Gender Difference in Computer Mediated Communication
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Transcript of Gender Difference in Computer Mediated Communication
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Ruprecht-Karls-Universitt Heidelberg Anglistisches Seminar PS1 Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis Lecturer: Monika Eller WS 2014/2015
Genderlects; Do they persist in computer mediated communication?
Mara Magdalena Khler
Steinhlde 21/2 74360 Ilsfeld
[email protected] submitted 20.03.2015
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Introduction
From a very early age, actually from the time that they were born, boys and girls, men
and women tend to be socialized in different ways. And over time what can happen is
that this can have a powerful influence on how both, men and women, are expected to
behave. Often this is what is called different cultures which comprises the idea that
genders and thus genderlects come from a masculine culture and a feminine culture
where individuals grow into. They create masculinity and femininity in their ways of
behaving, all the while believing they are simply acting naturally and from an overall
perspective the characteristics that are associated with masculinity and femininity can
have an enormous impact on their professional and personal lives.
Since genders are seen as coming from different cultures, we can refer to their
communicative intercommunion as Cross-Cultural Communication. In order to be better
conversationalists, better talkers, we have to understand gender and be aware of the
dichotomies between both cultures and their linguistic style.
Background
When talking about gender we need to bear in mind that gender is a social construct
devised by humans to define difference in masculine and feminine roles, behaviors, or
activities, whereas Sex is the biological/physical aspect that defines the difference
between men and women.
Deborah Tannen, whose work is the source for the background information and initial
point of this study, defines linguistic style as a persons characteristic speaking pattern
(1995; 139). It is a little bit more than just the way how we learned to talk. In fact it
includes properties like direct or indirect talk, pausing and pacing, word choice and the
selection of elements into your talk. All these parts combined together make a linguistic
style. She also defines it as a set of culturally learned signals by which we not only
communicate what we mean but also interpret others meaning and evaluate one
another as people (1995; 139). This idea, that we use it to evaluate other people, is
crucial to understanding the power of talk.
Deborah Tannens genderlect theory states that men and women have different
conversation styles, id est that there are gender differences in the way we communicate
and that understanding the differences is the key to better communication.
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There are gender differences in ways of speaking, and we need to identify
and understand them. Without such understanding, we are doomed to
blame others or ourselves or the relationship for the otherwise mystifying
and damaging effects of our contrasting conversational styles. []
Recognizing gender differences frees individuals from the burden of
individual pathology. [] Taking a sociolinguistic approach to relationships
makes it possible to explain these dissatisfactions without accusing anyone
of being crazy or wrong, and without blaming or discarding the
relationship.
(Tannen, 1990, p.17)
Stereotypical gender contrasts described by Tannen are:
Conflict versus compromise: Men are generally more confrontational than women and
its easier for men to deal with verbal conflict than it is for women. Women tend not to
ask directly for what they want.
Independence versus intimacy: Men use conversation to exert their independence
while women often use conversation to preserve intimacy.
Status versus support: Men have a more competitive linguistic style, while women use
a more mitigated linguistic style in order to implicate mutual support.
Orders versus proposals: Men give direct orders while women use questions or
suggestions to indirectly issue a command.
Advice versus understanding: While men often give constructive criticism or advice,
women want a comprehensible listener for their problems.
According to Tannen (1995; 140), women acting naturally differ from men acting
naturally because in fact there are different patterns that form linguistic style in every
speech community known to linguists.
Women tend to use what is called powerless speech mannerisms like hedges (I guess
Id like it), hesitations (Uh, well if you, er), intensifiers (So thats how I feel),
polite forms (Excuse me, but could I), tag questions (You think?), which are
questions that come after the statement, and disclaimers (Im no expert but I think).
The masculine form of speech doesnt include these kind of speech patterns. According
to Herring (1994; 3) the female gendered style is supportive by the usage of thanking,
appreciation and community-building activities. Male style is characterized by
preserving a critical, self-confident and authoritative stance.
Two dynamics can be described of which one is the rapport talk whose properties are
the feminine style, form connections, cooperative metaphors, power down (see Tannen,
1995, 145), we-statements, since the first-person singular pronoun usage can give the
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illusion of control and exclusion of other participants of the situation. Saying I am hiring
a new marketing manager and I am going to put her into control of our marketing
division is a less cooperative message than using the first-person plural pronoun in the
same sentence. The other dynamic is the report talk characterized by its masculine style,
hierarchy, competitive metaphors, power up (see Tannen, 1995; 145), and I-
statements.
According to Lakoff (1975), womens style has an extensive set of words specific to their
interests, hypercorrect grammar, use of intensifier so and empty adjectives. Moreover
he ascribes the use of hedges and politeness to womens language and describes that
they ask more questions (also more tag questions) than men.
