Assertiveness: just say no

This month a feminist classic was reissued: Anne Dickson’s A Woman In Your Own Right, first published in 1982. Back in the 1980s virtually every feminist I knew owned a copy; I can still visualise the shiny silver cover. The 40^th anniversary edition looks different, with a sunshine yellow cover and a new subtitle (the original one, ‘Assertiveness and You’, has been replaced by ‘The Art of Assertive, Clear and Honest Communication’). The content has also been updated: it’s not being presented as a historical document, but as still-relevant, practical advice.

Is it still relevant? As Dickson says in her new introduction,

It is tempting to believe that the world has changed to such an extent that women no longer have need of the guidance and support this book originally set out to offer.

She goes on to point out that while some things have changed for some women, many basic inequalities have persisted. Women are still expected to do the lion’s share of the unpaid care-work, and they still contend with high levels of sexual and domestic violence. She also cites some newer problems, like the explosion of online bullying and abuse.

No feminist disputes the argument that we still live in an unequal world. But is assertiveness a solution to the problems Dickson mentions? Personally, I have my doubts: as regular readers will know, I’m critical of the idea that the way women communicate is, if not the root cause of their subordinate position, then at least an important contributory factor. I think the assumptions behind communication training for women are linguistically and politically naïve, and there’s little if any evidence that interventions based on them are effective.

In that case, you might ask, why have those interventions been so popular for so long? A cynical answer might be that, like the equally ineffective products of the diet industry, they are lucrative. Training is a profitable business, and AFAIK it’s unregulated: anyone can market their services as a trainer, coach or ‘communication consultant’. Anne Dickson, to be fair, does have expert credentials: she’s not in the same category as the hacks and grifters I’ve criticised in the past. Her model of assertiveness is internally coherent, and there’s more to her advice than the usual finger-wagging bullshit. But that’s exactly why the 40^th anniversary of her best-known work seems like a good moment to revisit the reasons why—even at its best—I find this approach misguided.

Assertiveness training (AT) is now quite strongly associated with feminism, but it wasn’t invented by feminists. It originated in the late 1940s as a form of behaviour therapy for people whose dysfunctional behaviour was linked, in the opinion of those treating them, to ‘poor communication skills’. In some cases the problem it was meant to address was the extreme passivity caused by severe depression or long-term institutionalisation; it was also used with drug addicts, teen mothers and homosexuals, whose ‘deviant’ lifestyles were thought to result from low self-esteem and/or inability to resist peer pressure. In other cases the presenting problem was not passivity but its opposite, aggression. AT was used to teach people (including sex offenders and domestic abusers) to verbalise feelings of anger rather than resorting to physical violence.

Trainees were taught a set of guiding principles which emphasised that (a) everyone has the right to their needs and feelings, while at the same time (b) everyone has the obligation to respect the right of others to their needs and feelings. These principles were said to require the adoption of a style of speech which was clear, direct and honest rather than passive, aggressive or manipulative. The strategies taught in AT included using ‘I’ statements, making requests directly without hinting or hedging, and refusing unwanted invitations or unreasonable requests by ‘just saying no’.  

In the early 1970s, American second wave feminists took AT out of the clinic and into the small, self-organised women’s groups which formed the backbone of the Women’s Liberation Movement. These were women who’d grown up in the 1950s, the era of what Betty Friedan called ‘the feminine mystique’; they turned to AT to help them unlearn their ingrained habits of passivity and subservience. In Britain, similarly, Anne Dickson recalls that the women she worked with early on in her career ‘could immediately identify with passive and indirect behaviours, and could readily understand how this put them at a disadvantage’.

Today Dickson thinks women have less of a problem with passivity, but it troubles her that assertiveness has been popularly conflated with aggression. She complains that the phrase ‘an assertive woman’ conjures up a picture of someone ‘authoritarian, domineering and overbearing’, who ‘gets what she wants by any means available to her’ and uses feminism as an excuse for expressing ‘hostility and intolerance, to men especially’. This is not, Dickson insists, what assertiveness means. It ‘teaches us how to maintain directness and clarity and remain authoritative while at the same time avoiding aggression’ (her emphasis).

