Showing what you know

One of the challenges of exams is that they not only test you on what you know but they also test you on how you interpret the question to show what you know. A case in point is last summer's AS Paper 2 in which lots of students (including many of my own, I'm sure) saw a question about gender and thought "Woo hoo! We've done this one already - it was on last year's Paper 2". Or words to that effect...

Of course, a gender question was set on the 2016 paper, but with a very different focus. The problem with this is that - like all the other areas you do for Paper 2 in the AS and the A level - you have to select the most relevant knowledge to address the question that's been asked... not the question you'd have liked to be asked. And with Question 3 on Paper 2, the focus was very much supposed to be on representation of gender. That means that it's not really relevant* to talk about studies into language use and interaction. What's more, the question actually gave stimulus material based on discussion around sexist language as a way into the task.

This article, which appeared on The Guardian website a few weeks before the exam, is much more like the kind of thing that I think examiners were after: a text that looks at how language represents gender and how ideas about gender are constructed and challenged.

This is also a good one to think about; it's a blog by Deborah Cameron about the politics of pronouns and the reasons why various writers and linguists have argued about them and their significance.

The key thing to think about here is that when you look at the main areas for Paper 2 - broadly speaking, at AS it's accent & dialect and sociolect (including social groups, social class, occupation and gender) and at A level it's those plus ethnicity and world Englishes - you need to be aware that it's not just how people use language that is being assessed but how the users of language can be represented in language.

So, three things that you can do to help you avoid producing the wrong knowledge are:

1. Think carefully about how questions might be phrased that ask you to focus on representation of some of the other areas - social groups, ethnicity, occupational language.
2. If you are doing the AS, think carefully about the stimulus material and the steer it's giving you. 
3. Read the question very carefully and select from the most relevant parts of your knowledge. Don't assume that the keyword 'gender' should be the cue to offload all your knowledge about everything you've ever learnt about gender.

(*There are a few cases where it might be a little bit more relevant - like how certain pop linguistics books represent men as from Mars and women from Venus, or how deficit theorists represent women as weak - but these aren't enough to sustain a good answer.)

Revising gender: discourses and debates

Gender as a topic area features in both the AS and A level, and can appear in either part of Paper 2. You could get an AS level "Discuss the idea that..." or an A level "Evaluate the idea that..." question in Section A or gender might feature as part of 'language discourses' in Section B.

What is meant by 'discourses'? Well, it's something that I've defined elsewhere as a debate or argument about language, but it can also be treated as a way of thinking about, talking about and describing language. If you want to get academic about it (and why wouldn't you?) here's what the linguist Paul Baker has to say about it in his excellent book about language, gender and sexuality, Sexed Texts:

Language constructs ideas about gender, represents them to us and often helps establish them as 'common sense'. When people write about gender, they often articulate many of the existing discourses - that gender interaction is like a battle of the sexes, a form of combat, or that debates about gendered pronouns are about a form of repression or policing of natural language - and part of your job at both AS and A level is to unpick those discourses and find alternative ways to express them. 

For example, at AS level, you were asked in Section B of last summer's AS Paper 2 to write an opinion piece in which you discussed claims about female and male communication and the stimulus text was an extract from a Mail Online article about how men are supposed to use one kind of filler an women another. Even the Mail article (yes, even the Mail) managed to point out that it wasn't always as simple as saying that men do x and women do y, because they pointed out that there are what they termed 'betweeners' such as David Beckham, Jessie J and Eminem who mix and match their umms and errs. The article also pointed out that age might have a bearing on the kind of filler a person uses.

Why does this matter? Here's the main reason. If the stimulus text shows that it's not quite as simple as saying that men do x and women do y, then why do they use a headline that suggests exactly the opposite and why do they think that is an appropriate way to frame the debate? Maybe because, as Deborah Cameron pointed out a few years ago, difference sells. To paraphrase Cameron, headlines such as "Newsflash: men and women use language in largely the same ways" don't really have as much appeal as ones that propose there's a difference. She talks more about these dubious claims in her (highly recommended) Myth of Mars and Venus and has this to say about such reductive headlines in an extract from that book on The Guardian's site in 2007:

Most people, of course, do not read academic journals: they get their information about scientific research findings from the reports that appear in newspapers, or from TV science documentaries. These sources often feature research on male-female differences, since media producers know that there is interest in the subject. But the criteria producers use when deciding which studies to report and how to present them introduce another layer of distortion. And sometimes headlines trumpet so-called facts that turn out, on investigation, to have no basis in evidence at all.

