of conversation (one manifestation of field) differ, as well as grammatical structures (the means by which field and topic, and women and men themselves, are talked about). Many fields are identifiable as male or female on the basis of both acknowledged and unacknowledged restricted access (discrimination) and on the basis of what people say. Sport, local government, the stock market, economics, wine, administration, etc. are seen as male. Women's fields are domestic and personal, e.g. reproduction, human relationships, child rearing, domestic work. On the whole they do not have an elaborated technical lexis, control of which is a necessary prerequisite to claim expert status in society.
The most obvious manifestation of field is topic, and there is plenty of evidence that women and men do talk about different topics. Eakins and Eakins: men's greatest conversational interests seem to be business and money, followed by sports and amusements. Women's leading topics were men and clothes. Persons played a smaller part in men's talk.
Grammatical structure: the nominal group
Men and women are talked about differently, not only in terms of the characteristic roles, activities, and objects associated with them on the basis of the fields that there noun to be involved in and that are perceived as appropriate for them to engage in (which will come out as lexical differences, worse characteristic of the associated with, and seen as, female and male), but also in terms of differences in the perceived centrality or marginality of the participation in the affairs of the world (which will come out as grammatical differences, particularly involving participant roles in clause structure).
Lexical choice in relation to gender: women are frequently primarily characterised in terms of their appearance, their marital status, and their fecundity.
Animate human nouns are used to refer to people. Many of these, particularly occupational and professional labels, are commonly said to be unmarked for gender or of common gender. In fact they are covertly male: the habit of indicating by some linguistic marker when a woman is being referred to is so pervasive that the absence of such an indicator is taken to mean that the referent is a man. Thus the male is linguistically unmarked, the linguistic norm, and the female is a deviation from that norm. The 3 techniques used to mark feminine gender/femaleness of referent are: the addition of a suffix to the noun, using a word explicitly marking the reference as female (woman, girl, etc.), and using a word implicitly marking the referent as female (pretty, brunette, emotional, etc.).
1) Suffix: the most common is -ess: actress, hostess. -Ette: generally pejoratively: usherettes, suffragettes, bachelorettes.
2) Explicit word (classifiers): woman doctor, lady lawyer, female attendant. They indicate a subclass of the group referred to. Implication that the group itself is basically male.
3) Implicit word (epithet): the epithet (premodifying the head in terms of what like rather than what kind, as classifiers do). Classifiers are commonly nouns. Epithets are characteristically adjectives.
Nominal groups referring to persons, then, are hardly neutral with respect to gender. If the referent is male then that fact is likely to be indicated using one or more of the linguistic resources available, and if femaleness is not marked the assumption will be that the referent is male.
Why does it matter that female referents must be identified as such? And what is the effect of the various kinds of marking? The basic issue seems to concern power. Eakins and Eakins referred to the weakening, diminishing or trivialising effect of feminine suffixes such as -ess or -ette: the male terms carry the suggestion of added power of competency, and adding a feminine marker ending may detract from connotations of potency that such a word normally evokes in people.
Interpersonal meanings habitually spread themselves through linguistic structures. Women are always liable to be represented as if they're characters from a Mills and Boon romance, but one does have a choice with men, even within the pages of the romance.
Grammatical structure: the clause
This same issue of power and powerlessness emerges clearly at clause rank in relation principally to the question of agency: whether or not one is presented as doing or being done to, as causer of actions/event or merely acted upon, what one is presented as acting upon, whether events are presented as occurring with or without agency.
On agent deletion (achieved by using passive rather than active forms and deleting the agent): women as agents, esp. in creative activity, may tend to be deleted. Men as agents may also be deleted, when what they might otherwise be held responsible for is politically sensitive or ideologically uncomfortable.
Shuster: passive forms are more common if females are speaking or referred to, with respect to certain verbs of sexual or courting activity (e.g. 'she was picked up (by him) in a bar'); this reflects the female internalisation of culturally expected 'passivity'.
On the likelihood of women and men appearing as agents: in clauses with material (doing) processes, the female participant has things done to her more often than the male, who was more often the doer; where a process was coded as having a causer, the male was more likely to fill this role.
On what the agent has control over: Hellinger: women as agents in clauses involving personal achievement, creative action or some prestigious professional activity were almost non-existent. The largest category involved action directed at a male, the second involved verbs of speaking. Thwaite: as agents, women control clothing and accessories, their own body parts, and many small parts of the domestic environment, but never anything as important as a lease, cash, or a car, all controlled by males.
Chapter 5. Speaking as woman/man
Stereotypes' and interpretations
There is no single stereotype of how women and men talk in this society, but there are a number of stereotypic portraits on the basis of which a few generalisations have been made: women speak better, men swear and use slang more, women and men talk about different things, men tell jokes and women can't, women can smooth over difficult social situations. It is the female who has the more pervasive reputation as a talker. Why, if men talk more? Spender: when silence is considered the appropriate behaviour for women, any talk of a woman engages in can be considered too much!
When it comes to the language actually used, the stereotype is disappointingly vague, suggesting merely some kinds of lexical differences (principally involving the use of slang, swearwords, and possibly euphemisms) and in most general terms, some differences in pronunciation and grammar.
Robin Lakoff: Women (and some men) talk as they do because of their position of relative powerlessness both in the society as a whole and in the context of particular relationships.
Differences between women's and men's speech
The differences in this section concern gender role (or social role mediated by gender) and not gender identity, which is logic conveyed by means that are outside the linguistic system.
There do seem to be linguistic features that are stereotypically associated with men and women, there is a large measure of agreement about the association of such features with one or the other gender, and children learn to associate more and more of such features with the appropriate gender group over time.
Discourse stratum
Interruption: men interrupt women in mixed-sex conversation.
Switching pause: white males have along the course after their turn then do white females in mixed-sex dyads. The pattern is the reverse for black dyads (US).
Topic choice: men may and do reject women's topics in mixed-sex conversation, while women will talk on topics raised by men.
Back-channel noises: women use mm hmm significantly more than men, particularly in woman-to-woman conversations, as signals that the communication channel remains open.
Speech function (speech act) choice and realisation: men use many more commands than women and tend to realise them congruently by means of the mood choice imperative.
Initiating conversations: women tried to initiate conversation more often than men but succeed less often because of the lack of male cooperation.
Lexico-grammatical stratum: grammar
Clause rank
Mood choice
Tags: Lakoff: women use the more than men. For others, no difference.
Modality/modulation: commonly referred to as hedges, i.e. the variety of means by which one can say something a little short of indicating that something categorically is or not the case. Includes modals, modal adverbs, and interpersonal metaphors. Women are supposed generally to use more hedges, a part of the stereotype of tentativeness; also to use more 'super-polite' forms, i.e., multiple modality.
Transitivity choices: process types and participant roles: men and women may make different choices of process type and hence different choices of participant roles.
Terms of address (vocatives): different choices are made by and to men and women.
Sentence length: there is limited evidence that girls produce longer sentences than boys but in adulthood the reverse may be true.
Sentence completeness: Jesperson fault that women left sentences incomplete more often; Haas suggests this may be because women get interrupted more often.
