Talking

When sociolinguist Deborah Tannen published her book "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation" in 1990, it helped me understand a pattern I'd noticed during my years in journalism. 

Many of my male colleagues, including me, seemed to get ahead in media companies faster and win more awards than our female colleagues, despite the fact that we were not better reporters or writers.

If anything, when it came to interviewing sources, women seemed to be the better listeners, generally, so they often got better and deeper information than we did.

Tannen's book at least provided a context for all of this. She wrote:

"For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships ... For most men, talk is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order."

Although she was talking mainly about personal rather than professional relationships, her book proved useful in my teaching jobs. I started pointing out to my women students that they might use their conversational preferences to their tactical advantage when interviewing men in positions of power.

Also, women journalists inside the company faced a similar challenge and therefore an opportunity. In that era, female colleagues tended to speak less in meetings, and when they did have something to say it more often was to raise a question, whereas the men favored making declarative statements and staking out a position.

The men also interrupted the women much more frequently than vice versa.

I'm not pretending that I was some sort of genius for noticing this stuff, but I could see that the whole situation was pretty unfair. And when around the same time coverage of the pay disparities between men and women surfaced, the whole thing started to sicken me.

I developed the kind of bad feeling I always get when confronted with injustices. All too easily, I knew, it could have been me on the outside, left out, feeling diminished. Despite whatever successes I had had, there were plenty of failures too, setbacks, betrayals and disappointments -- mainly but not exclusively dealt me by men.

And to be fair, there were some pretty mean moves put on by women colleagues as well, including behind-the-back betrayals that hurt a lot. In fact, they still hurt to this day. So I concluded neither sex had any claim to a higher degree of morality or decency in the media environment; it really boiled down to how each individual behaved.

Systemic discrimination existed, yes, but the impact of that reality varied widely person by person. Some turned out to be kind; some turned out to be mean.

Not to sound cynical, but I'm not sure all that much has changed to this day. At least at work, men and women still seem to misunderstand each other pretty much as ever. But least there is a much broader consciousness of the problem than in the past.

In that spirit, I haven't met the person yet who couldn't try just a little bit harder to understand the other gender. And that includes me. Maybe we just have to switch roles now and then. Isn't that what the Golden Rule is all about?

(This essay is from three years ago in 2021.)

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