These remarks underline Dickson’s continued allegiance to the original model of assertiveness, in which aggression was as much of a problem as passivity, but they also illustrate the limitations of the philosophy behind that model (which, to the extent it has any political content, might be described as ‘wishy-washy liberal’). From a feminist perspective the equation of female assertiveness with aggression is a predictable consequence of sexism and misogyny. Any attempt by a woman to assert her rights or her authority directly, and any refusal on her part to defer to others’ wishes, is liable to be construed as illegitimate and hostile—in short, as an aggressive act, which may then provoke a backlash.  

This is implicitly acknowledged in some of the academic literature on assertiveness. Back in the 1990s, when I was researching AT for my book Verbal Hygiene, one of the texts I read included a discussion of a course developed for women in Puerto Rico, where the designers had decided not to include the topic of saying no to your male partner. In Puerto Rico, they explained, the submission of wives to husbands was ‘a relatively intransigent cultural norm’: encouraging women to say no to their husbands would be neither effective nor ‘socially valid’, and it could put the women at risk of violence. This surely underlines the point that AT is not politically radical. It’s not about challenging the prevailing social order, it’s about helping individuals function more effectively within it.

The main tool AT employs for that purpose is a set of rules for using language, which are meant to help trainees achieve the ideal of ‘clear, direct and honest communication’. In the abstract this seems unobjectionable: no one is in favour of obscure, confusing and dishonest communication. But if you delve into the details of what AT means by ‘clear, direct and honest’, you soon discover that the recommended speech-style is linguistically unnatural and socially unrealistic–and as such, unlikely to make communication more effective.

One problem with AT’s advice is its assumption that every speaker in every situation has the same freedom to choose to be ‘direct and honest’, and that what stops many women from making that choice is simply their own lack of confidence or self-belief. In reality, of course, there are other constraints which have more to do with the social context than with individual psychology. Many of the contexts in which women are told they should assert themselves involve power inequalities: standing up to a bullying boss, or a violent husband, may have consequences they are (understandably) unwilling to risk. It’s not a good idea to ‘just say no’ to someone who may take that as a provocation and respond with physical violence.

In fact, empirical research has shown that even in non-threatening situations English-speakers very rarely perform refusals by ‘just saying no’ without apology or explanation. A bald ‘no’ may be clear and direct, but it will also be heard as rude and hostile. But AT handbooks have a tendency to dismiss linguistic markers of politeness as mere ‘padding’, detracting from the clarity of the message without adding any extra information. The point this misses is that communicating isn’t just about exchanging information, it’s also about negotiating the relationship between participants. Politeness plays a crucial role in establishing the necessary level of co-operation and mutual respect. Eliminating it will undoubtedly influence the way your interlocutors perceive you—but not usually in a positive way.    

There’s a good illustration of this in the original AWIYOR: if you’re in a café and you find your cup hasn’t been washed properly you should say to the server, ‘I’d like you to change this for a clean cup’. This is textbook assertiveness: a clear, direct, first-person statement of what the speaker wants, with no superfluous ‘padding’ (like, say, ‘sorry, but could you change this for a clean cup please?’). It’s also brusque to the point of rudeness, making the speaker sound overbearing and self-absorbed.

That’s not just my opinion. Psychologists have done experiments where subjects watched videotapes of people communicating in ‘assertive’ and ‘unassertive’ ways and then rated each speaker for qualities like competence, likeability and aggression. ‘Assertive’ speakers are often judged to be aggressive, rude and unlikeable. And while that’s true for speakers of both sexes, you won’t be surprised to hear that the effect is stronger for women. Because women are expected to be kind and self-effacing, any female behaviour that deviates from that norm attracts more disapproval than the same behaviour in men.  

