Fathers maybe particularly important here. A small child would rather play with its father than with its mother. Fathers also tend to be more physical and imaginative play mates than mothers particularly when playing with boys. When children find a task difficult, fathers are more likely to give them practical assistance while mothers tend just to give encouragement.
As children, they tend to play with other children of the same sex, creating two different ‘cultural’ worlds. Boys tend to play in large groups with the emphasis on physical activity and fighting is a common feature when with each other.
Young girls, friendships are more exclusive, private and limited. They prefer to play intensively with one or two, ‘best friends’. They make things fair between each other by co-operating and taking turns.
When a child crosses the boundary line between genders. Girls who are tomboys seem to gain in status, and are perceived as doing fun masculine things like climbing trees. But for boys when they do not conform to the gender role, they become objects of ridicule they are teased for being sissy and girly, and are thought to play with dolls and cry frequently.
In 1990 Deborah Tannen published a book for general readers titled, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. This is not really a book about differences in the ways men and women talk. Tannen's methodology, discussion and analysis, allows her to make analytic and critical claims about the forms and functions in men's and women's natural conversations. As is typical of most discourse analysts, Tannen works with small sample sizes and selects data purposively rather than randomly because it illustrates her analysis. Occasionally she reminds the reader that her descriptions of the men and women she has studied may not necessarily generalize beyond her own small samples. At other times she seems to write, at least as I read her, as though she really believes she is describing women (in general) and men (in general). Her descriptions are persuasive and often seem to offer an explanation for problems of communication between the genders that it is easy to ignore, the important limitations in her research method and small samples.
Tannen's analysis shows that attempts to understand what goes on between women and men in conversation are muddled by what she calls the ‘ambiguity’ and ‘polysemy’ of power and ‘solidarity’. By this she means that the same language can be used to accomplish both functions, so utterances by men and women cannot be sorted into distinct categories of supremacy or friendliness. She illustrates the problem by reviewing and showing ambiguities in studies of gender and various discourse strategies including indirectness, interruptions, silence versus volubility, topic rising, and conflict styles.
Tannen objects to the line of reasoning. Her own research shows that overlapping talk is characteristic of what she calls "high involvement" style. Listeners who are mainly women are highly involved in conversation, often use "cooperative overlaps," not to gain the floor, but to show enthusiasm and participation in the topic. Compared with men, conversations among women tend to show more involvement through cooperative overlaps or collaborative floor holding. By contrast, men more often talk in singly developed floors which Tannen calls "high considerateness" style.
"Ethnic Style in Male-Female Discourse," examines a frequent theme in much of Tannen's research. She examines gender differences in the context of cultural difference, primarily by contrasting interpretations of the male and female speech made by Greeks, Greek-Americans, and Americans. Cross-cultural variations in style and understanding were slightly more apparent in her data than variations between genders. Sample sizes in this study were too small to allow for meaningful statistical comparisons, but the qualitative findings show that ethnicity may be confusing as well as unpredictable in research on gender and language.
Her insights into the linguistic strategies used by men and women have reversed simplistic thinking that the discourse styles of men and women can be explained as power versus submissiveness. While not denying that these stereotypes are sometimes accurate, she reminds us that gender differences are embedded within a more complex framework of culture.
Dale Spender launched the attack with, Man Made Language, in which she argues that language is as an instrument for reinforcing and upholding a male-centred society. Spender argues that the gate is controlled by men and used to bar women. She also discusses the exclusion of women from the creation of cultural forms and from experiences of naming, including ways in which women writers have been devalued. She also includes discussions, with varied examples, efforts made by women writers to construct “women-centred meaning,” to create new symbolic systems.
In one discussion Spender taped and analysed a discussion on sexism in a mixed sex conversation there were thirty-two women and five men. Later, when Spender analysed the tape it revealed that the men talked over fifty percent of the time, it also revealed that what the men wanted to talk about, and the way the men wanted to talk was given superiority “high considerateness”. Women wanted to talk about what happened to them. Women were interrupted, and their conversations were devalued. Spender gave examples from the discussion and described the conflict that ensued when women challenged men, men overlapped women and took control over the conversation
Dale Spender argues that the actions behind having a culture with in gender is that the patriarchal society is to be blamed, for the reasons behind the average male being the superior sex. Many social institutions and social gatherings are then organised to reveal this belief in male supremacy. Spender also argued that in one sense a patriarchal society is organised so that the beliefs in male supremacy ‘come true’, she also explores the idea that, if in a variety of ways, if a community can come to accept that males are superior, that they are more worthy and more deserving, will then lead to the whole community to be perpetrated by the system of patriarchy.
With in the twenty first century gender does play its part in the ‘culture’. However many women are becoming a lot more dominant e.g., within the workplace. The economic base for people's lives is extremely important in the realization of a gender-equal society. As women have moved into the workplace, the environment has changed so that each woman can select an occupation that best suits her various employment needs, and can fully display her talents in her chosen field without facing gender-based discrimination.
Men are taking on equal roles in house keeping and are becoming more in touch with their feminine side. There are many examples of where men have dominated the part to care of their children whilst the mother works in full-time paid jobs (breadwinner). Shared parenting has become a main feature towards the twenty first century. There has been quite a lot of suggestion in recent years that men are getting more involved in childcare, and that different, more involved, kinds of fathers are now more common. It appears that there have been some positive changes in this area.
Men and women are engaging in to each other’s agendas to cut out and cut off the aspect of ‘gender culture’ in today’s society.
Bibliography
- Spender Dale, Man Made Language, 1998, Pandora press
- Tannen Deborah, You Just Don’t Understand (men and women in conversation), 1992, Virago press.
Word count, 1554.