The other reason it matters is that if you are going to produce an opinion piece about gender and interaction, it makes sense not to parrot the simplistic, black and white discourses of the popular press, but to offer something a bit more nuanced. Not only is this good for getting marks on AO2 (concepts, knowledge about language, theory and research) but it's good for your AO5.

If you can engage your readers and inform them about language in a way that shows you understand the media discourses around gender and manipulate them for your own ends - perhaps even subverting them and challenging them in the process - you can pick up marks for style, structure and shaping of language. If you can show that you have read, tasted and perhaps even digested others' opinions, you can do a better job of expressing your own views.

And when it comes to the A level, where you might be required to pull apart the language of articles and other popular media texts about gender (or sociolect, accent and dialect, world Englishes, language change for that matter, where all these discourses recur) your ability to spot popular and prevalent discourses, and then to interrogate them, could really help you with the text analysis task in Question 3.

Gender sensitivity?

Looking for an example of how language and gender makes the news? Then go no further than these two pieces about the same story. Not only do you get a good sense of how language can be part of a wider battle about gender roles and social inequality but you also get a lesson in language discourses for free.

Just have a look at how The Guardian and Mail Online report the same story, use different sources, experts and language techniques to frame their views.

They're right

Still on the subject of gender, one area which has long been debated and contested is that of gendered pronouns and what we do when we don't want to signal gender. For example, an expression like "Each student should bring his own lunch" begins with an indefinite determiner (each) uses a male (singular) pronoun (or determiner, more accurately here) but assumes that all students will be male. Using his/her is an alternative, but is often seen as a clunky and still puts the male first. "Each student should bring their own lunch" runs into problems with subject and pronoun agreement (singular each and plural their) but has often been seen as an acceptable way to phrase something like this.

However, many formal publications and style guides have ruled against 'singular they' and seen it as a grammatical faux-pas. But even that seems to be changing, and the Associated Press this week announced that they would accept 'singular they'.

The case for 'singular they' is made convincingly here as well, and it certainly seems to be a better idea than trying to invent new pronouns such as hesh, hen and thon which have struggled to catch on.

Edited on 05.04.17 to add another article on this story (thanks to @FKRitson and @a_gadsbey).

Revising gender: representation of gender revisited

Here are links to old posts on this blog that address language and gender from a representation perspective.

Slutwalks
Everyday Sexism
Pyramids of Egregiousness
Calm down, dear

And here are some links to more recent discussions of language and gender (thanks largely to Nicky B and her social media antennae):

Revising gender for AS & A level: legs-it and baby bumps

We've made a start on revising gender for Paper 2 of the A level this week and I've also been finishing off gender with my AS classes before we head into lots of exam revision. There's not a lot of time to teach everything on the A level part of the course after doing the AS last year, so we're relying a fair bit on the material students covered in class last year and hoping they revise the key things themselves, but I've been trying to find a way of approaching it that works.

Anyway, today's Daily Mail front page provided an absolute gift for the representation of gender. If you haven't seen it, it's this monstrosity below.


While the picture and caption make me want to bang my head repeatedly on the keyboard, shouting "This.Is.Not.The.1950s!" there's something in the whole way that this is presented that goes beyond what I've traditionally taught for this topic and made me consider another angle.

A lot of the focus on gender and language (for me, at least) has been on words and meanings: which words and which meanings and how we can raise awareness about what words might connote and how they are unequal - lexical asymmetry and semantic derogation, basically. There's also what language can do in terms of its syntax - constructing male as doer and actor and woman as receiver and patient. There's even what morphology can offer - suffixes that diminish women's roles and those that mark gender where it seems unnecessary (actress...waitress...why not just actor and waiter?).

So far so good. But when I've introduced language analysis to my students, I've always tried to conceptualise it as something that goes from tiny details of language to the much bigger picture, so am I missing something here?