Direct quotation: women are supposed to use direct quotation rather than paraphrase; possibly an indicator of powerless language.
Group rank
Nominal group
Adjective frequency: girls use more adjectives.
Adjective type: considerable evidence that women use evaluative (attitudinal) adjectives more than men. Where an end to use evaluative adjectives, they tend to use different items from women.
Actives of approximation (about, around): women are claimed to use these more than men.
Intensifiers (submodification: so, very, etc.): women are said to use these more.
Possessive constructions: boys use this more.
Word rank
Reduplicated forms: women are reputed to use more reduplicated adjectival forms, like itsy-bitsy and teeny-tiny. Reduplicated hypocoristic forms (pet forms) of personal names, such as Ally-Bally and Stevie-Weave would to be seen by many people as part of baby talk and hence inappropriate for male use.
Lexico- grammatical stratum: lexis
Field range: women and men seem to include different lexical sets in their total repertories, depending on the range and kinds of field they are involved in.
Slang: men at generally supposed to use more slang.
Swearing: even more than slang, this has been regarded as men's territory.
Euphemism: women use them more, especially with reference to sexual matters and bodily functions.
Politeness markers (please-thanks): women are said to use these more than men.
Phonological stratum
Phonological variants: where there are variant pronunciations women tend to use the form with higher prestige more.
Intonation: Women's intonational tones are said to be more dynamic than men's, displaying wider ranges of pitches, more frequent and rapid shifts in pitch, and more frequently ending with a non-falling terminal than men's. This pitch-gender association may be learned extremely early.
Interpreting the differences systemically
Chapter 6. Social relations through grammar
The semiotics of social relations
3 dimensions are needed for an adequate characterisation of the contextual variable tenor. There is the social distance or intimacy dimension called contact and an attitudinal dimension concerned with attitude or emotion towards addressee (or towards the field of discourse) called affect. The 3rd dimension is power. These are all clines or continua. Power ranges from equal to unequal, with the basis of that power deriving from at least one (and maybe more than one) of the factors specified: force involves physical superiority; authority is a function of socially-legitimating inherently unequal role relationships such as parent-child, teacher-child, employer-employee, or ruler-ruled; status is a matter of relative ranking with respect to some unevenly distributed but socially desirable object/standing/achievement, e.g. wealth, profession/occupation, level of education, hereditary status, location of residence, etc.; expertise is a matter of the extent to which an individual has knowledge or skill.
Age, gender and race, familiar sources of power inequality, are not mentioned because they are seen as matters of ideology.
The contact dimension has to take a number of factors into consideration: the frequency of interaction and the extent in time (of the relationship itself and individual communicative episodes) of the contact; the extent of the role diversification --whether people relate to one another in one capacity only, etc. (customer and newspaper seller), or in a wide range of contexts; and finally with the orientation of the interaction is primarily towards persons or towards tasks.
The third dimension, affect, differs from the other two are in that it may be absent, whereas an interaction can always be located and decline somewhere between equal and an equal power, and somewhere between greatest and least contact. Whether or not affect is marked will depend on what kind of power and contact choices have been made: in particular, the subordinate in an unequal power relationship is less likely to choose affect than the superior (lest offence be given or taken), while in interactions characterised in terms of greatest contact, i.e. intimacy, effect is expected (specifically, positive affect; negative affect between intimates is culturally frowned upon). If affect is present, the primary choice is between positive and negative, and in terms of either the relationship as a whole or an individual episode.
The linguistic realisation of social relations
In moving between tenor and language, we know that the principle linguistic systems involved are interpersonal: at clause rank involving mood, modality and modulation, and vocation (the system of address). These systems are utilised to make the kinds of meaning that are regarded as culturally appropriate for different kinds of social relations.
Each of the three tenor dimensions seems to activate somewhat different sets of linguistic choices and to do so with characteristic patterning of realisations. Such patterning can be structural or interactional. For the power dimention, the characteristic realisational pattern is interactional, in terms of the extent of reciprocity of the linguistic choices made. For the dimensions of contact and affect, the characteristic realisationsal patterns are structural, in terms of the principles of proliferation and amplification.
Power is realised primarily in terms of linguistic choices on the discourse stratum and at clause rank within lexical grammar, with the quality or inequality of interactants indicated by the extent of reciprocity of those choices. The greater the equality between interactants, the more likely they are to behave linguistically in parallel or symmetrical ways: equals have an equal right to interrupt one another, to nominate new topics, to take on the role of primary knower or actor, to be definite rather than tentative, to reciprocate address terms that are contextually appropriate for the extent of contact and affect involved.
Contact is realised primarily within lexico-grammar, particularly in terms of lexis but also at all ranks of grammar: clause, group, word and morpheme. Here the extent of the contact is realised in terms of proliferation or the range of options available. Generally the greater the contact, the larger the range of options, and the less the contact, the smaller the range (to the point where fleeting contacts with strangers or people one barely knows are commonly quite ritualised). Affect is realised primarily at group rank and below within lexical grammar and also, most importantly, on the phonological stratum in terms of variation in intonation, rhythm, rate of speech, etc. Here the relevant realisational principle seems to be amplification, generally achieved by the repetition of identical or functionally equivalent elements of structure, increases in the strength of the affect being realised in terms of amount of repetition as well as choice of actual item.
The politics of address
As far as power is concerned, address between males and females in public contexts is asymmetrical.
Key linguistic realisations of the tenor dimensions power, contact and affect
Stratum/rank
Power
Contact
Affect
Discourse
Conversational structure: turn-taking, including length of turn, interruption; primary/secondary actor/doer status; speech function choice.
Lexical cohesion: who controls strings (field/topic choice).
Reference: who refers to whom and to whose discourse, and how. homophora to include/exclude, e.g. name dropping.
Conjunction: who controls/reformulates internal conjunction, e.g. 'Do you mean...?', 'So then?'
Lexico-grammar:
Grammar
Clause
Mood: extent of congruence in relation to speech function choice.
Exclamatives
Presence and extent of modulation/modality.
Ellipsis
Tags
Vocation: reciprocity
Vocation: range of choices
Vocation: attitudinal; amplified structures
Nominal group
Extent and kind of modification: amplified structures; intensification
Word
Truncation (clipping). Suffixation
Suffixation. Reduplication. Infixing (only with expletives in English, e.g. kangabloodyroo)
Lexis
Technical lexis.
Slang
Swearing. Attitudinal lexis
Phonology
Elision
Rhythm. Rate. Pitch
It would seem that women, like children, can be addressed in public with conventionalised intimate forms to a far greater extent than is permissible for men.
