There are those who believe that the existence of gender differences at very early ages is evidence that these differences are biological or generic in origin.
— Deborah Tannen
For many women, and a fair number of men, saying 'I'm sorry' isn't literally an apology; it's a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation.
The Pavlovian view of women voters - 'plug the words in, and they will respond' - sends a chill down my spine because it sounds like an adaptation of something I have written about communication between the sexes: When a woman tells a man about a problem, she doesn't want him to fix it; she just wants him to listen and let her know he understands.
A double bind is far worse than a straightforward damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma. It requires you to obey two mutually exclusive commands: Anything you do to fulfill one violates the other.
I have two sisters; one is two years older, and one is eight years older. That helped me understand how completely different sister relationships can be.
Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women's styles of friendship and conversation aren't inherently better than men's, simply different.
As a sociolinguist, I want to know how cultural differences affect the ways people talk and listen. My research method, inspired by the work of Robin Lakoff and John Gumperz of the University of California at Berkeley, is sociolinguistic microanalysis. I tape-record and transcribe naturally occurring conversations.
Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture.
If women talk in ways expected of them or project a feminine demeanor, it's seen as weak. But if they talk in ways associated with men or bosses, then they're seen as too aggressive. Whatever they do violates one or the other expectation: either you're not talking as you should as a woman or as boss.
The death of compromise has become a threat to our nation as we confront crucial issues such as the debt ceiling and that most basic of legislative responsibilities: a federal budget. At stake is the very meaning of what had once seemed unshakable: 'the full faith and credit' of the U.S. government.
We all feel wistfulness or regret about roads not taken.
While the requirements of a good leader and a good man are similar, the requirements of a good leader and a good woman are mutually exclusive. A good leader must be tough, but a good woman must not be. A good woman must be self-deprecating, but a good leader must not be.
There is probably no such thing as a level playing field in political campaigns.
I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. For part of my life, I was living in Detroit, and I remember a friend of mine commenting she could always tell when I had been speaking to my mother because my New York accent had come back.
The culture of critique undermines the spirit not only of people in public roles but of those who read about them, afraid to believe in anyone or anything because the next story... will tell them why they shouldn't.
This idea that we should be best friends with our partner of the opposite gender leads toward tremendous frustration. Did you ever notice that while men often refer to their wives as best friends, women usually refer to another woman in that way?
It might seem at first surprising that when I studied women and men talking at work, I found that women 'interrupted' each other more often than men did - when they were in all-women conversations.
The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate.
People vary. You change your style, your hair, and the way you dress. Talking differently will be a part of that.
The double bind lowers its boom on women in positions of authority, so those who haven't yet risen to such positions have not yet felt its full weight.
Birth order is fascinating, and it is forever.
Sisters, to me, are fascinating because it is a unique connection of the coming together of connection and competition. The fact that you have these age differences is a built-in power struggle, and the fact that you're all trying to get attention and resources from the same parents creates competition.
Most non-New Yorkers, finding themselves within hearing range of strangers' conversation, think it's nice to pretend they didn't hear. But many New Yorkers think it's nice to toss in a relevant comment.
One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'
Conflict and opposition are as necessary as cooperation and agreement, but the scale is off balance, with conflict and opposition overweighted.
The political Right is particularly vehement when it comes to compromise. Conservatives are now strongly swayed by the Tea Party movement, whose clarion call is a refusal to compromise regardless of the practical consequences.
When did the word 'compromise' get compromised? When did the negative connotations of 'He was caught in a compromising position' or 'She compromised her ethics' replace the positive connotations of 'They reached a compromise'?
A sister is the one person you can call in the middle of the night when you can't sleep or the one who doesn't want to hear about your problems unless you're ready to do something about them. She's the one who is there when you need her or the one whose absence when you need her hurts the most.
When evidence emerged that Clinton was a devoted mother, Margaret Carlson writing in 'TIME' found her guilty of 'yuppie overdoting on her daughter.'
Maybe we're kind of predisposed to think that anything a politician does is calculated and therefore suspect.
We tend to assume that we have a baseline of speech that's going to be normal in all contexts, but the truth is, we all change our ways of speaking depending on who we're talking to. And so I think it's kind of a gesture of politeness to the people you're speaking to to try to say something in their own idiom.
If you understand gender differences in what I call 'conversational style', you may not be able to prevent disagreements from arising, but you stand a better chance of preventing them from spiraling out of control.
For women, detailed conversation is our lifeblood, while for men it's just not as critical.
One of the first studies in the field of gender and language, by Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West in 1975, found that in casual conversations between women and men, women were interrupted far more often.
The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.
If you talk to your friends the way your parents talk, they will think you are stiff and odd.
The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer.
I think it is important to remember that there are so many different ways to be sisters.
I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always.
New Yorkers seem to think the best thing two people can do is talk.
It is easy to understand why conflict is so often highlighted: Writers of headlines or promotional copy want to catch attention and attract an audience. They are usually under time pressure, which lures them to established, conventionalized ways of expressing ideas in the absence of leisure to think up entirely new ones.
Conflict can't be avoided in our public lives any more than we can avoid conflict with people we love. One of the great strengths of our society is that we can express these conflicts openly.
Back when the powerful 19th-century senator Henry Clay was called 'the great compromiser,' achieving a compromise really was considered great.
A sister is like yourself in a different movie, a movie that stars you in a different life.
For each other, at each other: Sisters can be either or both. The same could be said of people in any close relationship. Yet there is something special about sisters - specially gratifying and specially fraught.
When Clinton first appeared on the national stage back in 1992, the young wife of the Arkansas governor running for president, she kept her natural-brown hair off her face with a headband.
You're not from Puerto Rico, so you should say Puerto Rico like all the other people from the place that you come from.
Asian cultures... place great value on avoiding open expression of disagreement and conflict because they emphasize harmony.
It's a particularly modern myth that married people are best friends. The best-friend concept is a uniquely female phenomena.
An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what's perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter's gender.
