The Guardian is publishing three excerpts from Deborah Cameron’s new book, The Myth of Mars and Venus, a debunking of myths about language and gender. Not a few of these myths are perpetuated by linguistic anthropologists like bestselling author Deborah Tannen, who is very much in Cameron’s cross hairs as she writes this book. Here is how she concludes the second excerpt:

But the research evidence does not support the claims made by Tannen and others about the nature, the causes, and the prevalence of male-female miscommunication. No doubt some conflicts between individual men and women are caused by misunderstanding: the potential for communication to go awry is latent in every exchange between humans, simply because language is not telepathy. But the idea that men and women have a particular problem because they differ systematically in their ways of using language, and that this is the major source of conflict between them, does not stand up to scrutiny.

In the first piece she argues that the literature is biased in favor of research which proves that there is a difference:

In relation to men and women, our most basic stereotypical expectation is simply that they will be different rather than the same. We actively look for differences, and seek out sources that discuss them. Most research studies investigating the behaviour of men and women are designed around the question: is there a difference? And the presumption is usually that there will be. If a study finds a significant difference between male and female subjects, that is considered to be a “positive” finding, and has a good chance of being published. A study that finds no significant differences is less likely to be published.

She includes a chart from one such “negative” study.

While linguistic anthropologists may need to update their course syllabi a bit, I don’t think this is going to have a major impact on the study of language and gender. After all, the very fact that people insist on seeing strong differences where there are none is an important part of the socio-cultural world in which we live. Moreover, these stereotypes about masculine and feminine linguistic styles very much inform our speech practices.

Cameron focuses on the power dynamics of such gendered expectations, looking at how the majority of the literature blames “miscommunication” on women:

This raises two questions. First, if the male and female styles are equally valid, why does it always seem to be women who are told they must accommodate to men’s preferences – even, apparently, when the men are their subordinates? Is avoiding male-female miscommunication an exclusively female responsibility? Second, though, why is it assumed that indirectness causes miscommunication in the first place? What is the evidence that men are confused by it?

… some “misunderstandings” are tactical rather than real. Pretending not to understand what someone wants you to do is one way to avoid doing it. This may be what is really going on when a man claims not to have recognised a woman’s “Could you empty the trash?” or “The groceries are in the car” as a request. The “real” conflict is not about what was meant, it is about who is entitled to expect what services from whom.

That speech differences between genders are overblown by the media will not come as a surprise for long term Language Log readers, in fact Mark Liberman is mentioned by name in Cameron’s book. But I also wonder whether Cameron’s efforts at debunking have caused her to overstate her case. There are clearly gendered norms for male and female speech, and it seems unlikely that these would not have any impact on actual speech behaviors. In some societies, such as Japan, we can see these differences quite clearly (or used to, I assume things are changing). Moreover, in the best work on the subject, like that by Penny Eckert, we see how gender and class intertwine, with upwardly mobile school girls speaking with more standard pronunciation than their male peers, and those without such aspirations speaking in an even stronger Detroit accent than the boys.

I don’t think Cameron would deny any of this, and I’m still waiting for part three to see if she addresses actual differences as opposed to mythical ones. What is clear, however, is that insofar as Cameron does accept that there are any differences, she places herself clearly on the “dominance” side of the “difference vs. dominance” debate. Again, Mark Liberman:

According to difference theories (sometimes called two-culture theories), men and women inhabit different cultural (and therefore linguistic) worlds. To quote from the preface to Deborah Tannen’s 1990 popularization You just don’t understand, “boys and girls grow up in what are essentially different cultures, so talk between women and men is cross-cultural communication.”

According to dominance theories, men and women inhabit the same cultural and linguistic world, in which power and status are distributed unequally, and are expressed by linguistic as well as other cultural markers. In principle, women and men have access to the same set of linguistic and conversational devices, and use them for the same purposes. Apparent differences in usage reflect differences in status and in goals.

UPDATE: Part three is up (actually it has been for a while, but it isn’t clearly marked as such).

Elite women often resolve the problem by contracting out what is still regarded as “their” work to less privileged women: paid nannies, cleaners and carers. Something that cannot easily be contracted out, however, is the task of caring for a partner’s emotional needs. It is not a coincidence that one of the key issues Mars and Venus books address is women’s complaint that “I take care of his feelings, but he doesn’t take care of mine”.