Even when reciprocal use of first names occurs between men and women, the form of that choice tends to be different. If the full form of the name is not used, then adult males will generally be addressed with a monosyllabic truncated form of the first name, whereas the form usually used to females all the leads as well as children, will be one with the diminutive suffix -y. The suffixed forms, along with other diminutive suffixes, are commonly used to children of both sexes, but boys come to see them, sometimes at a very early age, as 'girls' names' and reject them. The relevant tenor dimension here is contact: the use of diminutive or hypocoristic forms of names is a matter of increases in intimacy. Why do women retain the more intimate forms into adulthood more than men? Women are culturally defined as more contactable than men: contactable comes to mean sexually available. Diminutive-forming resources have come to be substantially gender-marked and in such a way that 'feminine' forms demean, belittle, and trivialise at the same time as they feminise. Why it isn't it seen as demeaning? Because in Western cultures intimacy (greater contact) is automatically associated with positive affect, they use of suffixed forms of personal names can be claimed to be an indication of friendliness, or affection: as a matter of affect and not of contact, much less power. The second reason (at least in Australian English) is that esp. males use a large number of words with the characteristic diminutive -y ending in every day casual conversation: barbie for barbecue, footie for football, etc. The use of such forms seems clearly related to contact, occurring in and/or being used to create a relatively relaxed informal interaction --the egalitarian mateship theme again. None of these forms has any hint of a trivialising or demeaning flavour.
For males however, the -y suffix, along with the number of other hypocoristic suffixes used in name forms, commonly occurs with the last name rather than the first name. Such forms would seem to achieve a nice balance between friendly camaraderie on the one hand and maintaining a certain distance on the other: asserting at the same time mateship and lack of any conceivable homosexual 'taint'. This is clearly yet another manifestation of the male tendency to interpret intimacy only in a sexual terms.
Endearments are commonly used publicly to women, who may also find themselves addressed by complete strangers in terms of their physical appearance and addressed or referred to a few early as sexual objects (either as people, albeit of little value, or merely as their own sexual organs).
There is a quite extensive lexis of derogatory terms for women as women that is not paralleled by a set denigrating men as men.
Tenor and the ideology of gender
With respect to power it would seem that men are culturally legitimated as powerful and women not. Consequences of this are that relations between males are between those who are seen, and who see themselves, in terms of power. Men can see one another as accomplices or as rivals --or little of both. Relations between women and men in general are culturally defined as between powerful and powerless and this shows up linguistically in a variety of ways. Women have to create new patterns of relating to one another, as well as legitimating those patterns that to have a history but which were so often not taken seriously by either men or women.
In terms of contact, women are culturally defined as contactable, as are children. Relations between men in terms of contact can be friendly (accomplices) but not to close (also rivals). Whereas intimacy for males in English-speaking societies is largely sexual, this is not necessarily so for women.
In terms of effect, the general Western ideological preference is for the logical and rational, rather than the emotional, i.e. affect is seen as culturally suspect.
The pattern of evaluation would seem to be that emotions that involved the exercise of power are respected, while the emotion shown from the powerless position, or that proceeds from a response to situations, rather than an attempt to control them, is less valued. It is culturally acceptable for men to display the 'powerful' emotions, especially anger, but not for women and children to do so: men can be righteously angry, but women merely lose their tempers and children throw tantrums. Even in their relations with children, women's anger can be seen as ineffective and as a legitimate. Women may display all the 'response' emotions, however, and thereby demonstrate their inferiority as human beings.
Epilogue. So where do we go from here?
The basic argument has been that women and men as groups tend to make different selections at all linguistic levels from phonology to genre. Such selections ought to be understood as realising, and hence perpetuating, an ideological opposition between male and female that maintains that the two are different in specifiable ways and which validates the male and his activities as of great importance and value and the female and her activities as of lesser importance and value. The ideology functions as a legitimating mechanism for a particular kind of social organisation in which women and men do not participate on equal terms because they grow up learning to use the same language in different ways for different tense, and as a consequence of this to see themselves as different.
These overall differences can be referred to as speech styles or preferably as coding orientations.
In terms of gender, we can mention the male controlling code and the female responding code, where males aim to control things, events, and most crucially people; and females show much more responsiveness to things, events, and particularly people. The consequences of such a difference in overall orientation are the continued resistance to the inclusion of women in access to real power and the continued marginalisation of those men who are not interested in power or control.
Four options for the future:
1. Leave things as they are.
2. Teach women the male controlling code.
3. Teach men the female responding code.
4. Keep naming the ideology and particularly the practices that realise and sustain it.
A hopeful sign is the fact that the ideology of gender has become partially visible, as a consequence of social change; the traditional coding orientations are now out of step with some aspects of contemporary reality.
Cate Poynton - Language and gender: making the difference
Chapter one. Language and the social construction of gender
Introduction
Contemporary feminism has focused much attention on the issues of socialisation into gender roles and of sexist discourse. Implicit meanings are undoubtedly more effective, insofar as they remain unquestioned and hence unproblematic. Feminists, in particular, have questioned social attitudes and social practice concerning gender. Feminists have seen women's interests as consistently subordinated to those of men, women's personalities systematically distorted in the service of the subordination, women's capacities underrated or denied, their desire for autonomy frustrated and ridiculed, their sexuality denied, feared, and exploited, and their image trivialised and sentimentalised.
The basis of such denial of the problematic nature of gender is usually that male and female are seen as natural, God-given categories; the social category of gender seen as deriving automatically and exclusively from the biological category of sex.
Sex: identification as female or male (biological). Gender: identification as feminine or masculine (social).
If gender is a social creation, then one should be able to find evidence that this is so, including evidence of the process of its creation and linguistic evidence. Difference is simply assumed, with no awareness of the extent to which adult behaviour creates that difference. 3 consequences of this differentiation in society: (1) Institutionalised inequality/inferiority of women, where they have been denied their right to the engage in certain activities and their activities and their very selves denigrated and trivialised. (2) Institutionalised channelling of human diversity along two paths: female and male. (3) Institutionalised hostility between male and female.
These issues are of importance to all members of society, but esp. to parents and educators.
Language and the making of meaning
Much of the discussion of language in relation to sexism has focused on words (lexis). Such an approach is inadequate: it does not get to grips with the real issues of language in relation to gender, and it makes it very easy for the whole matter to be trivialised.
Linguistic structures
Language can be considered in terms of grammatical structure (lexico-grammar), physical substance (phonology, graphology), construction of texts (discourse).
Higher level semiotics
There are three kinds of constraining factors, each of which will be regarded here as a semiotic (meaning-making) system in its own right: register, genre and ideology. These systems do have meanings of their own, but have no means of expression: they have to 'borrow' linguistic forms in order to realise their meanings.
Understanding the meaning involves knowing what the words refer to, understanding how what is said relates to the context in what it's said (register meanings), what the goal of purpose of the talk is (genre meanings) and what beliefs and values are implicated (ideological meanings).
The first semiotic plane above language is register. The concern of register is with what Malinowski called context of situation: institutional context (field), relationship between speaker and addressees (tenor), and what channel (mode). Field is realised by experiential choices, tenor by interpersonal choices, and mode, by textual choices.
Halliday: the text is the basic unit of meaning. There is a kind of structuring of texts whereby they go somewhere in terms of having a beginning-middle-end structure, and in terms of having a goal or point.
Genres are the structures or staged ways of getting things done by means of language in a particular culture. They are identifiable by means of the particular linguistic choices that realise their elements of schematic structure (beginning-middle-end structure). Some of these realisations are characteristic, but most of them will be probabilistic. Genres are not only realised directly by language: they may also be realised through register.
