CHAPTER 4

How Women’s Ways of Talking Differ from Men’s

An interview with Deborah Tannen

Editor’s note: Deborah Tannen was interviewed by HBR editors Amy Bernstein, Sarah Green Carmichael, and Nicole Torres.

Let’s go back for a few minutes to the 1990s. More women were in the office, increasingly working alongside men or above them, not for them. Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics professor, was concerned about these women being heard, given credit, and accurately evaluated by their male colleagues and bosses. She knew from her research that the way women tend to talk at work can put them at a disadvantage—a topic that she described in her 1995 Harvard Business Review article, “The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why.”

In this interview, Deborah Tannen discusses whether women still face the issue of being heard at work and how the way women speak may play a role in their being held back.

HBR: Has anything changed since you wrote in the 1990s about how women speak and are heard in the workplace?

Deborah Tannen: My impression is that not much has changed. I have been giving talks to various organizations, corporations, and companies pretty much nonstop since back then. And whenever I give these talks, I get the same response: “That’s exactly what’s happening to me. I experienced that just yesterday. You’ve just told the story of my life.” That’s the basis for my saying that not much has changed.

So, if women are still struggling to be heard for the same reasons today—if not much has changed—we want to get a better understanding of where that comes from. What’s driving that?

I trace the way women and men tend to speak at work—and it’s important to say “tend to,” since nothing is true of all women or all men, and we have many influences on our styles other than our gender. But there are tendencies that girls and boys often learn as kids playing in same-sex groups. Girls tend to talk in ways that downplay their authority. If they play up the fact that they are the leaders in the group or that they’re good at something, the other girls will criticize them: “She’s bossy. She thinks she’s something. She’s stuck up.” That’s in contrast with the way boys tend to maintain their position in the group. They talk up what they’re good at, maybe even making it into a game where they’re trying to top each other. And the leader of the group is someone who tells the others what to do and gets it to stick. If we move into the workplace, a person in authority has to tell others what to do. And frequently, women will find ways to do it that don’t seem too bossy, which downplays their authority. This can come across to others, especially to some men, as lacking or not deserving authority.

I was once speaking at a college and talking to the president of the school, and she told me of an experience she’d had. She had said to her assistant, “Could you do me a favor?” and then went on to ask her to do something. A member of the board took her aside and said, “Don’t forget: You’re the president.” He had heard the fact that she’d started with “Could you do me a favor,” as if she really thought she didn’t have the authority to ask her own assistant to do something. In fact, you could see her way of asking as asserting authority. She knew the assistant had to do whatever she asked her to do, so she was saving face for the assistant by asking in a way that was, in her view, simply polite.

One of the ways I’ve noticed that women make not just requests but all kinds of leadership maneuvers less direct is by phrasing things as questions. You might hear a woman in a meeting say, “I’m not quite sure I’m following. Can someone recap for me?” if they think that the person running the meeting should have provided more detail or background but didn’t in the beginning. Or, “Can someone please explain what the Q3 results mean?” even if they themselves know, but they think someone else in the group needs that information.

That’s a great example of how women will often talk in ways that will save face for other people. And it’s interpreted as something internal about them. (To see more examples of communication styles and how they’re misinterpreted, see table 4-1.)

The narrative is usually that women are socialized to be less confident. But it seems like you’re saying they’re actually socialized to sound less confident.

Yes, absolutely. Laurie Heatherington, a psychology professor at Williams College, did a study where she asked hundreds of incoming freshmen at the university to predict the grades that they were going to get in their first year. There were two conditions. Half of them were asked to do it in a public way, either to orally tell the interviewer what grades they expected or write it on a piece of paper, and then those predictions were read aloud to a group. The other was private: Write what you expect, close it in an envelope, seal up the envelope, and no one’s going to see it. In the conditions where their predictions were public, women predicted much lower grades for themselves than men tended to. When their predictions were private, the results were pretty much the same for the women and the men. The women were downplaying what they really expected so that they wouldn’t come across as too full of themselves.