For me this is the core of the problem with communication training for women. Even when the advice itself isn’t stupid, it doesn’t acknowledge what both research and experience consistently show—that women are judged by a double standard and caught in a double bind. If they conform to gendered expectations they’ll be criticised as weak and ineffectual, while if they flout those expectations they’ll be damned as ‘abrasive’, ‘shrill’ and ‘strident‘.

This casts doubt on the assumption the whole enterprise is based on: that women are held back in life by the way they communicate, and the remedy is for them to change their behaviour. But if the new, ‘improved’ behaviour is not acceptable either–it just attracts a different set of criticisms–that might suggest that women’s speech was never the real problem. What really holds women back is systemic sexism: the negative judgments made on their speech are just expressions of that deeper prejudice.

So where does that leave A Woman In Your Own Right? I’ve read a lot of self-help books and training manuals in my time, and as I said earlier, I regard AWIYOR as one of the better ones. Even if I think some of the advice is linguistically misguided, it would be hard to argue that it’s actively harmful.

Considered as an institution, however, I do think assertiveness training—and communication training more generally—has done more harm than good over the last 40 years. Some examples are worse than others, but they all recycle and reinforce the belief that women as a group have a communication problem, and that this is an important reason why they are (still) not equal to men. They’re underpaid because they don’t feel comfortable asking directly for more money. They’re overworked because they can’t say no. They’re overlooked because they don’t speak up, or else they hedge and waffle and don’t protest when they’re interrupted.

This argument is not supported by good evidence, and our continuing receptiveness to it distracts attention from the deeper causes of inequality. It also obscures the nature of the problems women do have with language and communication, which have more to do with a combination of men’s behaviour and widely-held sexist attitudes than with women lacking the confidence to speak or using language that stops people taking them seriously.

So, with all due respect to Anne Dickson, I am not inclined to celebrate the anniversary of A Woman In Your Own Right. To be honest (not forgetting clear and direct), I find its longevity depressing. There was a time when I thought this whole genre was on its way out, but it managed to hang on, and in the last decade it’s produced a new crop of popular texts with titles like The Confidence Code and Girl, Stop Apologizing.

These recent books are part of the rise of what the feminist media scholars Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill call ‘confidence culture’, a depoliticised form of feminism which, in their words, ‘exculpate[s] social structures and institutions from responsibility for gender injustice, laying it squarely at women’s door’. Rather than exhorting women to demand their rights and improve their material conditions through collective political struggle, it calls on them to empower themselves by improving themselves. As A Woman In Your Own Right demonstrates, this is not a new idea. It wasn’t the solution to our problems forty years ago, and it isn’t the solution to them now.

Cartoon by Angela Martin, 1994

When Kamala met Mike

Note: all extracts reproduced in this post are taken from the full debate transcript published by USA Today

PAGE: Kamala Harris – Senator Harris, I mean. I’m sorry. 

HARRIS: It’s fine. I’m Kamala.

PAGE: No, no, you’re Senator Harris to me. 

About 14 minutes into last week’s Vice-Presidential debate, the moderator Susan Page apologised for calling the Democratic challenger ‘Kamala Harris’ (first name + last name) rather than ‘Senator Harris’ (title + last name). Harris reassured her: ‘It’s fine. I’m Kamala’. Page (who was herself addressed as ‘Susan’ by both candidates) responded that it wasn’t fine: her role in this formal setting required her both to observe the proper courtesies and to treat the two candidates equally. At no point had she addressed or referred to Harris’s opponent as ‘Mike Pence’. He was always ‘Vice-President Pence’.

Many feminists would agree that it’s not OK to call Harris by her first name while giving Pence a formal title—nor for the media to refer to the two of them in shorthand as ‘Kamala’ and ‘Pence’. I’ve pointed out before that the first-naming and/or de-titling of women in public contexts, when comparable men get last name + title, is a common phenomenon—it’s one manifestation of the ‘gender respect gap’. But as I’ve also pointed out, it’s a bit of a minefield for women with progressive/egalitarian politics. You may recognise the first-naming of women (see also children, domestic servants, and in Jim Crow America, Black people) as a putdown, a case of the familiarity that implies contempt, but you still don’t want to be seen as a self-aggrandising bully insisting that everyone should defer to your exalted status, or as so insecure that you have to stand on ceremony at all times. Was that what prompted Harris’s ‘it’s fine, I’m Kamala’?