Ideology: beliefs, attitudes, and values are at the heart of ideology. Most expressions of attitude or evaluation which may be explicit or take the more implicit form of denying, or attempting to discredit, meanings that threaten the status quo.
Ideology deals in evaluation, probably always in relation to binary oppositions such as female/male, capitalism/socialism, war/peace; in its dynamic aspect it involves favoured genre, register and language choices in relation to particular issues. It is not merely a matter of coherent system of ideas, or 'false consciousness', or any other political or sociological account of ideology. No culture, and no individual within a culture, functions without ideology.
Language and the construction of reality
'Speaking the same language': manifestations of personality. Something much larger than a particular skill, shared between speakers; a whole world-view, a set of beliefs about the way things are and ought to be (in particular about things knowable and things sayable), a body of knowledge about what is real and what isn't. Language plays a crucial role in the construction of the shared view of reality held by speakers of a common language in three interrelated ways:
1. By naming aspects of the physical and social reality speakers inhabit that are seen as significant in a particular culture,
2. Through the ways of speaking that are characteristic of a particular culture, insofar as they make possible the enactment of social institutions and social values,
3. Through covert grammatical categories, particularly when these form congruent sets (grammatical conspiracy).
Naming reality
Naming is essentially a matter of lexis. A gap, or hole, involves the total absence of any kind of lexical item referring to a particular aspect of experience. Some gaps seem to be quite accidental and arbitrary. Some gaps only open up under changed circumstances. Others only begin to be seen as gaps when resistance to the pressure of a powerful ideology begins to bring about the questioning of the status quo. Thus, aspects of social reality that come to be perceived as oppressive by those who are oppressed may come to be named by them.
Kress and Hodge: naming leads to familiarity with, and easier classifications and memory of, what is named; but only what has some name can be shared. What we habitually do say becomes what we see.
Experiment: anger/fear: classification of female and male that habitually as associate certain attributes with one gender but not the other. Such habitual associations are coded linguistically.
Ways of speaking
Halliday: ordinary spontaneous conversation has the power of constructing and organising social situations, and creating and modifying the structure of reality. He demonstrates how the actual linguistic choices are realisations of acts of meaning that are the realisation of choices at some higher level, somewhere in the semiotic systems of the culture.
Bernstein: differential access to meaning dependent on class and the educational of consequences of this.
Covert grammatical categories
Whorf: cryptotypes: hidden or covered grammatical features related to aspects of the culture.
Martin: grammatical conspiracies: sets of categories which cumulatively oriented speakers in a certain direction.
Kress and Hodge: English does not have an overt category of gender but it does have a covert category revealed in ways such as:
1. Pronoun choice with reference to certain common nouns (e.g. countries, ships, and some cars are she). Antecedents of he tended to be strong, active, brave, wise, clever and mischievous, while antecedents of she tended to be weak, passive and foolish.
2. Adjective choice with reference to males or females, or products associated with them: feminine or masculine valency.
3. Personal names, familiar or diminutive forms of words.
Halliday: Society, language and mind are indissoluble; society creates mind, mind creates society, and language stands as mediator and metaphor for both these processes.
Male vs. female: the ideology of gender
The nature and genesis of ideology
Ideology: the body of ideas characteristic of a particular society or sub-culture.
Kress and Hodge: ideology is a systematic body of ideas, organised from a particular point of view.
Smith: cosmology: set of beliefs concerning how things are. Identical with world-view. Not merely knowledge but also value and attitude systems.
Marx: ideology is that systematic distortion in the service of class interest, which functions to legitimate power relations based on class.
The identification of such apparently biologically based categories as gender, and presumably also race, as sources of ideology is important for understanding the social construction of reality. The naturalness and inevitability of power relations based on class is a construct of ideology as a legitimating mechanism.
The form of ideology
Ideology is a process of ideologising, the process of creation of meanings within a society characterised by certain patterns of control. Ideological meanings emerge out of particular power configurations. They mirror the society back to itself to reinforce its own identity. When the power configuration is challenged, ideology becomes visible as ideology. What becomes visible will be a pattern derivable from a myriad instances of meanings being made to fit a particular kind of social organisation, a pattern involving some kind of opposition or dichotomy and an evaluation of the terms of that dichotomy such that one term is more highly valued than the other.
Male: reason, active, instrumental, knowledge, competence, action, culture.
Female: emotion, passive, expressive, ignorance, incompetence, speech, nature.
The evaluation proceeds in two stages. There is an absolute evaluation, which on the whole values more highly the terms associated with the male by seeing these as fundamental to Western culture. The second layer of evaluation is a conditional one, valuing the terms associated with the female only insofar as these are not set up as counter-values challenging the ascendancy of the dominant values.
In personal terms, conditional evaluation means that a subordinate group is only evaluated positively insofar as it lives out its subordination in the ideological terms that have been set up for it.
Sexism: the ideology of gender as inferiorization (attitudinal and actual) of women with respect to men.
Ideological structures are merely formalisations of patterns of behaviour characteristic of a particular society. As long as individuals participate in the institutions of that society, they must perforce act ideologically. Hence as long as the four key structures of women's situation (production, reproduction, sexuality and the socialisation of children) remain substantially unchanged, the ideological meanings of man and woman will remain unchanged. Those meanings arise in the first instance from the activities of men and women including, most importantly, their talk about themselves and each other, and the activities of both.
Chapter 2. Using language to achieve social goals
Introduction
Genre needs to be examined first because it deals with the question of goals, with what are recognised and socially sanctioned as possible ends or purposes within a particular society. In being socialised into particular cultural identities, involving nationality, ethnicity, class, and gender, individuals learn the set of genres that are available to them and appropriate for them in terms of that national/ethnic/class/gender identity. And in learning the genres, they learn what are possible goals for them.
In the case of gender, the blocking of access has often been quite blatant. In our society (as in most), access to and participation in prestigious genres, and consequently evaluation of genres themselves and of genre performance, has historically been determined largely by class and by gender. Where women are recognized as having competence in a genre, that genre will tend to have lower prestige or to be distinguished in some way that enables it to be taken less seriously or even pejoratively. Even more seriously, some genres in which women do have competence are not even recognised as such: they are in effect invisible. An adequate characterisation of all the genres would involve specifying their internal organisation as staged activities having a schematic structure.
The world of home and informal interaction
Girls are sensitised to, and socialised into, the interactive genre of conversation at a very early age while boys are likely to be less developed in this respect. Everyday conversation is crucial in the construction and maintenance of social reality in terms of what is made explicit but also in terms of what is simply taken for granted. Both these kinds of saying, the explicit and the implicit, need to be mastered if the genre itself is to be mastered, and the construction of the self as part of the social reality that is in a constant stage of reconstruction is an inevitable consequence of such learning.
The response of some males to what they would designate 'women's talk' topics can range from verbally deriding such choices to refusing to participate in any discussion involving feelings, to the extreme response of getting up and walking out of the room. Such behaviour is obviously important in reinforcing the negative self-image many women have of themselves and in socialising girls and boys from a very early age into such negative evaluations of women and women's talk.