There might be something a little bit different going on with credit taking and women, where for some of us, taking credit is kind of a repugnant act. Have you seen anything on that front?

Yes. I observed that women frequently said “we” when talking about something they personally had done or accomplished. I also observed men saying “I” about things that they were not individually, personally responsible for. And I think that has a lot do with our sense of what’s appropriate. A lot of women feel it’s kind of boastful to say “I.” The word should be avoided. So, they’ll say “we” to be gracious about the people they work with. But they assume other people will know that they really did it. And that’s similar to a more general pattern by which many women felt: If I do a good job, it will be noticed. I don’t have to call attention to what I’ve done. Whereas many men realize that they should call attention to their work or people won’t know.

A lot of these ways of speaking that women have taken for granted or assume are appropriate are realistic. It’s a phenomenon I often refer to as a double bind: a situation in which you must fulfill two requirements, but anything you do to fulfill one violates the other. Women in positions of authority must fulfill expectations for a good woman and those for a good leader. But those expectations are mutually exclusive. If she speaks as we expect women to speak—be self-effacing, downplaying her accomplishments—she will be liked but seen as less competent and confident than she really is. If a female leader speaks as we expect a person in authority to speak, she may be respected but not liked and seen as too aggressive. It’s a challenge to find some middle ground.

What does it sound like to successfully navigate that?

I’ll give an example. A woman has to tell a subordinate to do something. She could ask, “Do you think you could do this by 4:00?” Here, the question form, the high pitch, the rising annotation, all of that would be considerate and not too imposing. People would like her but see her as lacking authority. She could say, “Do this by 4:00.” That would be authoritative but might come across as too assertive for a woman. Or she could say, “I need this by 4:00. Do you think you could do that?” So, it’s something in between the very self-effacing and the very declarative.

There are also conversational rituals that women have, such as apologizing when something’s not their fault, simply because something bad happened. Or ritualistically complimenting other people, especially other women. But sometimes these rituals are left uncompleted by the other party, making it awkward for the women.

Here’s an example of a conversation ritual that can backfire when the other person doesn’t do their part. Women are often told they apologize too much. They’re told, “Don’t apologize; it’s not your fault.” Sometimes a woman will use an apology to get the other person to apologize. For instance, let’s say there was a meeting, and you’re the boss. Your subordinate didn’t come to the meeting, but they were supposed to be there. You might say something like, “Gee, sorry you weren’t at the meeting. If I forgot to tell you about it, I’m sorry, it was really pretty important.” She knows she told him about the meeting. She has apologized for A; he is supposed to apologize for B.

So he should say—and she would expect him to say—“Oh, yeah, you did tell me. I’m sorry, something came up, and I couldn’t make it. But I’ll make sure to find out what went on, and it won’t happen again.” If he says, “Yeah, make sure you tell me next time,” it’s like sitting on a seesaw or a teeter-totter. You sit on your side, and you trust the other person to sit on their side. If they get off, you go plopping to the ground, and you wonder how you got there. But it really wasn’t anything you did. The other person did not do their part of the conversational ritual.

If conversational rituals have changed because there are more women in the workplace and more female leaders, and they introduce their own conversational rituals—there’s more complimenting, more apologizing going on, maybe—why aren’t those behaviors or rituals more valued if they’re more common?

When I did this research back in the early nineties, I was quite convinced that when there were more women in the workplace, the standards would change. So, in a way, I’m disappointed and also surprised that they haven’t. The explanation I would surmise is that a sense of how a person in authority should speak or behave is still based on an image of a man in authority. We still associate authority with men. Sadly, the double bind is alive and well.

__________

Deborah Tannen is university professor and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She is the author of 12 books, including You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which introduced to the general public the idea of female and male styles of communication, and Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work, on which her 1995 Harvard Business Review article is based. Her most recent book is You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships.

Adapted from “Make Yourself Heard” on Women at Work (HBR podcast), January 24, 2018