In this case there may have been more to it. Like most things we do with language, first-naming takes on different meanings in different contexts. In political contexts, a gesture implying that you don’t stand on ceremony or demand automatic deference from others can signify qualities which many voters regard as virtues—it says you’re authentic, down-to-earth, a woman or man of the people rather than an establishment type motivated purely by personal ambition. Maybe Harris was exploiting that symbolism.

If she was, she wouldn’t be the only woman to do so. In New York City a campaign has just been launched by the Black lawyer and media commentator Maya Wiley using the slogan ‘Maya for Mayor’.  In her campaign video Wiley makes much of her non-establishment credentials: ‘Some will say I don’t sound like past mayors or look like them or think like them, and I say yes, I don’t — that is the point’. Referring to herself as ‘Maya’ underlines that point. Though it’s also true that her name is particularly well suited to the purpose: if you were called Maya and you were hoping to be elected mayor, why wouldn’t your campaign slogan be ‘Maya for Mayor’?

This brings us neatly to an observation made by several people on Twitter, that when we’re talking about the naming of politicians and other public figures, sexism, or indeed sex, is not the only variable in the equation. The media’s preference for ‘Kamala’ over ‘Harris’—but at the same time, for ‘Pence’ rather than ‘Mike’—is also a preference for more over less distinctive names. Mikes (but not Pences) are a dime a dozen; conversely, Kamalas (in the US) are much rarer than people whose last name is Harris.

The distinctiveness principle predicts that there will be a greater tendency to first-name women, because historically women’s given names have been more variable, and thus more likely to be distinctive, than men’s; but it doesn’t apply exclusively to women. It also explains (at least in part) why the current British Prime Minister is so frequently referred to as ‘Boris’—a very unusual name for a white British man—rather than by his more commonplace last name ‘Johnson’.

I say ‘at least in part’ because in Johnson’s case the first-naming also reflects his carefully-cultivated image as an unconventional politician with a larger-than-life personality. But male politicians whose given names are less distinctive have often tried to get some of the positive effects associated with first-naming (sounding more authentic and down-to-earth, or less patrician) by using nicknames or diminutive forms alongside their last names: see ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, ‘Bill’ Clinton and for that matter ‘Joe’ Biden—and on the other side of the US party line, ‘Dick’ Nixon and indeed ‘Mike’ Pence.  

All in all, then, I don’t think feminists need to get too wound up about the first-naming of Kamala Harris. Though there’s probably an element of knee-jerk sexism about it, in context it has other meanings too. In an era of populism, when elected politicians are judged at least as much on criteria relating to their personal authenticity as on criteria relating to their competence, being ‘Kamala’ may do more to help Harris than to hurt her.  

I feel similarly about some of the other features of the debate that prompted indignation on Harris’s behalf. For instance, it was noted that the moderator thanked Mike Pence more than 50 times, whereas she thanked Harris fewer than 30 times. On its own that sounds like more evidence of the respect gap. But when you look at the transcript you soon realise there’s another explanation. Susan Page consistently used the formula ‘thank you’ to fulfil the dual function of acknowledging a debater’s answer and telling them to stop talking because their time was up. She did this with both participants, but more with Pence because he went over his allotted speaking time more frequently. He also ignored more of Page’s interventions, which forced her to repeat herself.

Here’s an extract, from around 24 minutes in, where Page makes three separate attempts to bring Pence’s turn to a close before he finally yields the floor:

PENCE: Joe Biden, 47 years in public service, compared to President Donald Trump, who brought all of that experience four years ago– 

PAGE: Thank you – Thank you, Vice President –

PENCE: – and turned this economy around by cutting taxes, rolling back regulation, unleashing American energy-

PAGE: Thank you – Thank you, Vice President Pence –

PENCE: – fighting for free and fair trade, and all of that is on the line –

PAGE: Thank you, Vice President Pence –

PENCE: – if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are in the White House.