Furthermore Dindia and Allen (1992) also described a higher level of intimacy in female
language style and the importance of self-disclosure in genderlect. According to them,
sharing their personal experiences, views and problems is often used by women in
conversations to offer sympathy.
To put it in a nutshell women generally speak a language of connection and intimacy,
they use language as a way to establish connections and negotiate relationships and are
thereby anxious for making the conversation partner feel comfortable, while men
generally speak a language of status and independence and use it as a way to negotiate
and maintain status in a hierarchical order. This is a generalization and does not mean
that only men or women share certain properties in their language usage. There are, of
course, exceptions where women use a male linguistic style or male linguistic style
properties and vice versa. The founded generalization makes us expect certain
tendencies for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and hence this study will
examine to which extent gender difference becomes apparent in CMC, by means of
evaluating comments on a public page of shared interest on facebook.
Data
The present study is based on an analysis of a random sample of 341 comments of a
non-academic list collected from January, February and March 2015 on the official
facebook page of the news television channel Fox News Channel with currently about
10 million likes. The posts the comments belong to were chosen according to their topics
to exclude the possibility of not authentic results in consequence of a unilateral focus
on one topic or correlated topics. One of the three posts is of the topic animals/animal
business, the second one belongs to the topic (drug-related) crime and the third
one to the topic military. Out of thousands of comments on each post about 110
consecutive comments were selected randomly after deactivating the Top Comments
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display, selecting the option Latest Activity and scrolling down a few times without
getting a picture of the comments content. All comments were in English so that no
comment had to be excluded for language criterion. To allow the evaluation of the
collected data it was necessary to clearly identify the commentators sex, which one
profile didnt fulfill and which is why it had to be excluded from the study.
Methodology
To identify and classify the collected comments they first had to be saved and adjusted
to a readable format and in order to make them suitable for this study the corresponding
sex had to be matched to every commentator. The clear assignment of sex to the
commentators was realized by calling up the commentators profiles, where their sex
automatically showed up if adjusted correctly. Only in one case the sex couldnt be
determined for which reason the comment was excluded from the study. In addition,
categories were designed to facilitate the examination of whether the claims of previous
researches also apply to the communication observable in the collected data. Those
categories were elaborated according to the previous described empirically observable
gender differences in communication.
First, the category questions was established to verify whether it is true, that women ask
more than men and furthermore the sub-category rhetorical questions was introduced
to differ between real seeking of information and the usage of a stylistic device. To be
classified as such, in this case, questions dont necessarily have to be marked by a
concluding question mark, as questions could be detected by their structure.
Second, since demands show a commanding stance, the category demands plays an
important role in analyzing whether the impression that men are more authoritative
than women appears in this case, too. This category contains instructions, orders,
commands and similar.
Statements, the third category, is sub-divided in non-judgmental statements/facts and
opinions figured as generally valid fact or truth. The usage of the latter demonstrates a
self-confident stance relating to the opinion that men speak a language of status and
independence, because formulating the own opinion about something as if it were an
objective fact shows a desire for or the existence of ones own assertiveness.
In order to examine the appearance of Dindia and Allens statement that women tend
to share personal information, experiences and problems, the category self-disclosure
was added.
And finally there is a category for thanking, showing happiness, recognition,
appreciation and giving affirmation with the title positive reactions. This category
comprises phrases similar exclamations and sometimes even only one word. Since there
werent any positive exclamations in the sense of thanking, showing happiness etcetera,
the category positive reactions was omitted for one post.
The expressions and utterances in the comments of each post then were put in their
belonging categories and evaluated according to the sex of the commentators, more
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precisely the quantity of men or women. The result of the question how many
comments belonging to one category were done by females or males was put into
relation with the total number of women or men of the set of comments. The following
example will clarify the procedure. Given the case that a post has a total of 100
comments of which 50 commentators are female and 50 are male and the evaluation of
the comments counts 12 women showing self-disclosure, the amount of the members
of that gender in that category (12 women) has to be to be put in relation with the
amount of the total number of female comments (50), giving a percentage of 24%. This
means that in the fictive case 24% of the women shared their experiences, personal
information, views or problems.
There were comments that didnt fit in any of the categories and other comments with
more than only one sentence which is why some comments or rather their content fit
into more than one category.
Results
Below is the first randomly selected post, posted on January 7, 2015 on Fox News.
1) Petco has removed Chinese-made dog and cat treats from stores as they may
have sickened thousands of pets and killed 1,000 dogs since 2007.
http://fxn.ws/1Asvkci
The results of the evaluation of the comments show that from the total of 112
comments, 67 are female and 45 are male, which is 59.8% female comments and 40.2%
male comments (see Table 1).