We've got morphemes, words, phrases and clauses, but does any of that really explain what's so offensive and wrong about the Mail headline? It's not really the word 'legs-it' that's bad is it? We all have legs, don't we? The word legs is not really on a par with bad words like slag, sket and ho. No it's something that's working at a higher level than words, phrases and clauses that's the issue here and that's discourse. Discourse - as I've been grappling with in various articles - is a term that has multiple meanings in language study but here it's working as a couple of things: as language used at a level beyond the sentence and as a way of constructing and representing ideas.

The offensiveness comes from the wider discourse that's presented: that women - strong, powerful, political women (whatever you think of their party politics) - are not to be taken seriously and only deserve to be belittled and trivialised by talking about their legs. Their legs. On the front page of a national newspaper.

It's the same discourse that allows other national papers to discuss the human rights barrister, Amal Clooney's appearance at the United Nations in terms of her baby bump and high heels.

So, gender representation works on a level beyond the levels of words, phrases and clauses and on a wider textual and discourse level. That makes it slightly harder to pin down and analyse but it also offers some ways into it, and over the next week or two we'll have a look at different approaches to language and gender (and some other areas) to think about what AS and A level students could say about them.

Fry up

Over the summer, you might have read about vocal fry; that’s the kind of deliberately croaky voice demonstrated here by my favourite sit-com teenager, Dalia in Suburgatory.  Recent coverage of vocal fry has all the features of typical media stories on language and gender, and is a great example of why we should be sceptical when reading mainstream media coverage of linguistic issues.   Reading and analysing mainstream media coverage of linguistic issues is, of course, something  A2 students will need to do in your exam; you’ll also need to create your own piece for your intervention coursework.

 

First, newspapers will pick up on a recent bit of linguistic research, or maybe something they've seen mentioned on Twitter or YouTube.  Journalists are particularly keen on using headlines which express a clear and simple difference between men and women, so they will either reduce complex, nuanced findings to simplistic ‘men do this/women do that’ headlines like this, or base an article around a flawed bit of research like this.   The wonderful Deborah Cameron outlines this process at length in her snappily titled blog post (which btw would make a great style model for your intervention) ‘How to Write a Bullshit Article About Women’s Language’.

In the case of vocal fry, it seems that reporters noticed a story in the academic publication ‘Journal of Voice’.    Enterprising journalists realised they could write a story that combined celebrity click-bait with a ‘men-and-women-are-different’ story and so produced headlines like this featuring tabloid darlings like Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears.   There was even more mileage in the story when media outlets realised they could use the story to lecture women about how they need to speak more like men, and to blame their failure to do this for inequalities in education and the workplace.  Even feminist writers in respected, ‘serious’ newspapers got in on the act, presenting the story as a rallying call to young women; stop talking like a weak and feeble girl!

Never mind the fact that the original research only looked at young women, and so provided no evidence that only young women use vocal fry.   Never mind the easily demonstrable fact that men use vocal fry too, as shown in this brilliant post.   Never mind the fact that the original research only looked at young women, and so provided no evidence that only young women use vocal fry.  Never mind the fact that vocal fry is only seen as a sign of weakness when women use it.

The lesson here is not to take media coverage of women’s language (or, indeed, any linguistic issue) at face value.    Instead, do a bit of digging and reading around.  And if you want a different perspective on women’s language, you can always rely on Professor Cameron.

Oh man!

While sitting at home, feeling sorry for myself with a bout of man-flu, this article about a curious phenomenon called manterrupting popped up on Twitter. Apparently, manterrupting is when males interrupt women in meetings and/or co-opt (or bropropriate*) their ideas as their own.


It's a man-word like these explained here by Stan Carey on the MacMillan Dictionaries blog and makes use of the man- prefix that has become so productive in recent years. So far we've had...

• mansplaining: patronising explanations delivered by men to women of things that women probably already know more about (Urban Dictionary definition here)
• manspreading: sitting on public transport and spreading one's sweaty flannels in order to secure more seat space (Collins Dictionary definition here)
• manscaping: removing unsightly body hair to make oneself more attractive (Oxford Dictionaries definition here)
• manslamming:aggressive pavement action involving a man barging into people (often women) who he believes to be in his way (explained and illustrated in The Daily Telegraph)

But what others can you can come up with? A couple of possible ones suggested on Twitter have been:

manterpreting: (a male way of interpreting a woman's words...although when @sooze8968 suggested this I perhaps did my own manterpretation of it).
manter: (pointless chat amongst men possibly making them both late for whatever)

Any more?