Males and females use conversation differently. Maltz and Borker: while women use conversation primarily for negotiating and expressing a relationship (interactionally), men use conversation as display. For males, getting and holding the floor is of prime importance, while for females it isn't. What's problematic is getting and keeping people engaged, maintaining the conversation and the interaction. The consequence is male-female miscommunication, since the verbal strategies and different interpretations of the same strategies lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
Women seem to be the obvious losers in that their conversational goals and strategies are consistently devalued by males and in that in interaction with males they regularly suffer the indignities of being talked over and at. In developmental terms, learning to interact cooperatively is hardly the kind of verbal skill needed to function successfully in positions of power and influence in our society. If women do succeed in these positions, which involves mastering the kind of talk that is necessary to do the job, then the final touch is that their womanliness or femininity is called into question. If one values cooperative talk, however, then men who only participate in 'performance' talk are the losers.
The world of school
The family is the first major social institution that all but a few children experience. School is the second. Both these institutions, as experienced by children, have profound effects on their gender identities. By the age of 4, children have a firm knowledge of sex identity and are well able to perceive distinctions of gender role.
Teachers, teaching, knowledge and gender
As one progresses up the education hierarchy from kindergarten to university the following observations can be made:
1. A steadily decreasing number of teachers are women.
2. Specialisation of knowledge steadily increases and specialised knowledge is considerably more prestigious.
3. The preferred mode choice for teachers steadily shifts from dialogue to monologue.
4. Though the relationship of teacher to students remains one of more powerful to less powerful, the basis of the teacher's power shifts from authority to expertise, ie, comes to be based on knowledge rather than control.
What is probably involved is a set of closely related teaching or instruction genres rather than a single genre. Teaching at these different levels differs in terms of specific field, tenor and mode choices. The goal of all teaching would seem to involve the administration of rites of passage that have to be successfully negotiated by students if they are to enter into the adult world with particular degrees of standing.
There seems to be a set of connections between specialised knowledge, high status knowledge, and masculine knowledge, legitimating men as the most appropriate possessors of such knowledge. Control of children is one legitimated area of power for women (though in both family and school, the ultimate authority figure is commonly male).
Women are doubly disadvantaged as authority figures, and bear a double burden as a consequence. Culturally, women are not seen as authority figures and the patterns of interaction they are socialised into are fundamentally cooperative, rather than coercive. Women not only bear the brunt of this psychological stress but also the opprobrium heaped on them because of the truly terrible things that do happen to children in schools. The negative attitudes generated by such experiences are generalised not merely to teachers but to women, and are less often seen as deriving from the nature and organisation of the institution of school itself, much less the ideologies that sustain it.
Teacher-student talk in the classroom
Predominantly boys talk and are talked to. Teachers interact more with boys on every one of the four major categories of teaching behaviour: approval, instruction, listening to the child, and disapproval. Thus, it appears that boys receive more of the teacher's active attention. More open-ended questions are directed to boys and more yes/no questions, to girls. Thus, boys are allowed, more than girls, to develop their verbal abilities as well as their power of self-motivation and imagination. Female silence is exploited by educational institutions and contributes to the over-representation of males and the under-representation of females in those who achieve educational success. Boys' interests must be taken into account in choosing reading materials, themes or topics within subject areas, and even the content of textbooks, because boys will not tolerate 'girls' topics' but girls will not actively protest at 'boys' topics'.
If the education system by and large fails to accommodate female interests and topics, then 3 options are available to women: opt out asap, attempt to beat the males at their own game, or learn about themselves and other women through women's studies courses etc.
It is vitally important for women to start to talk but it is not necessary that we emulate the habits of men. Men talk more, they exert more control over talk, and they interrupt more. Women listen more, are more supportive when they do talk, and have greater expertise in terms of sustaining conversations. It is precisely these qualities which have been neither valued nor acknowledged. It would seem to be preferable if men were to listen more and to be more supportive of the conversation of others.
Children writing
Boys may talk in class, and be approved for it; girls write. Boys and girls differ in what they write (genre) and what their write about (field). In the very early stages of learning to write, these are the predominant genres employed by both girls and boys:
1. Picture description (description of a picture including exophoric demonstrative).
2. Observation/comment (specific observations and optional expression of attitude).
3. Recount (temporal sequence of events without a crisis).
4. Report (descriptions, usually of generic participants). Boys produce more Reports than girls when asked simply to write.
Within the context of primary school, the most highly valued genre is Narrative. What distinguishes the girls' from the boys' texts is that girls produce single Complication-Resolution structures, where boys have a preference for repetitive (serial) structures, which girls almost never produce; and girls write about topics that their teachers can approve of, while boys' topics can and do upset teachers.
The positions of real power and influence in our society need command of genres for which boys' educational experience provides an appropriate preparation and girls' doesn't. Even in terms of the written genre of most significance in secondary and most tertiary education --Exposition (explanations provided in support of a generalisation)-- girls' genre competence at primary school is not merely irrelevant but positively disabling.
Home and school as preparation for what?
That totally blocking access is no longer socially acceptable does not mean that women (and men) who want to move out of traditional roles have it easy. They frequently have to cope with their sexual identity being impugned. And women find that they have to be better than their male colleagues in order to make it at all because women's performance is consistently evaluated as inferior to men's. Even women seem to think that men are better at everything, including female fields. Teachers discount girls' competence and classify it as not genuine ability. Spender: When boys ask the right questions, it shows that they are bright; when girls ask them it shows that they know what is expected of them.
Women as linguistic performers are consistently downgraded by men as well as women; women's talk is gossip or chat, while men's is discussion; women novelists write women's novels, about non-universal people, while men novelists write novels, about universal people; women speaking or writing with passion about controversial issues are shrill and hysterical, epithets seldom applied to men simply because one disagrees with them.
The expectation that women will be actively involved in only some of the major social institutions and marginally involved (if at all) in others means that women are linguistically prepared only for a restricted range of social processes and thereby denied the possibility of organising discourse to achieve the full range of culturally validated goals. Where males feel a lack in genres, leading to the attempt to acquire 'female' genres, then such learning is likely to be seen as extension of the male preserve rather than trespass on the female preserve, unlike the situation of the woman learning a 'male' genre, who is made very conscious that she is an intruder.
Chapter 3. Lexis and gender
Introduction
In English, the distorting effects of gender ideology on language as resource, as system, are most visible and blatant in lexis. But grammar, phonology and discourse do not remain unaffected by sexist ideology.
Personal titles
Asymmetry: while males are identified purely in terms or gender, females are distinguished in terms of their relationship to a male: either as daughter or wife. One possible response is Ms, for 'female'. But there are attempts to incorporate it into the original network (as 'unknown marital status', indicating women living in a de facto relationship, divorced, lesbian, etc), ie, still defining women in terms of marital status. Also for many people Ms has the much more specific meaning of 'feminist', so:
Pronouns
Issue of the masculine pronoun when referring to an unspecified or hypothetical individual.
One cannot draw any conclusions from the fact that languages range in their pronouns systems from those that make no gender distinctions. There is no basis for assuming that language that has grammatical gender is more or less prone to seeing the world through ideological lenses in relation to gender. It all depends on how the system is used.
