You Just Don't Understand

by Deborah Tannen

In all these examples, the men had information to impart and they were imparting it. On the surface, there is nothing surprising or strange about that. What is strange is that there are so many situations in which men have factual information requiring lengthy explanations to impart to women, and so few in which women have comparable information to impart to men.

Since women seek to build rapport, they are inclined to play down their expertise rather than display it. Since men value the position of center stage and the feeling of knowing more, they seek opportunities to gather and disseminate factual information.

If men often seem to hold forth because they have the expertise, women are often frustrated and surprised to find that when they have the expertise, they don’t necessarily get the floor.

When the word expert was spoken in these experimental conversations, in all cases but one it was the man in the conversation who used it, saying something like “So, you’re the expert.” Evidence of the woman’s superior knowledge sparked resentment, not respect.

These experimental studies by Leet-Pellegrini and Aries, and the observations by Fox, all indicate that, typically, men are more comfortable than women in giving information and opinions and speaking in an authoritative way to a group, whereas women are more comfortable than men in supporting others.

By the same process, since more men than women are comfortable holding forth to a crowd, it may well be that it is difficult for women to get center stage, regardless of how articulate they are, because a norm is established by which most people expect men, and not women, to command attention.

Making others laugh gives you a fleeting power over them: As linguist Wallace Chafe points out, at the moment of laughter, a person is temporarily disabled. The man Bernice met was comfortable only when he was making her laugh, not the other way around. When Bernice laughed at his jokes, she thought she was engaging in a symmetrical activity. But he was engaging in an asymmetrical one.

it. Linguist Deborah Schiffrin showed that in the conversations of working-class Eastern European Jewish speakers—both male and female—in Philadelphia, friendly argument was a means of being sociable. Linguist Jane Frank analyzed the

conversation of a Jewish couple who tended to polarize and take argumentative positions in social situations. But they were not fighting. They were staging a kind of public sparring, where both fighters were on the same side.

Because they are not struggling to be one-up, women often find themselves framed as one-down. Any situation is ripe for misinterpretation, because status and connections are displayed by the same moves. This ambiguity accounts for much misinterpretation, by experts as well as nonexperts, by which women’s ways of talking, uttered in a spirit of rapport, are branded powerless. Nowhere is this inherent ambiguity clearer than in a brief comment in a newspaper article in which a couple, both psychologists, were jointly interviewed. The journalist asked them the meaning of “being very polite.” The two experts responded simultaneously, giving different answers. The man said, “Subservience.” The woman said, “Sensitivity.” Both experts were right, but each was describing the view of a different gender.

Most troubling of all, women and men are judged differently even if they speak the same way. Communications researcher Patricia Hayes Bradley found that when women used tag questions and disclaimers, subjects judged them as less intelligent and knowledgeable than men who also used them. When women did not give support for their arguments, they were judged less intelligent and knowledgeable, but men who advanced arguments without support were not. In other words, talking in ways that are associated with women causes women to be judged negatively, but talking the same way does not have this effect on men. So it is not the ways of talking that are having the effect so much as people’s attitudes toward women and men.