As Language work in Hallas absence-Gender research

John Grey's popular book 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus'

The book states that most common relationship problems between men and women are a result of fundamental psychological differences between the sexes, which the author exemplifies by means of his metaphor: men from Mars and women from Venus, and that each sex is acclimated to its own planet's society and customs, but not to those of the other. One example is men's complaint that if they offer solutions to problems that women bring up in conversation, the women are not necessarily interested in solving those problems, but mainly want to talk about them. The book asserts each sex can be understood in terms of distinct ways they respond to stress and stressful situations.

 

Dale Spender and Pamela Fishman's challenges to what other theorists have said

Pamela Fishman conducted an experiment and involved listening to fifty-two hours of pre-recorded conversations between young American couples. Five out of the six subjects were attending graduate school; all subjects were either feminists or sympathetic to the women’s movement, were white, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Fishman listened to recordings and concentrated on two characteristics common in women’s dialect, including tag questions for example ‘you know?”

From his research, Fisherman came to the conclusion that women use tag questions such as ‘isn’t it?’ as an effective method of beginning and maintaining conversations with males. She also states that females do this to gain conversational power which in Lakoff’s is not the case.Lakoff believes that men have the power within conversations and are the powerful ones within conversation. This is stated in the dominance model which says men dominate over women in a conversation. Even though both of these theorists are female, they both have different views on how powerful they think they are when it comes to men.

Dale Spender

The book ‘Man Made Language’ is based on Spender's PhD research. Her argument is that in patriarchal societies (men are in authority over women in all aspects of society) men control language and this all works in their favor. It states how men believe themselves to have authority over women by their language "Language helps form the limits of our reality. It is our means of ordering, classifying and manipulating the world" Where men perceive themselves as the dominant gender, disobedient women who fail to conform to their given inferior role are labeled as abnormal, promiscuous, neurotic or frigid. This alone shows how men do not get judged as easily as women and have for freedom in how they use their language; as long as they got a low-toned, masculine voice, they are perceived the authority.

Mary Beard's ideas about women's voices not being valued

Mary Beard is interested in the relationship between that classic Homeric moment of silencing od silencing a woman and some of the ways women’s voices are not publicly heard in our own contemporary culture.

For example, in the old punch cartoon, one of the characters says “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it”. This shows that even in the smallest situations such as a suggestion, men get the finale word even if women came up with the ‘excellent suggestion’. Due to it being in a cartoon also suggests that young children are even getting influenced by the fact men are the dominant people and should over-power the female’s voice.Mary looks at how the abuse of women speaking out even in today’s society is subjected.

Mary quotes: ‘The culturally awkward relationship between the voice of women and the public sphere of speech-making, debate and comment: politics in its widest sense, from office committees to the floor of the House. I’m hoping that the long view will help us get beyond the simple diagnosis of ‘misogyny’ that we tend a bit lazily to fall back on.’

O'Barr and Atkins's challenge to deficit theory

The Deficit Model was created by Robin Lakoff in 1975, when she describes male language as stronger, more prestigious and more desirable. She argues that women are socialized into behaving like 'ladies'(linguistically and in other ways too) and that this
in turn keeps them in their place because being 'ladylike' precludes being 'powerful' in our culture. Such as Margret Thatcher changing her way of speaking so it sounded more masculine, therefore coming across as more powerful to gain support from the public in becoming Prime Minister.

 

Lakoff’s key point in this model is that is women speak less frequently, it shows that they are listening to the male speaker and shows this by using minimal responses such as the odd ‘yeah’ .In my opinion, this also comes across as though the female is agreeing with the male as even if she has a different point of view, she has no choice but to agree as the men’s language is the norm.

• 
  William O'Barr and Bowman Atkins done a study in a courtroom in 1980.
• They studied "language variation in a specific institutional context- the American trial courtroom - and sex-related differences" were the topic of this particular research.
•  During the process of witness examination they analysed how trial lawyers and law professors.
• O'Barr and Atkins studied courtroom cases for 30 months, observing a broad spectrum of witnesses.
•  They examined the witnesses for the ten basic speech differences between men and women that Robin Lakoff proposed.

O'Barr and Atkins discovered that the differences that Lakoff and others supported are not necessarily the result of being a woman, but of being powerless. They used three men and three women to prove their point. The first man and woman both spoke with a high frequency of "women's language" components. The woman was a 68-year old housewife, and the man drove an ambulance. In comparison to woman and man 3 who were a doctor and a policeman, respectively, who both testified as expert witnesses .They show that the first pair of witnesses experience less power in their jobs and lives. O'Barr and Atkins found that pair 2 fell between pairs 1 and 3 in frequency of hedges and tag questions, etcetera, in their speech.