The rule that the masculine pronoun included the feminine was first formalised in 1746 and in 1850 was enshrined in English law in the Acts Interpretation Act 1850: 'words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females'. Kramer et al: a prime example of the way in which language renders females invisible. Despite the claims made that the generic masculine includes females, there is a growing body of evidence indicating that this is simply not the case.
The next issue concerning pronoun choice involves its use in person if vacation. What pronoun choices are available for referring to a single human being? He, they, he/she, s/he. The 2nd is regarded by many as cumbersome and the 4th, while visually very neat in written English, has no spoken form and no comparable object form linking him and her.
Lexical resources: man and woman
In dictionaries, the ratio of men words to women words is nearly 3:1. In the Roget's Thesaurus, the entry for female is 150% the length of that for male, possibly because of sexually pejorative lexis referring to women. The (linguistically) unmarked term, the linguistic (and cultural) norm, and some fixed and modified forms of this norm represented a departure, a deviation. Supposedly generic man and compounds including it are perceived as male, not as unmarked with respect to gender. Males are simply more visible, creating the presumption that it someone is doing something is likely to be a male and less actually specified as female.
Three important issues concerning the structure of the lexicon. First is the question of asymmetry between male and female, gaps in the lexicon. Women are valued positively when they're young, beloved, married, and the producer/nurturer of children, but negatively when they are sexual, unmarried, verbally aggressive, demanding rights, or aspiring to govern themselves or others. Men are valued negatively when they are either excessively 'masculine' (macho) or insufficiently masculine (effeminate). Otherwise, they're mostly valued positively.
Proliferation of woman as prostitutes: Stanley is right in seeing man as the source of the lexical proliferation: the solidarity of males provides the interpersonal context for the proliferation of lexis about both women and men, as men interpret them ideologically. It would seem that it is not women's behaviour but rather men's fears and fantasies about women's sexuality, and their refusal to take women seriously as other than sexual beings, that has motivated such a consistent pattern of derogation.
Chapter 4. Speaking about men and women
Introduction
The experiential structures focus of this chapter occur in language with 2 degrees of specificity:
1. Relations between 'things' and 'events' may be spelled out in relation to one another in clause structure.
2. Relations between 'things' and 'events' may be handled in a more associational way, realised this attributes of someone or something, in nominal group structure.
Field
In the construction of texts, structures, and esp. the lexis used in them, cluster in characteristic configurations that signal that speakers are acting within or reflecting upon certain fields: portions of socially constructed experience recognised as discrete portions by members of that culture, commonly institutionalised to the extent of having a name (e.g. athletics, music) or maybe even to the extent of being identifiable as a formally constituted social institution (e.g. government, education).
The socially constructed world functions by distributing or restricting access to roles and activities in relation to what are regarded as relevant social characteristics such as age, gender, class, etc. One can expect this to show up linguistically in terms of differences in what people talk about, and how people are talked about.
Fields of discourse tend to differ for men and women and as a consequence of this topics of conversation (one manifestation of field) differ, as well as grammatical structures (the means by which field and topic, and women and men themselves, are talked about). Many fields are identifiable as male or female on the basis of both acknowledged and unacknowledged restricted access (discrimination) and on the basis of what people say. Sport, local government, the stock market, economics, wine, administration, etc. are seen as male. Women's fields are domestic and personal, e.g. reproduction, human relationships, child rearing, domestic work. On the whole they do not have an elaborated technical lexis, control of which is a necessary prerequisite to claim expert status in society.
The most obvious manifestation of field is topic, and there is plenty of evidence that women and men do talk about different topics. Eakins and Eakins: men's greatest conversational interests seem to be business and money, followed by sports and amusements. Women's leading topics were men and clothes. Persons played a smaller part in men's talk.
Grammatical structure: the nominal group
Men and women are talked about differently, not only in terms of the characteristic roles, activities, and objects associated with them on the basis of the fields that there noun to be involved in and that are perceived as appropriate for them to engage in (which will come out as lexical differences, worse characteristic of the associated with, and seen as, female and male), but also in terms of differences in the perceived centrality or marginality of the participation in the affairs of the world (which will come out as grammatical differences, particularly involving participant roles in clause structure).
Lexical choice in relation to gender: women are frequently primarily characterised in terms of their appearance, their marital status, and their fecundity.
Animate human nouns are used to refer to people. Many of these, particularly occupational and professional labels, are commonly said to be unmarked for gender or of common gender. In fact they are covertly male: the habit of indicating by some linguistic marker when a woman is being referred to is so pervasive that the absence of such an indicator is taken to mean that the referent is a man. Thus the male is linguistically unmarked, the linguistic norm, and the female is a deviation from that norm. The 3 techniques used to mark feminine gender/femaleness of referent are: the addition of a suffix to the noun, using a word explicitly marking the reference as female (woman, girl, etc.), and using a word implicitly marking the referent as female (pretty, brunette, emotional, etc.).
1) Suffix: the most common is -ess: actress, hostess. -Ette: generally pejoratively: usherettes, suffragettes, bachelorettes.
2) Explicit word (classifiers): woman doctor, lady lawyer, female attendant. They indicate a subclass of the group referred to. Implication that the group itself is basically male.
3) Implicit word (epithet): the epithet (premodifying the head in terms of what like rather than what kind, as classifiers do). Classifiers are commonly nouns. Epithets are characteristically adjectives.
Nominal groups referring to persons, then, are hardly neutral with respect to gender. If the referent is male then that fact is likely to be indicated using one or more of the linguistic resources available, and if femaleness is not marked the assumption will be that the referent is male.
Why does it matter that female referents must be identified as such? And what is the effect of the various kinds of marking? The basic issue seems to concern power. Eakins and Eakins referred to the weakening, diminishing or trivialising effect of feminine suffixes such as -ess or -ette: the male terms carry the suggestion of added power of competency, and adding a feminine marker ending may detract from connotations of potency that such a word normally evokes in people.
Interpersonal meanings habitually spread themselves through linguistic structures. Women are always liable to be represented as if they're characters from a Mills and Boon romance, but one does have a choice with men, even within the pages of the romance.
Grammatical structure: the clause
This same issue of power and powerlessness emerges clearly at clause rank in relation principally to the question of agency: whether or not one is presented as doing or being done to, as causer of actions/event or merely acted upon, what one is presented as acting upon, whether events are presented as occurring with or without agency.
On agent deletion (achieved by using passive rather than active forms and deleting the agent): women as agents, esp. in creative activity, may tend to be deleted. Men as agents may also be deleted, when what they might otherwise be held responsible for is politically sensitive or ideologically uncomfortable.
Shuster: passive forms are more common if females are speaking or referred to, with respect to certain verbs of sexual or courting activity (e.g. 'she was picked up (by him) in a bar'); this reflects the female internalisation of culturally expected 'passivity'.
On the likelihood of women and men appearing as agents: in clauses with material (doing) processes, the female participant has things done to her more often than the male, who was more often the doer; where a process was coded as having a causer, the male was more likely to fill this role.