Table 1. Distribution of Comments written by men and women to the first post
The classification of the comments showed, for women, the biggest percentage in the
categories Self-disclosure and Questions. This means that women mostly gave personal
views, experiences or information while for men the categories Statements and Self-
disclosure. 32.8% of all the women who commented the post used self-disclosure in their
comments and 20.9% asked questions. The percentage for male comments in the
category Statements is 33.3% and for Self-disclosure 22.2%.
112 Total comments 100%
67 Women 59.8%
45 Men 40.2%
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The table below lists the proportional distribution of comments among all the
categories.
Category Male Female
Questions - Real questions - Rhetorical Questions
15.6% 2.22% 13.33%
20.9% 4.5% 16,4%
Demands 20% 16,4%
Statements: - Non-judgmental - Opinions as fact
33.3% 13.3% 20%
12% 9% 3%
Self-disclosure 22.2% 32,8%
Positive reactions 0% 7.5%
Table 2. Proportional distribution of the comments to the first post among the categories
The most striking differences between men and women are noticeable in the category
Statements, not only because more men than women comment in a stating manner, but
also because as we can see in Table 2, women tend to give non-judgmental information
or facts if they state something, while for men it is the other way round. Their comments
give the impression to be a fact but on closer inspection it becomes clear that they carry
certain valuation or an opinion. In the category Self-disclosure is another divergence. In
relation, female tendencies toward self-disclosure are bigger than male tendencies.
The following randomly selected post is from March 4, 2015.
2) Breaking News: Mexican police arrest Alejandro Trevino-Morales, leader of
the notorious Los Zetas drug cartel. http://fxn.ws/1B0ED57
In this case, the evaluation of the corresponding comments had a widely differing
distribution than the evaluation of the comments to the previous post. In this case only
32 of the comments were comments done by women, which represents 29.6% of the
total amount of comments and 76 men commented, which represents 70.4 percent of
all comments.
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Table 3. Distribution of Comments written by men and women to the second post
Of those 32 women that wrote a comment to the post the majority chose to write a
statement that on closer look is an opinion figured as generally valid fact or truth. None
of the women wrote a non-judgmental statement but 37.5% of them wrote their opinion
in form of a statement. The second largest percentage of womens reaction can be found
under the category Positive feelings. 31.3% of the women showed their satisfaction
about the news or recognition and gratitude.
60.5% of the men used statements in their comments and 57.9% of them were used not
to give facts, but to state the own opinion. The second largest percentage of mens
comments are shared by two categories equally with 17.1%. There werent any real
questions but 17.1% of the men used rhetorical questions in their comments and also
17.1% demands.
Category Male Female
Questions - Real questions - Rhetorical Questions
17.1% 0% 17.1%
15.6% 0% 15.6%
Demands 12.5% 17.1%
Statements: - Non-judgmental - Opinions as fact
60.5% 2.6% 57.9%
37.5% 0% 37.5%
Self-disclosure 6.3% 4%
Positive reactions 1.3% 31.3%
Table 4. Proportional distribution of the comments to the second post among the categories
As we can see in Table 4 the most striking divergences between comments done by men
and by women to this post, is the strongly differing percentage in the categories
Statements and Positive Reactions. We can see that women use statements and positive
reactions in their comments to nearly the same extend but almost no man gives positive
reaction in his comment. Compared to the first post, there is a shift of the percentage
distribution between non-judgmental statements and opinions figured as generally valid
fact. No woman used value-free statements while in the comments to the first post
more women that wrote a statement wrote an unbiased one.
The third randomly selected post is from February 17, 2015.
108 Total comments 100%
32 Women 29.6%
76 Men 70.4%
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3) Breaking News: Islamic State militants have burned to death 45 people in the
western Iraqi town of al-Baghdadi, just five miles away from an air base
staffed by hundreds of U.S. Marines, a local police chief tells the BBC.
http://fxn.ws/1L7GW7F
The collected data of this post consisted of a higher percentage of womens comments
than of men. From 103 comments, 67 were from females and 36 from males. This
represents a percentage of 65% for women and 35% of men as shown below in Table 5.
Table 5. Distribution of Comments written by men and women to the third post
In this part of the data set the evaluation differed a little bit from the other two parts
because there was a considerable number of comments that didnt fit in any of the
elaborated categories. Those comments were mostly supplications but were not
excluded from the study since they represent a part of the total comments and have an
influence on the percent distribution of both, the participation of men and women as
commentators for this post in general and the classification into categories. In this case
the two categories with the biggest percentage were for men statements with 30.5%
and demands with 22.2%, for women demands with 23.9% and also statements with
20.9%.