In this short extract Page produces five ‘thank yous’ addressed to Pence, so it’s not surprising that the overall tally was over 50 (if anything it’s surprising it wasn’t higher).

But it isn’t just because of Page that ‘thank you’ appears so frequently in this transcript. Possibly in an attempt to avoid repeating the extraordinary incivility of the earlier Presidential debate between Trump and Biden, Pence and Harris engaged in repeated exchanges of polite thanks:

PENCE: Senator, I want to thank you and Joe Biden for your expressions and genuine concern. And I also want to congratulate you, as I did on that phone call, on the historic nature of your nomination.

HARRIS: Thank you. 

PENCE: Well, look, I respect the fact that Joe Biden spent 47 years in public life. I respect your public service as well. 

HARRIS: Thank you.

Both candidates were evidently determined to present at least the appearance of adherence to the rules of civil exchange, to the point where they almost seemed to be competing to see who could produce more politeness tokens. But in one much-commented on respect, Pence clearly deviated from those rules. As well as consistently ignoring the moderator’s instructions to stop talking, he repeatedly attempted to interrupt Harris.

Here’s an example from about half an hour in. Harris has just been invited to respond to Pence’s claim (made in his answer to a question about the economy) that if Biden becomes president he will raise ordinary citizens’ taxes. She says:

HARRIS: Well, I mean, I thought we saw enough of it in last week’s debate, but I think this is supposed to be a debate based on fact and truth. And the truth of the fact is, Joe Biden has been very clear. He will not raise taxes on anybody who makes less than $400,000 a year –

PENCE: He said he’s gonna appeal the Trump tax cuts –

HARRIS: Mr. Vice President I’m speaking.

PENCE: Well –

HARRIS: I’m speaking.

Harris deals with the interruptions using a strategy I discussed in an earlier post—what conversation analysts call ‘doing being interrupted’, i.e. explicitly calling attention to the fact that your speaking rights have been violated. She does this by saying, calmly (since as a woman, and more specifically as a woman of color, she has more to lose than a white man if she gets angry): ‘Mr Vice President I’m speaking….I’m speaking’. (If you want to judge her tone for yourself there’s a video clip of this section embedded in the transcript I linked to at the top of this post.) This is a dual-purpose strategy: even if it is not successful in enabling her to regain the floor immediately, she will still have made the point that Pence took it from her illegitimately. And if she’s canny, that will also help her to play a longer game.

The longer game turned out to be needed, because the initial ‘I’m speaking’ move did not immediately cause Pence to back down. Rather, he pressed his advantage:

PENCE: – it’d be important if you said the truth. Joe Biden said twice in the debate last week that he’s going to repeal the Trump tax cuts. That was tax cuts that gave the average working family $2,000 in a tax break every single year –

HARRIS: That is – That is absolutely not true –

PENCE: – Senator, that’s the math –

HARRIS: – that tax bill – 

PENCE:  Is he only gonna repeal part of the Trump tax cuts?

By getting drawn into this quickfire exchange Harris is letting Pence set the agenda, but it seems she recognises that, and returns to the procedural point that he has muscled in on her turn:  

HARRIS: If you don’t mind letting me finish –

PENCE: Please

HARRIS: We can then have a conversation. Okay?