On what the agent has control over: Hellinger: women as agents in clauses involving personal achievement, creative action or some prestigious professional activity were almost non-existent. The largest category involved action directed at a male, the second involved verbs of speaking. Thwaite: as agents, women control clothing and accessories, their own body parts, and many small parts of the domestic environment, but never anything as important as a lease, cash, or a car, all controlled by males.
Chapter 5. Speaking as woman/man
Stereotypes' and interpretations
There is no single stereotype of how women and men talk in this society, but there are a number of stereotypic portraits on the basis of which a few generalisations have been made: women speak better, men swear and use slang more, women and men talk about different things, men tell jokes and women can't, women can smooth over difficult social situations. It is the female who has the more pervasive reputation as a talker. Why, if men talk more? Spender: when silence is considered the appropriate behaviour for women, any talk of a woman engages in can be considered too much!
When it comes to the language actually used, the stereotype is disappointingly vague, suggesting merely some kinds of lexical differences (principally involving the use of slang, swearwords, and possibly euphemisms) and in most general terms, some differences in pronunciation and grammar.
Robin Lakoff: Women (and some men) talk as they do because of their position of relative powerlessness both in the society as a whole and in the context of particular relationships.
Differences between women's and men's speech
The differences in this section concern gender role (or social role mediated by gender) and not gender identity, which is logic conveyed by means that are outside the linguistic system.
There do seem to be linguistic features that are stereotypically associated with men and women, there is a large measure of agreement about the association of such features with one or the other gender, and children learn to associate more and more of such features with the appropriate gender group over time.
Discourse stratum
Interruption: men interrupt women in mixed-sex conversation.
Switching pause: white males have along the course after their turn then do white females in mixed-sex dyads. The pattern is the reverse for black dyads (US).
Topic choice: men may and do reject women's topics in mixed-sex conversation, while women will talk on topics raised by men.
Back-channel noises: women use mm hmm significantly more than men, particularly in woman-to-woman conversations, as signals that the communication channel remains open.
Speech function (speech act) choice and realisation: men use many more commands than women and tend to realise them congruently by means of the mood choice imperative.
Initiating conversations: women tried to initiate conversation more often than men but succeed less often because of the lack of male cooperation.
Lexico-grammatical stratum: grammar
Clause rank
Mood choice
Tags: Lakoff: women use the more than men. For others, no difference.
Modality/modulation: commonly referred to as hedges, i.e. the variety of means by which one can say something a little short of indicating that something categorically is or not the case. Includes modals, modal adverbs, and interpersonal metaphors. Women are supposed generally to use more hedges, a part of the stereotype of tentativeness; also to use more 'super-polite' forms, i.e., multiple modality.
Transitivity choices: process types and participant roles: men and women may make different choices of process type and hence different choices of participant roles.
Terms of address (vocatives): different choices are made by and to men and women.
Sentence length: there is limited evidence that girls produce longer sentences than boys but in adulthood the reverse may be true.
Sentence completeness: Jesperson fault that women left sentences incomplete more often; Haas suggests this may be because women get interrupted more often.
Direct quotation: women are supposed to use direct quotation rather than paraphrase; possibly an indicator of powerless language.
Group rank
Nominal group
Adjective frequency: girls use more adjectives.
Adjective type: considerable evidence that women use evaluative (attitudinal) adjectives more than men. Where an end to use evaluative adjectives, they tend to use different items from women.
Actives of approximation (about, around): women are claimed to use these more than men.
Intensifiers (submodification: so, very, etc.): women are said to use these more.
Possessive constructions: boys use this more.
Word rank
Reduplicated forms: women are reputed to use more reduplicated adjectival forms, like itsy-bitsy and teeny-tiny. Reduplicated hypocoristic forms (pet forms) of personal names, such as Ally-Bally and Stevie-Weave would to be seen by many people as part of baby talk and hence inappropriate for male use.
Lexico- grammatical stratum: lexis
Field range: women and men seem to include different lexical sets in their total repertories, depending on the range and kinds of field they are involved in.
Slang: men at generally supposed to use more slang.
Swearing: even more than slang, this has been regarded as men's territory.
Euphemism: women use them more, especially with reference to sexual matters and bodily functions.
Politeness markers (please-thanks): women are said to use these more than men.
Phonological stratum
Phonological variants: where there are variant pronunciations women tend to use the form with higher prestige more.
Intonation: Women's intonational tones are said to be more dynamic than men's, displaying wider ranges of pitches, more frequent and rapid shifts in pitch, and more frequently ending with a non-falling terminal than men's. This pitch-gender association may be learned extremely early.
Interpreting the differences systemically
Chapter 6. Social relations through grammar
The semiotics of social relations
3 dimensions are needed for an adequate characterisation of the contextual variable tenor. There is the social distance or intimacy dimension called contact and an attitudinal dimension concerned with attitude or emotion towards addressee (or towards the field of discourse) called affect. The 3rd dimension is power. These are all clines or continua. Power ranges from equal to unequal, with the basis of that power deriving from at least one (and maybe more than one) of the factors specified: force involves physical superiority; authority is a function of socially-legitimating inherently unequal role relationships such as parent-child, teacher-child, employer-employee, or ruler-ruled; status is a matter of relative ranking with respect to some unevenly distributed but socially desirable object/standing/achievement, e.g. wealth, profession/occupation, level of education, hereditary status, location of residence, etc.; expertise is a matter of the extent to which an individual has knowledge or skill.
Age, gender and race, familiar sources of power inequality, are not mentioned because they are seen as matters of ideology.
The contact dimension has to take a number of factors into consideration: the frequency of interaction and the extent in time (of the relationship itself and individual communicative episodes) of the contact; the extent of the role diversification --whether people relate to one another in one capacity only, etc. (customer and newspaper seller), or in a wide range of contexts; and finally with the orientation of the interaction is primarily towards persons or towards tasks.
The third dimension, affect, differs from the other two are in that it may be absent, whereas an interaction can always be located and decline somewhere between equal and an equal power, and somewhere between greatest and least contact. Whether or not affect is marked will depend on what kind of power and contact choices have been made: in particular, the subordinate in an unequal power relationship is less likely to choose affect than the superior (lest offence be given or taken), while in interactions characterised in terms of greatest contact, i.e. intimacy, effect is expected (specifically, positive affect; negative affect between intimates is culturally frowned upon). If affect is present, the primary choice is between positive and negative, and in terms of either the relationship as a whole or an individual episode.
The linguistic realisation of social relations
In moving between tenor and language, we know that the principle linguistic systems involved are interpersonal: at clause rank involving mood, modality and modulation, and vocation (the system of address). These systems are utilised to make the kinds of meaning that are regarded as culturally appropriate for different kinds of social relations.
Each of the three tenor dimensions seems to activate somewhat different sets of linguistic choices and to do so with characteristic patterning of realisations. Such patterning can be structural or interactional. For the power dimention, the characteristic realisational pattern is interactional, in terms of the extent of reciprocity of the linguistic choices made. For the dimensions of contact and affect, the characteristic realisationsal patterns are structural, in terms of the principles of proliferation and amplification.