*And I'm also doing just that, because Sally Flower at Colchester was the first person to mention some of these this week. Anyway, I can't help it: I'm a man and it's in my genes. 

Feisty sluts being abrasive

There's been lots of good material in the papers recently about language and gender, so it's useful for anyone thinking of investigations at AS into representation of social groups & individuals.

The Telegraph looks at words which only seem to be used to label or describe women, while The Guardian has its own take on the issue. Fast Company also has a look at the ways in which language is used differently for men and women in their performance reviews, with abrasive being used to describe women much more than men.

Elsewhere, the discussion about what slut and sluttish mean - or has meant in the past - is picked up in The Guardian.

His and hers

MacMillan Dictionary blog has been running a gender month, taking a look at how gender is represented, constructed and debated in language. If you're studying gender as part of the AQA B spec (ENGB1) you'll find good stuff here and here, and if you're looking at gender and variation for the AQA A spec (ENGA3) this one and this one might be of interest to you.

You can find a complete run-down of gender month posts here and there's lots of good stuff to look through.

Men are from Earth and so are women.

A new book by Cordelia Fine called Delusions of Gender takes on many of the same targets that Deborah Cameron's brilliant Myth of Mars and Venus demolished a couple of years ago.

For a while now, the argument that men and women are hard-wired from (or before) birth to be different has been gaining popular support, but many studies suggest that the differences between the sexes are not as pronounced as many might like to believe. And certainly, in terms of verbal abilities, gender seems to account for only a small proportion of difference. Here's a review of Fine's book in last week's Guardian and here's a nice bit about language and gender:

The latter example, on the issue of verbal skills, is particularly revealing, neuroscientists argue. Girls do begin to speak earlier than boys, by about a month on average, a fact that is seized upon by supporters of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus school of intellectual differences.

However, this gap is really a tiny difference compared to the vast range of linguistic abilities that differentiate people, Robert Plomin, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, pointed out. His studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children's verbal development is due to their gender.

"If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild," Plomin told the Observer.

Chatting gas

Here's a very dubious poll that claims men gossip more than women. It's not dubious because men don't gossip (they do, but they probably don't like to call it "gossip"), but it's dubious because it's such a rubbish set of questions and relies on such sketchy data. Have a look here for The Telegraph's take on it.

As Deborah Cameron points out so clearly in her excellent Myth of Mars and Venus (covered here), we shouldn't generalise about what men and women do in conversation, because there are so many different types of men and women and we all "do" masculinity and femininity in different ways depending on where we are and who we're with, but one big stereotype about gossip is that it's just a girl thing.

Battle of the texters

Gender and text messaging come under the spotlight in a recent piece of research from Indiana University carried out by Susan Herring and Asta Zelenkauskaite, reported here in Science Daily.

According to the summary on Science Daily, the usual patterns of gender interaction* - men talking for longer and using more non-standard forms - are reversed when men and women use text messaging to interact in public forums.

Expecting findings consistent with past research on gender-patterned public communication, Herring and Zelenkauskaite were predicting men would post more and longer text messages, and that men would also employ more non-standard techniques. Instead, the opposite was true when it came to communication within a new, convergent medium that mixes interactive television (iTV) with SMS or texting.

The study found women used more non-standard language such as abbreviations or expressive insertions that represented characteristics including enthusiasm, sadness, emphasis and individuality. And while women were both more economical and expressive, they also came closer to maxing out, or did max out, on the 160-character message limit more often than their male counterparts.

So, according to this research, if the length of a text message equates to the length of an utterance in spoken mode, then it's actually women who are "saying" more and "saying" it more often. But of course, this isn't quite the texting we're used to here, because (as they explain in the article) the texts are used as part of an interactive TV forum, rather than phone to phone. Presumably you text in and your message appears on the screen.

Would the same patterns hold true in phone to phone texting or would the usual patterns* of gender and spoken language kick back in? And might this research throw up these findings because the nature of the text "conversation" is flirtatious and expressive in nature?

