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Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.

I’m sorry, I’m not apologizing

Tannen, Deborah. “I’m sorry, I’m not apologizing.” Jan.-Feb. 1991: 20+. Web. 15 May 2014.Executive Female

I’m Sorry, I’m Not Apologizing

Men and women speak differently, reflecting their different priorities in life–gaining respect and independence vs. feeling connected to other people and being liked.

If women speak and hear a language of connection and intimacy, while men speak and hear a language of status and independence, then communication between men and women can be like cross-cultural communication, prey to a clash of conversational styles. Instead of different dialects, it has been said they speak different genderlects.

It begins in the beginning. Research by anthropologist Marjorie Harness Goodwin and sociologist Janet Lever confirms widely observed behaviors: Boys tend to play outside, in large groups that are hierarchically structured. It is by giving orders and making them stick that high status is negotiated. Another way boys achieve status is to take center stage by telling stories and jokes, and by sidetracking or challenging the stories and jokes of others. Boys’ games have winners and losers and elaborate systems of rules that are frequently the subjects of arguments. Finally, boys are frequently heard to boast of their skills and argue about who is best at what.

Girls, on the other hand, play in small groups or in pairs; the center of a girl’s social life is a best friend. Within the group, intimacy is key. In their most frequent games, such as jump rope and hopscotch, everyone gets a turn. Many of their activities (such as playing house) do not have winners or losers. And much of the time, they simply sit together and talk. Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.

Sitting in the front seat of the car beside Harold, Sybil is fuming. They have been driving around lost for half an hour and Harold refuses to ask for directions. Why? Because when you offer information, the fact that you have it implies superiority.

Harold says he won’t ask because anyone he asks may not know or may give him wrong directions. Sybil believes this is unlikely, and even if it did happen they would be no worse off than now.

Part of the reason for their different approaches is that Sybil believes that a person who doesn’t know the answer will say so, because it is easy to say “I don’t know.” But Harold believes that saying “I don’t know” is humiliating, so people might take a wild guess.

Speaking in business meetings

At the executive committee of a fledgling professional organization, the outgoing president, Fran,

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Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.

suggested adopting the policy of having the president deliver a presidential address. To support her proposal, she told a personal anecdote: Her cousin was president of an established professional organization. The cousin’s mother told Fran’s mother her daughter was preparing her presidential address, and she asked when Fran’s presidential address would be. Fran was embarrassed to admit to her mother that she was not giving one. This made her wonder if her organization should emulate more established organizations.

Several men on the committee were embarrassed by Fran’s reference to her personal situation and were not convinced by her argument. It seemed to them not only irrelevant but unseemly to talk about her mother’s telephone conversations at an executive committee meeting. Fran had approached the meeting — a relatively public context — as an extension of private discussion. Many women’s tendency to use personal experiences as examples, rather than abstract argumentation, results from their orientation to language as it is used in private speaking.

Two British interaction analysts, Celia Roberts of Baling College of Higher Education and Tom Jupp of London Education Authority, conducted a study of a faculty meeting at a secondary school in England. They found that the women’s arguments did not carry weight with their male colleagues because the women tended to use their own experiences as evidence, or argue about the effect of policy on individual students. The men at the meeting argued from a completely different perspective, making categorical statements about right and wrong.

The same distinction is found in discussions at home. A man told me that he felt critical of what he perceived as his wife’s lack of logic. For example, he recalled their conversation about an article in The New York Times claiming that today’s college students are not as idealistic as students were in the 1960s. He was inclined to accept this claim. His wife questioned it, supporting her argument with the observation that her niece’s friends were very idealistic indeed. He was scornful of her reasoning; it was obvious to him that a single personal example is neither evidence nor argumentation — it’s just anecdote. It did not occur to him that he was dealing with a different system of logic, rather than a lack of logic.

The logic this woman employed made sense of the world as a more private endeavor — observing and integrating her personal experience and drawing connections to the experiences of others. The logic the husband took for granted was a more public endeavor — gathering information, conducting a survey or devising arguments by rules of formal logic as one might in doing research.

First me, then me

I was at a dinner with faculty members from other departments in my university. To my right was a woman who asked about my research and I explained it. Then I asked about her research and she explained it. Finally we discussed the ways our research overlapped. Later, we branched out to others at the table. I asked a man across from me what he did. During the next half hour, I learned a lot about his job, his research and his background. Shortly before the dinner ended, there was a lull, and he asked me what I did. When I said I was a linguist, he became excited and told me about a

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