Power is realised primarily in terms of linguistic choices on the discourse stratum and at clause rank within lexical grammar, with the quality or inequality of interactants indicated by the extent of reciprocity of those choices. The greater the equality between interactants, the more likely they are to behave linguistically in parallel or symmetrical ways: equals have an equal right to interrupt one another, to nominate new topics, to take on the role of primary knower or actor, to be definite rather than tentative, to reciprocate address terms that are contextually appropriate for the extent of contact and affect involved.
Contact is realised primarily within lexico-grammar, particularly in terms of lexis but also at all ranks of grammar: clause, group, word and morpheme. Here the extent of the contact is realised in terms of proliferation or the range of options available. Generally the greater the contact, the larger the range of options, and the less the contact, the smaller the range (to the point where fleeting contacts with strangers or people one barely knows are commonly quite ritualised). Affect is realised primarily at group rank and below within lexical grammar and also, most importantly, on the phonological stratum in terms of variation in intonation, rhythm, rate of speech, etc. Here the relevant realisational principle seems to be amplification, generally achieved by the repetition of identical or functionally equivalent elements of structure, increases in the strength of the affect being realised in terms of amount of repetition as well as choice of actual item.
The politics of address
As far as power is concerned, address between males and females in public contexts is asymmetrical.
Key linguistic realisations of the tenor dimensions power, contact and affect
Stratum/rank
Power
Contact
Affect
Discourse
Conversational structure: turn-taking, including length of turn, interruption; primary/secondary actor/doer status; speech function choice.
Lexical cohesion: who controls strings (field/topic choice).
Reference: who refers to whom and to whose discourse, and how. homophora to include/exclude, e.g. name dropping.
Conjunction: who controls/reformulates internal conjunction, e.g. 'Do you mean...?', 'So then?'
Lexico-grammar:
Grammar
Clause
Mood: extent of congruence in relation to speech function choice.
Exclamatives
Presence and extent of modulation/modality.
Ellipsis
Tags
Vocation: reciprocity
Vocation: range of choices
Vocation: attitudinal; amplified structures
Nominal group
Extent and kind of modification: amplified structures; intensification
Word
Truncation (clipping). Suffixation
Suffixation. Reduplication. Infixing (only with expletives in English, e.g. kangabloodyroo)
Lexis
Technical lexis.
Slang
Swearing. Attitudinal lexis
Phonology
Elision
Rhythm. Rate. Pitch
It would seem that women, like children, can be addressed in public with conventionalised intimate forms to a far greater extent than is permissible for men.
Even when reciprocal use of first names occurs between men and women, the form of that choice tends to be different. If the full form of the name is not used, then adult males will generally be addressed with a monosyllabic truncated form of the first name, whereas the form usually used to females all the leads as well as children, will be one with the diminutive suffix -y. The suffixed forms, along with other diminutive suffixes, are commonly used to children of both sexes, but boys come to see them, sometimes at a very early age, as 'girls' names' and reject them. The relevant tenor dimension here is contact: the use of diminutive or hypocoristic forms of names is a matter of increases in intimacy. Why do women retain the more intimate forms into adulthood more than men? Women are culturally defined as more contactable than men: contactable comes to mean sexually available. Diminutive-forming resources have come to be substantially gender-marked and in such a way that 'feminine' forms demean, belittle, and trivialise at the same time as they feminise. Why it isn't it seen as demeaning? Because in Western cultures intimacy (greater contact) is automatically associated with positive affect, they use of suffixed forms of personal names can be claimed to be an indication of friendliness, or affection: as a matter of affect and not of contact, much less power. The second reason (at least in Australian English) is that esp. males use a large number of words with the characteristic diminutive -y ending in every day casual conversation: barbie for barbecue, footie for football, etc. The use of such forms seems clearly related to contact, occurring in and/or being used to create a relatively relaxed informal interaction --the egalitarian mateship theme again. None of these forms has any hint of a trivialising or demeaning flavour.
For males however, the -y suffix, along with the number of other hypocoristic suffixes used in name forms, commonly occurs with the last name rather than the first name. Such forms would seem to achieve a nice balance between friendly camaraderie on the one hand and maintaining a certain distance on the other: asserting at the same time mateship and lack of any conceivable homosexual 'taint'. This is clearly yet another manifestation of the male tendency to interpret intimacy only in a sexual terms.
Endearments are commonly used publicly to women, who may also find themselves addressed by complete strangers in terms of their physical appearance and addressed or referred to a few early as sexual objects (either as people, albeit of little value, or merely as their own sexual organs).
There is a quite extensive lexis of derogatory terms for women as women that is not paralleled by a set denigrating men as men.
Tenor and the ideology of gender
With respect to power it would seem that men are culturally legitimated as powerful and women not. Consequences of this are that relations between males are between those who are seen, and who see themselves, in terms of power. Men can see one another as accomplices or as rivals --or little of both. Relations between women and men in general are culturally defined as between powerful and powerless and this shows up linguistically in a variety of ways. Women have to create new patterns of relating to one another, as well as legitimating those patterns that to have a history but which were so often not taken seriously by either men or women.
In terms of contact, women are culturally defined as contactable, as are children. Relations between men in terms of contact can be friendly (accomplices) but not to close (also rivals). Whereas intimacy for males in English-speaking societies is largely sexual, this is not necessarily so for women.
In terms of effect, the general Western ideological preference is for the logical and rational, rather than the emotional, i.e. affect is seen as culturally suspect.
The pattern of evaluation would seem to be that emotions that involved the exercise of power are respected, while the emotion shown from the powerless position, or that proceeds from a response to situations, rather than an attempt to control them, is less valued. It is culturally acceptable for men to display the 'powerful' emotions, especially anger, but not for women and children to do so: men can be righteously angry, but women merely lose their tempers and children throw tantrums. Even in their relations with children, women's anger can be seen as ineffective and as a legitimate. Women may display all the 'response' emotions, however, and thereby demonstrate their inferiority as human beings.
Epilogue. So where do we go from here?
The basic argument has been that women and men as groups tend to make different selections at all linguistic levels from phonology to genre. Such selections ought to be understood as realising, and hence perpetuating, an ideological opposition between male and female that maintains that the two are different in specifiable ways and which validates the male and his activities as of great importance and value and the female and her activities as of lesser importance and value. The ideology functions as a legitimating mechanism for a particular kind of social organisation in which women and men do not participate on equal terms because they grow up learning to use the same language in different ways for different tense, and as a consequence of this to see themselves as different.
These overall differences can be referred to as speech styles or preferably as coding orientations.
In terms of gender, we can mention the male controlling code and the female responding code, where males aim to control things, events, and most crucially people; and females show much more responsiveness to things, events, and particularly people. The consequences of such a difference in overall orientation are the continued resistance to the inclusion of women in access to real power and the continued marginalisation of those men who are not interested in power or control.
Four options for the future:
1. Leave things as they are.
2. Teach women the male controlling code.
3. Teach men the female responding code.
4. Keep naming the ideology and particularly the practices that realise and sustain it.
A hopeful sign is the fact that the ideology of gender has become partially visible, as a consequence of social change; the traditional coding orientations are now out of step with some aspects of contemporary reality.