Page 182 - Culture Technology Communication

Diversity in On-Line Discussions 165

that talking exercises dominance and prevents others from speaking.
The ultimate effect is a lack of regard for women and their speech.
This dominance also implies higher social status and that men are
more competent to complete the tasks or to discuss the issues at hand
than are women (James and Drakich 1993). Tannen (1994) explains
that women also typically use more supportive language patterns,
which thereby diminishes the power of their own contributions.
There are obvious implications for women, then, as they are increas-
ingly participating in public arenas such as the workplace and poli-
tics where they may not have equal opportunity for participation.
Women also strive less actively for control (Nadler and Nader
1987), whereas societal expectations are that men will dominate
task-oriented discussions. This conversation dominance is evidenced
by amount of communication and amount of interruptions, with
male dominance in speaking time achieved through interruptions
(James and Clark 1993). Lakoff (1995) believes that this control of
the discussion is interpretive control and goes beyond the genderlect
(i.e., simply a difference in language style based on gender) Tannen
describes. According to Lakoff, men are actually assigning valuation
to women’s speech. She also contends that men will also use silence,
since to ignore is also a sign of power; non-response is one of the
most effective ways the powerful silence the less powerful. She
states that as “annoying and discouraging as interruption is . . . non-
response is by contrast annihilating” (1995, 28) because to ignore
someone is to deny their existence.
Tannen (1993) states that while scholars recognize intuitively
that interruption and topic control in conversation is encouraged by,
and encourages, power imbalance, research has shown that women
actually interrupt more. She admits that this finding was puzzling
until still other research showed that there was, in fact, a difference
in the patterns of interruption. For instance, men raise more new
topics than women and use interruptions to change subject and
take floor, while women use interruptions as cooperative overlap
and to show support for the speaker. Tannen (1993) also identifies
another key difference in the communication practices of men and
women, i.e., men use a more adversarial style in discussions, while
women are likely to ask more questions. Women also use verb qual-
ifiers and have a pattern of politeness behaviors, leading to an
image of less intelligence. According to Lakoff (1995), women have
learned the language of apology, and these linguistic patterns neg-
atively affect credibility and suggests uncertainty and triviality in
the subject matter.