The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

230 Chapter 7

Person A: What’s been going on?

Person B: It’s my brother.

Person A: Uh-huh.

Person B: It’s never anything specific,

but he’s just really, really annoying me and

there’s nothing I can do about it. You know?

Person A: That sounds tough.

Person B: I’ve even been having dreams

where he’s doing something really awful.

Person A: It’s probably a good thing that

you don’t have to live with him anymore,

don’t you think? But it seems like it still

haunts you. It must still bother you if you

have dreams about him a lot and stuff.

Now consider the following interaction:

Person A: Pat still hasn’t given me back

that money I let him borrow.

Person B: I wouldn’t have given it to him

in the first place.

Person A: I wouldn’t either but he was in

a bind and ...

Person B: Dude, you just don’t get it.

I told you a long time ago: You never lend

money to that guy. Never. I’ve known him

for a long time and you can’t trust him.

The two interactions are both same-sex

interactions. Can you tell which one is be-

tween two women and which is between two

men? How? There are aspects of language that

distinguish men’s and women’s speech—but

usually only when they interact with the same

sex. The language used in mixed-sex interac-

tions is much harder to distinguish. The two

same-sex interactions provided are very ste-

reotypical. The first interaction was between

two women, and the second was between two

men. The speaking styles differed on a num-

ber of dimensions discussed in this section.

One of the most common perceptions we

have about the differences between women’s

and men’s language is that women use more of

it! That is, women talk more than men. In the

interactions just described, the women’s con-

versation was longer than the men’s. Does this

stereotype have a basis in reality? In a meta-

analytic review of the literature on children’s

language, girls were found to talk more than

boys (Leaper & Smith, 2004). However, the ef-

fect size was small (d=-.11), and sex differ-

ences were larger among younger children.

By contrast, in a meta-analytic review of adult

speech, men were more talkative than women

(d=+.14; Leaper & Ayres, 2007). However,

there were several moderators of the latter ef-

fect, including the way that language was mea-

sured, the nature of the relationship, and the

sex composition of the interaction. There were

no sex differences in the number of words spo-

ken, but men spoke for longer periods of time

and spoke more words per turn, suggesting

that men’s talkativeness conveyed dominance.

To support this theory, men were also found

to talk more than women in mixed-sex than

same-sex interactions—especially when the

dyad examined was a husband and wife.

Aside from general amount of talking,

are there specific features of language more

characteristic of women or men? Features of

FIGURE 7.4 Two teenage girls communicating

via text.

M07_HELG0185_04_SE_C07.indd 230 6/21/11 8:11 AM