PENCE: Please

HARRIS: Okay. [continues for 200 words]

At this point the moderator intervenes with one of her admonitory ‘thank yous’; but Harris uses the fact that she was interrupted to make a bid for more time:

PAGE: Thank you, Senator Harris –

HARRIS: – [Trump is in court right now] trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, which means that you will lose protections, if you have pre-existing conditions. And I just, this is very important, Susan 

PAGE: Yes, well we need to give – We need to give Vice President –

HARRIS: – and it’s just –  He interrupted me and I’d like to just finish, please

She goes on to deliver one of her more memorable lines of the night, ignoring further interjections from both Pence and Page:

HARRIS: If you have a pre-existing condition, heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, they’re coming for you.  If you love someone who has a pre existing condition –

PENCE: Nonsense

PAGE: Thank you – Thank you, Senator Harris –

PENCE: That’s nonsense

HARRIS: – they’re coming for you. If you are under the age of 26 on your parents’ coverage, they’re coming for you.

PAGE: Senator Harris, thank you.

HARRIS: You’re welcome

We can’t know if Mike Pence would have shown more respect for a male opponent’s speaking rights, or for the instructions given by a male moderator; but in the current state of US politics (which is even more polarised now than it was four years ago) I’m inclined to agree with those commentators who didn’t think Harris’s sex made much difference—that like his boss confronting Biden, Pence would have tried to steamroller whoever he’d been up against. And the fact is that she also used, albeit somewhat less frequently, strategies like cutting in to contradict him and ignoring instructions to stop speaking. Essentially the two of them played the same game by the same rules (making this encounter different from both Trump vs. Biden and Trump vs. Clinton in 2016). I don’t see much evidence that she was treated less favourably or less respectfully in the debate itself.

What happened after the debate, however, as pundits and the public assessed the two candidates’ performances, is a different story—one which shows, once again, that the biggest problem for women in politics is not how they themselves speak, or even how they are spoken to by their male colleagues, but how they are spoken about in the larger public sphere. The judgments made by commentators on the debate were transparently partisan: Trump supporters declared Pence the winner and Biden supporters insisted that Harris had outshone him. But where negative comments were made, they were clearly differentiated by sex, and in Harris’s case they drew from a bottomless well of sexist/misogynist stereotypes.

One commentator complained that ‘her reactions to Pence, which included smirking and smiling while he was answering most of the questions, were a turn off’ (this perhaps deserves some extra points for perversity, since men more commonly claim to be ‘turned off’ when women don’t smile). An Indian publication ran a piece with the predictably loaded title ‘Why is Kamala Harris so unlikable?’ which went on to say that she ‘reeked of condescension’ and had a ‘maniacal’ laugh (she does laugh, but ‘maniacal’ is quite a stretch–see the embedded clip I mentioned before). This writer also called her a ‘megalomaniac’, and in making that assessment he was far from alone. Harlan Hill, a commentator who has advised Donald Trump, and who tweeted during the debate that Harris was ‘a lying bitch’, said afterwards: ‘I stand by the statement that she’s an insufferable power-hungry smug bitch’.

This is really the crux of the matter. When two politicians are contesting the same position, it might seem logical to assume that they are equally ‘power-hungry’; but men are rarely described in those terms so long as they do not pursue power in extreme and extra-legal ways (e.g. plotting a coup or an assassination, as opposed to simply running for office). A woman, on the other hand, is ‘power-hungry’ (and therefore unlikable, a turn-off, an insufferable bitch, a megalomaniac) if she shows any disposition to seek any power at all. The desire for power, considered natural in men, is inherently incompatible with feminine modesty and submissiveness, and that is the standard women are judged against.

You do not have to be an admirer of Kamala Harris, or any other individual female politician, to understand this attitude as a fundamental obstacle to equality—one that cannot be overcome by exhorting women to speak differently, or to project a more ‘acceptable’ public image. Harris’s efforts to appear approachable (‘It’s fine, I’m Kamala’) did not stop commentators from branding her a power-hungry bitch. If you are, or aspire to be, in politics, and you have the pre-existing condition of being female, then whatever you do, the misogynists are coming for you.

In some democracies today the misogynists’ influence is much diminished; in others, including the US, it has reached new heights in recent years. Voting out the grotesque figure who currently occupies the White House (along with his religious zealot deputy) will not, on its own, be enough to turn that tide, but it’s certainly a good place to start.

