Difference Approach

The Difference Approach looks at the relationship between language and gender and, specifically, the differences in communication between men and women. According to this approach, gender differences reflect not only the differences in male and female speech, but also their diverse lifestyles and attitudes.

What is the difference approach?

Deborah Tannen presented her theory of the Difference Approach in her book You Just Don't Understand (1990)¹, which illustrates the various ways that men and women use language. Deborah Tannen's gender theory argues that men and women use language differently in ways that reflect and reinforce their gender roles and power relationships in society.

Deborah Tannen's difference theory proposed that men and women learn different ways of communicating through socialisation, which then influences them in adult life.

Tannen's work challenged earlier research by Robin Lakoff, who presented the Dominance Approach in 1975.

Fig. 1 - Tannen believed childhood socialisation leads to gender performativity later in life.

Different approaches in language?

In 1975, Robin Lakoff published Language and Woman's Place, where she argues that girls were brought up to speak and use language in a way that made them appear as the weaker sex.

Lakoff's research has been criticized by some linguists for being incomplete and biased.

Deborah Tannen's Difference theory suggests that language is defined more by difference than by male dominance and has received considerable support from other linguists including Janet Holmes, Jennifer Coates, Jean Gleason, and Esther Greif (see below).

Difference approach: Deborah Tannen

Deborah Tannen's difference theory argues that men often use language to assert dominance, while women tend to use language to establish rapport and build relationships.

Tannen has also argued that many of the communication difficulties that occur between men and women can be traced back to these differences in conversational style. A better understanding of these differences can help to reduce misunderstandings and improve communication between men and women.

Tannen said:

Deborah Tannen's difference theory identified six main contrasts in communication between men and women:

• Status vs. support
• Advice vs. understanding
• Information vs. feelings
• Orders vs. proposals
• Conflict vs. compromise
• Independence vs. intimacy

Let's have a look at these differences in more detail.

Status vs. support

According to Tannen, women seek comfort and support while men set boundaries to show power and status.

Fig. 2 - Status vs support is one of the distinctions Tannen noted between male and female speech.

In her book He Said, She Said (2003)², Tannen describes how a woman heard her son and two of his friends talking:

Tanner explained this as an example of the male desire to show status. As she puts it:

Advice vs. understanding

Information vs. feelings

According to Tannen, men typically communicate to give information, whereas women communicate to build up relationships or to network.

Orders vs. proposals

According to Tannen, men are more likely to make and respond to demands, whereas women are more likely to make and respond to suggestions.

In the following example, Kate is making suggestions, not demands. Like most women, she formulates her requests as proposals rather than orders. Ken, however, perceives her words as manipulation and resents this more than if she had made a straightforward demand.

Conflict vs. compromise

Tannen suggests that women avoid conflict at all costs, and therefore negotiate or compromise. Men tend to favour more direct exchange instead.

Fig. 3 - Conflict vs compromise is another difference between male and female language that Tannen identified.

Independence vs. intimacy

According to Tannen, while men use language to show their independence, women use it to connect with others.

In another situation from He Said She Said, Tannen describes the following exchange a father overheard between his daughter and her friend:

According to Tannen, this kind of communication starts with socialisation, which begins at the ages of three or four. This is when children learn different ways of communicating, which continue to influence them in adult life.

Tannen's research and writing focused on miscommunication and misunderstanding between men and women. Her theory demonstrates how women can be different from men in communication without being seen as unequal. Tanner's work challenged Lakoff's Dominance Theory and has since developed into genderlect theory of communication.

Difference approach: language and gender

What is 'genderlect theory' and what does it mean in the context of language and gender? Let's find out!

According to Tannen, male and female types of communication can be best understood as coming from two separate 'cultural dialects'. In other words, men and women communicate in different ways due to social norms and expectations; this difference in communication can be seen in everyday life, in films and on TV.

Male genderlect uses communication for the following:

• To exchange information ('Report' talk)
• To show independence
• To show status

Female genderlect uses communication for the following:

• To network ('Rapport' talk)
• To connect
• To develop intimacy

Television shows provide a major source for observing genderlect, as each character has a communication style that is specific to their personality. This can often appear 'atypical' in terms of gender-specific language. Since Tannen's original theory, there has been a shift towards deliberate genderlect mismatching in dialogue written for tv.