But whatever the quibbles over the possible differences between this and "proper" texting, it does raise lots of interesting questions about how we negotiate computer-mediated communication and blended modes, and whether the patterns sometimes noted in spoken interaction can be seen directly translated over onto these newer modes.

(*I'm using this term with some qualification, because as you can see here and here, generalising about gender and language is a bit of a mug's game)

Sexist grammar?

A piece of psychological research covered on the BPS Research Digest takes a look at gender in grammar. In some languages (French and German for example) nouns possess gender: not gender in the sense of socially constructed sexual identities, but gender as a grammatical concept, in which certain nouns are classed as masculine (le chapeau = the hat) or feminine (la plage = the beach). But gender in a more conventional sense also applies to French nouns, so you get le chien for a male dog and la chienne for a female dog, spectateur for a male spectator and spectatrice for a female spectator. OK so far?

But when you get a mixed group and need to use a plural pronoun, the tradition in both French and German has been to use the male pronoun ils to refer to the group, regardless of the gender of the participants. But as ils is a masculine pronoun, does it actually convey a gender neutral meaning?

The equivalent in English is the false generic pronoun he, which many people have historically used to refer to both men and women, as in the rather odd statement "Like other mammals, mankind breastfeeds his young". But as we have looked at in ENA1 Language & Representation, there's a problem with these generic pronouns (and nouns like mankind) because they don't really bring to mind gender neutral identities and often exclude women.

So anyway, back to the research. The result appears to have been that when French or German listeners hear a male plural pronoun they tend to assume that it refers to males and take longer to process the words if they're followed by clearly feminine nouns. More detail here. But how is this relevant to ENA1? Well, it's a bit of a long shot, but it could be argued that this sort of research helps support the linguistic relativist or linguistic determinist perspectives, that language can control or shape our perceptions. It could also support the Dale Spender Man Made Language position that sexist attitudes have become encoded in the language we speak, reflecting the dominant positions of males in the history of society and language control.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

Say goodbye to the female brain. Say hi to the female mouth

If you're an avid blog-reader, you'll remember last year's Myths of Mars and Venus story in which top linguist Deborah Cameron tore into the American bestseller The Female Brain. To summarise it, the writer of The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine made a claim that women use some 6000 more words a day than men, while Cameron (who is writing her own Myths of Mars and Venus) makes the point that there can be no "average" man or woman, least of all an average number of words we speak, because we use language differently depending on who we are, what we do, where we go and why we're doing it, and while gender may have some part to play in our language, it's one of many many factors.

The latest take on this comes in last week's news stories on a piece of research in Science magazine, reported here and here. According to The Guardian's story on this, "Men and women talk as much as each other, suggests a study which says that, on average, both genders speak around 16,000 words a day - a fact challenging the traditional notion that girls are considerably more chatty than boys".

The research is covered in more detail in The Times article here:

The first rigorous study exploring the verbosity of men and women has found both sexes equally capable of irritating jabber. The typical woman speaks an average of 16,215 words a day, while an average of 15,669 words pass the lips of men, a difference so small it is not statistically significant.

The most loquacious people of all, indeed, tend to be men, but men are also the most taciturn. All three of the biggest talkers who took part in the research were male, the most prolific of whom yakked his way through 47,000 words in a day. The most effusive woman managed a mere 40,000.

At the other end of the spectrum, one man spoke an average of just over 500 words each day. There were nine men who spoke fewer than 2,000 a day, compared with only four women.

As an average of 16,000 words are spoken each day, people who talk at 120 words per minute — the speed at which the BBC’s Huw Edwards reads the news — would end up speaking for a little more than two hours of the 17 they typically spend awake.
The Little Britain character Vicky Pollard, by contrast, speaks at 330 words per minute, and would get through the average daily word allocation in just 49 minutes.

The findings, from a team at the University of Arizona, overturn a notion that is not only popular with the public, but which has also found its way into scientific research.

The debate about male and female talk is continued here in a Times editorial, here on the BBC website and here in an article from today's Guardian. But as many commentators point out, the stereotype of women being chatterboxes is such a deeply ingrained social myth, that whatever the research presented to counter it, many refuse to accept it.

Useful for:
ENA3 - Male female conversation