Three percent of the women gave value-free statements while 17.9% of them gave their
opinion figured as a generally valid fact. 23.9% of the women gave directives, even
extreme ones, e.g. demanding the death of the Islamic State militants or the release of
an atomic bomb. Just like in the other two parts of the data set, the majority of the men
made assertions that implied their opinions. For the other categories the results of the
evaluation are listed below in Table 6.
103 Total comments 100%
67 Women 65%
36 Men 35%
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Category Male Female
Questions - Real questions - Rhetorical Questions
15.7% 2.8% 13.9%
17.9% 1.5% 16.4%
Demands 22.2% 23.9%
Statements: - Non-judgmental - Opinions as fact
30.5% 0% 30.5%
20.9% 3% 17.9%
Self-disclosure 11.1% 14.9%
Positive reactions 0% 0%
Table 6. Proportional distribution of the comments to the second post among the categories
In this case there werent any positive reactions. The results show that in relation, men
used more statements than women, just like in the results of the evaluation according
to the results of the data evaluation of post 1) and 2) and women shared more
personal information (self-disclosure) and asked more questions.
Comparing the three Tables, the results with respect to questions and demands show
different occurrences. Table 4 shows that men ask more questions than women,
whereas in Table 2 and Table 6 men have the lower percentage in the category
questions. Nevertheless the proportion between real questions and rhetorical
questions stays in all three tables more or less the same.
When taking a look at the category demands we can see, that in Table 6 the percentage
of demands from women (23.9%) is similar to the percentage of men using demands
(22.2%), whereas Table 2 shows with a difference of 3.6% between female and male
usage of demands, that more men use demands in their comments. Table 4 shows a
difference of 4.6% between female and male usage of demands in their comments,
whereby in this case the percentage is higher for women than for men.
In the following category, statements, the percentage of all tables leads to one
reasoning, that is to say that male tendency towards statements as a tool to convey their
opinion is in all three cases higher than female tendency towards representing their
views as a fact. The proportion between statements that carry own opinions (In The
tables labelled as statements as fact) and non-judgmental statements differs between
the tables. The percentage for female non-judgment statements in Table 2 is lower than
the percentage of opinion as fact-statements and in Table 4 and 6 it is higher higher
for the latter than for value-less statements.
Besides a small deviation in Table 4, the results are concordant regarding the category
self-disclosure. The female percentage for self-disclosure is higher than the male one in
Table 2 and 6.
For the category positive reactions the tables show an unambiguously result, namely:
positive reactions are almost exclusively shown by women.
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Conclusion
By means of the previous observations, two features can be clearly observed. First,
male tendencies towards statements that imply an opinion are higher than woman
tendencies to the usage of statements for expressing their opinion. Second, women tend
to give more positive reactions, for example Thank you, Good news or Awesome.
Moreover women rather give personal information, experiences and views and use
more rhetorical questions.
Since the category questions was established to examine whether Lakoffs statement
that women ask more than men is true for communication mediated via facebook
comments, the study came to the finding that in two cases the percentage of female
usage of question was higher and in one case, with a difference of 1.6% it was lower
than male usage of questions in comments. 1.6% is a very low difference and for this
reason it can be said, that women used slightly more questions in the data set of the
study than men did.
It also can be said, that men speak a language of status and independence, because the
majority of men chose to figure their opinion as a valid fact or truth. This demonstrates
a self-confident stance about their opinion.
The category self-disclosure was added in order to examine the appearance of Dindia
and Allens statement that women tend to share personal information, experiences and
problems, more than men. In sum this was also true for this study because only in the
part of the data set belonging to post 2) the proportion slightly differed and was higher
for men than for women.
As the category positive reactions was elaborated to see whether Tannens and Lakoffs
statements that were described in the background part of this study are true, the answer
is yes, due to the big differences between males and females positive feedback.
Only the claim that men are more authoritative than women could not be proved
because no significant divergence in the usage of demands came up.
Therefore it can be said on the whole that already existing observations and beliefs also
apply to computer mediated communication.
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References
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TANNEN, DEBORAH. (1995) The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why. Harvard
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Honor Pledge
I declare that I have read and understood the material exemplifying and explaining
cases of plagiarism included in the Studienfhrer ('Genius borrows nobly':
Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism), and that my paper contains no plagiarized
material and is solely my own work. I am aware of the fact that should my paper be
found to contain plagiarized material or to have been written in part or whole by
someone else, this will entail serious consequences. These include the following:
1. The reason for my failure will be recorded by the department.
2. I will not be given credit for the course.
The Honor Board may review my paper and suggest additional sanctions, including
expulsion.
Furthermore I am aware that submitting the same or a revised paper in two separate
courses without the instructors' explicit consent will result in similar consequences.
Mara M. Khler
March 20, 2015