Difference approach: Janet Holmes (1995)

Janet Holmes further developed the difference theory and states that:

• Women are more polite than men (where 'polite' means showing consideration to others).
• Women use language 'to establish, nurture and develop personal relationships' (Holmes, 1995)⁴.

Holmes also argues against Lakoff's thesis, as she states that:

• Hedging and fillers do not necessarily demonstrate indecisiveness and powerlessness.
• Tag questions, rather than expressing uncertainty, may be used to keep a conversation going or to be polite and include others in discourse.

She further defines four separate functions of tag questions, arguing that they can be used to express:

• Uncertainty
• Facilitation
• Softening
• Confrontation

Her research has, like Tannen's, been criticised for being based on 'a stereotypical view of women's language' (Mills, 2003) and insufficient data, although her statements are important as they launched the sociolinguist debate (1995) on difference theory.

Difference approach: child-parent interaction

The interaction between parents and their children is a significant factor in determining the language that the child will develop as time goes on. Let's look at some theories:

Jean Gleason and Esther Greif (1980)

In 1980 psycholinguists Esther Greif and Jean Gleason co-wrote Hi, Thanks, and Goodbye (1980)⁵, based on a study they carried out on parent-child interaction. The study focused on three routines: greetings, thanks, and farewells, and examined how fathers and mothers teach these routines to their daughters and sons.

Twenty-two children (eleven boys and eleven girls) and their parents participated in the study. The children were aged between two and five.

The results suggested the following:

The results suggest that the children generally needed to be taught social conventions (as they tended not to be spontaneous); this means a certain amount of conditioning begins in childhood. The boys seemed less shy than the girls in greeting people, although all were treated the same way by their parents, which would seem to add support to Tannen's Difference Theory.

Jennifer Coates (1993)

Coates worked with Tannen's theory and further supports the idea that women share feelings in order to reach a shared understanding and as a means of offering solidarity.⁷

Coates also argues that girls and boys develop different speaking styles early on and that this is because peer groups influence their social language development, with gender being a key component.

Coates made the following observations based on her research on children at school age:

• A child's peer group directly influences their social linguistic growth.
• Girls tend to stay in smaller groups that involve talking.
• Boys tend to stay in bigger groups that involve joint activity.
• As a result of different interactions within their groups, boys and girls develop different language habits.

Christine Howe agrees with Tannen but suggests that gender is not a key factor; she claims that boys and girls develop differences based on other factors (not only gender-based). Howe's research suggests the following contrasts between men and women in communication:

• Women are active listeners and avoid strong language.
• Men use language in a more competitive way than women to seek power.

Difference approach vs. diversity approach

Tannen's theory supports the idea that gender influences our way of communicating. She also suggests that women may have a different way of communicating without making them subordinate or inferior (essentially: it's okay to be different!).

The Diversity Approach argues that gender has no influence on language but that other factors (including context, society and socialisation) influence the way men and women communicate. In other words, the male and female gender does not physically or biologically exist; instead, gender is created through the repetition of acts, routines and beliefs or, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir:

Judith Butler is another key philosopher in this area who defines gender as:

In other words, the social roles for both men and women come from a mix of behaviour patterns that we adopt as we develop.

In her book The Myth of Mars and Venus (2008) Deborah Cameron challenges the myths surrounding gender differences and claims there is as much difference and similarity within each gender group as there is between men and women (also explored in Janet Hyde's work in 2005).

Cameron suggests we should think about gender in linguistics in a more complex way than we have done so far:

Hyde, meanwhile, proposes the Gender Similarities Hypothesis (2005), which indicates that there are actually fewer differences between men and women than there are similarities.

She also warns of the dangers of focusing on the differences. For example, viewing depression as a largely female problem could result in under-evaluating depression in men.

Fig. 4 - The difference and dominance approaches are very different, however, both are important in your study of English Language.

Communication would seem to be a highly individual phenomenon that depends on multiple factors, not all of which have been researched. The above-mentioned theories represent just a few ideas. What do you think about the connections between gender and language? All of these theories were published before 2010.