You Just Don't Understand

by Deborah Tannen

One interpretation of the Leet-Pellegrini study is that women are getting a bum deal. They don’t get credit when it’s due.

challenging a woman’s authority as they would challenge a man’s could be a sign of respect and equal treatment, rather than lack of respect and discrimination.

Most women lack experience in defending themselves against challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.

The game women play is “Do you like me?” whereas the men play “Do you respect me?

The men tended to set the agenda by offering opinions, suggestions, and information. The women tended to react, offering agreement or disagreement.

her bike on the hill, she may have waited to be encouraged to continue, whereas the boys just pressed on until they got to tell their stories.

She may have spoken too quietly and tentatively. Or it may simply be that the family is not interested in girls’ stories in general, or girls’ wipeouts in particular.

telling about risking danger, sustaining injury, and applying and displaying technical expertise is a good way to get attention and impress people.

The accusation “You’re not listening”

often really means “You don’t understand what I said in the way that I meant it,” or “I’m not getting the response I wanted.

Women use “yeah” to mean “I’m with you, I follow,” whereas men tend to say “yeah” only when they agree.

Women expect their conversational partners to encourage them to hold forth. Men who do not typically encourage quieter members to speak up, assume that anyone who has something to say will volunteer it.

When men, upon hearing the kind of work I do, challenge me about my research methods, they are inviting me to give them information and show them my expertise— something I don’t like to do outside of the classroom or lecture hall, but something they themselves would likely be pleased to be provoked to do.

This world view has given rise to the concept of the henpecked husband: Many men resent any inkling that their wives want to get them to do things. Women’s lives have historically been hemmed in at every turn by the demands of others—their families, their husbands—and yet, though individual women may complain of overbearing husbands, there is no parallel stereotype of a “roosterpecked wife.” Why not?

linguist Jean Berko Gleason studied how parents talk to their young children, and found that fathers issue more commands to their children than mothers do, and they issue more commands to their sons than to their daughters.

By framing proposals with “Let’s” and “We,” the girls implied that their group was a community, and the results of compliance would increase the power of the community, not the individual power of the person making the suggestion.

culturally different individuals don’t talk in ways that seem obviously appropriate.

Americans in Greece often get the feeling that they are witnessing an argument when they are over-hearing a friendly conversation

raising a different point of view is a more interesting contribution to make than agreeing. But Marge finds his disagreeing disagreeable, because it introduces a note of contentiousness into the conversation.

does not see disagreement as a threat. Quite the opposite, he regards being able to express disagreement as a sign of intimacy.

He too thought it natural to challenge an expert. I, like the women in this class, think that access to an expert is a chance to learn inside information

challenging can be a form of respect.

If boys and men often use opposition to establish connections, girls and women can use apparent cooperation and affiliation to be competitive and critical.

the women’s stories tend to be about community, while the men’s tend to be about contest.

The men tell about human contests—physical

contests such as fights as well as social contests in which they use verbal and/or intellectual ...

When a male storyteller is not the protagonist in his story, the protagonist is a man; men rarely tell stories involving

women. The women’s stories, on the other hand, revolve around the norms of the community, and joint action by groups of people.

The women tell about peculiar

people, dramatizing their abnormal behavior and setting it implicitly in contrast with social norms. They tell stories about themselves, about other women, and about men.

The vast majority of men who reported acting alone also reported a happy outcome. The majority of women who reported acting alone portrayed themselves as suffering

as a result.

Only a very small number of stories told by men (four out of twenty-one) had the protagonist receiving help or advice from someone. In a much larger proportion of the women’s stories (eleven of twenty-six...

Women and men are inclined to understand each other in terms of their own styles because we assume we all live in the same world.

game is fun because it manipulates and plays off the commodity that is important to girls— the strength of their affiliations—just as the boys’ games play off their valued commodity—skill.

The girls’ game is an experiment in shifting alliances. Their game is indeed a contest, but not one of skill; it is, rather, a popularity contest.

boys and girls are learning to handle complexity in different arenas—boys in terms of complex rules and activities, girls in terms of complex networks

of

relationships, and complex ways of using language to mediate ...

Being willing to make a scene can be an effective form of power.

The effect of fear is sometimes indistinguishable from the effect of respect.

gender distinctions are built into language. The words available to us to describe women and men are not the same words. And, most damaging of all, through language, our images and attitudes are buttressed and shaped. Simply by understanding and using the words of our language, we all absorb and pass on different, asymmetrical assumptions about men and women.

Most distressing in a society where equality is the agreed-upon goal, and where more and more women are entering high-status positions, women in authority find themselves in a double bind. If they speak in ways expected of women, they are seen as inadequate leaders. If they speak in ways expected of leaders, they are seen as inadequate women.