When females strike back…

‘How can we have an invasion when the troops storm ashore and then change their minds!’ - Bob Hope, entertainer, about women in combat.

Whatever position you hold or whatever power you carry, women are more likely to face stereotyping in the society. With all other women in the world, I experience this phenomenon everyday even being among the most loved ones of my life. Gender stereotyping is just another brick which the society made out of.

Gender stereotyping in the media is a well-established fact. Nowhere is it more obvious than in advertising, where the authoritative male voice-over is a regular feature. The attribution of specific and indeed limited gender roles by the advertising industry and by society in general is a fascinating subject in its own right.

I want to look initially at just one element of it, eg. the portrayal of women’s language and communicative skills as a component of their general behaviour patterns. Usually, references to women’s linguistic behaviour are implicit rather than explicit. There are occasions when deep-rooted expectations and prejudices come to the fore, displaying a stereotypical picture of women as creatures who talk a lot, interrupt men and are illogical and changeable.

Not only the content of speech, the tone and stress patterns are also become key factors in stereotyping women. For example, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lowered her pitch, spoke more slowly and reduced the variability of her intonation patterns. Here she was implementing a ‘contest’ strategy which is generally supposed to be employed by men.

One has also to contend with society’s expectations of women as ladies who speak politely and the fact that lower pitch is associated with greater credibility. Studies have shown that the lower the news reader’s voice, the more people are inclined to believe the news!

Recently growing attention has been devoted to a new approach in language termed gender linguistics. That happened due to the fact that social factor has become determinative in language studies which are deeply related with an individual and society.

Linguistic study of gender stereotypes in different kinds of texts is among pioneer researches. Stereotypes, therefore, can instigate prejudice and false assumptions about entire groups of people, including the members of different ethnic groups, social classes, religious orders, the opposite sex, etc.

A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the “other group” have in common. Stereotypes are forms of social consensus rather than individual judgments. Although sex is usually defined as a person’s biological traits, gender is defined as how a person identifies themselves to the world.

Gender relates to those affectations that are attributed to men and those affectations that are attributed to women. Gender stereotypes are those ideas, usually imposed by society of what is expected of men and women in the social structure.

The presence of gender stereotyped elements allows discovering unique language characteristics distinguishing texts for men and women. It’s no exaggeration to say that gender stereotypes are constantly present in intercultural communication: linguistic elements can be gender neutral as well as gender significant.

There is considerable divergence between conventional stereotypes and the reality of women’s speech. Since linguistic behaviour is not rigidly divided along sex lines, it is easy to discount differences as non-existent or unimportant. Linguistic research in the last twenty years has done nothing if not prove that variation does exist and that women are linguistically, as well as socially, at a disadvantage.

Researchers have shown consistently that women speak less than men in public fora and that men interrupt women more than the other way round.

In my point of view, language is one of few most powerful tools which women belong!