Language at Work

Language in the Workplace

Eakins and Eakins 1976:
They observed 7 university meetings taking note of the length of each utterance. They found that the men in the meetings usually had the longest utterances at between 10 and 17 seconds whereas the women's utterances were between 3 and 10 seconds.

Edelsky 1981:
In series of meetings of a University department faculty committee, Edelsky conducted a method to test his theory that the floor (the power and dominance) in a face to face conversation differs depending on the types of meetings held. The more linear and hierarchical segments of the meetings showed that men had more utterances than women and spoke more in different areas like in debates, in a joking manor, in directing and in soliciting responses. In the un-led discussions (the 'free for all' segment) it was shown that the floor was owned by men and women equally, arguably women had more power than the men.

Herring 1992:
A discussion was carried out over email about a linguistics 'distribution list'. The participants were from the 'Linguistic Society of America' where over 50% of the members are female. In spite of this, only 5 women took part compared to the 30 men.  The men's responses were also (on average) twice as long as the women's. Women also tended to use a more personal voice (ie: I did this, my opinion is etc) whereas the men used dominating language (ie: It is obvious that).

Herbert and Straight 1989:
By recording conversations between 2 people, Herbert and Straight concluded that compliments are usually given from people of a higher rank in the work force than by that of a lower. This contributes to the theory of maxims as the higher rank persons would want to be polite and make people of a lower rank feel comfortable