The return of ‘female email’

Do you remember your 2016 new year’s resolution? Was it to get more exercise, maybe? Give up the demon drink? Spend less time on Facebook and more with your real-life friends? Or was it, perhaps, to send ‘more effective email’, as recommended by the developers of an app called ‘Just Not Sorry’?

This app was intended to empower working women by encouraging them to delete ‘just’ and ‘sorry’ from their emails. If you hovered your mouse over one of the offending words you’d see a pop-up message from a communication ‘expert’, like “just” demeans what you have to say’, or ‘using “sorry” frequently undermines your gravitas’.

But even this ingenious invention seems not to have fixed women’s email problem. Last month the Telegraph ran a piece entitled ‘Sorry to bother you: how women can stop writing emails “like a girl” at work’. It begins with what the writer claims is a typically female email:

Hello! Hope you’re well and that you’re having a lovely week! So sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering if you could read the below article I’ve written? No worries at all if not – I know you must be super busy. Thank you so much for your time! Best wishes.

These 50-odd words are like a whistle-stop tour of women’s language stereotypes from the last half-century: they include a ‘just’, two ‘sos’, a ‘sorry’, a ‘lovely’, a superpolite indirect request (‘I was just wondering if you could…?’), and a veritable forest of exclamation marks. If the message had only ended with a smiley face emoji we could all have shouted ‘House!’

This much-maligned email style is generally assumed to be something women acquire in their teenage years, carry with them into the workplace, and need remedial instruction to get rid of. But last week a piece on Canada’s Global News website turned that assumption on its head. According to the reporter Meghan Collie, women in workplaces around North America are being told by their bosses, not to stop writing email ‘like a girl’, but on the contrary, to make their emails more girly.

Take Carlee Barackman, a former employee at a tech startup in Detroit who describes her email style as ‘short and to the point’:

Barackman thought she was emailing like everyone else — until her CEO pulled her aside to talk about her “harsh” language… While he didn’t explicitly ask her to soften her writing style, Barackman said it was implied, and she decided against it. “I had work to do and I didn’t want to spend extra time trying to convey my bubbly personality in an email,” she said.

Sometime later, Barackman replied to an email with “okay, thanks,” — no punctuation, no emojis — and her CEO called her out. Barackman agreed to try and “lighten it up,” but she didn’t really know what that meant. It was salt on the wound when Barackman saw an email thread between her male colleagues with writing nearly identical to the style that got her in trouble.

“I remember sitting down at my desk and having no idea who to ask about how to email like a woman. Is emailing like a woman even a thing?” she said. “I felt worried that, by adding extra fluff to an email, I would appear unprofessional, and also worried that, if I kept my replies short and direct, everyone would assume I was angry,” she said.

Carlee Barackman was only one of the many women who responded to the call Meghan Collie put out on Twitter: ‘Do you work in an office? Have you ever felt pressure to use emojis or exclamation points to soften your message?’ Affirmative answers flooded in, and they suggested that emojis and exclamation marks were only the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve been told numerous times to soften up my emails. I use smilies and ! In almost every email, and say please and thank you so much it would be weird if we were in person. I also throw in “just” a lot.

I have no idea what you’re talking about [followed by a screenshot of an email that reads “Awesome! I have been in and made the required edits! Thank you 😊]

I have been told to soften my tone, I notice that men and some women that they favor for whatever reason, are allowed to be rude, abusive and abrupt by email or message. The rest of us…get our tone policed. I have used emoji or “if that makes sense” a lot

I think it also comes down to what men can get away with in emails that women can’t — I once had a male manager write in all caps to get his point across.

I find men can get away with being short, rude and degrading but as soon as a woman does it, they get pulled in for it.

I hate exclamation points. Absolutely hate them. …But yes, I feel forced to use them to blend in & be polite! All the time! I’m so excited about absolutely nothing & here’s the punctuation to prove it!

I have consciously been removing exclamation points and emojis, apologies and just-a-quick-question from my emails for years. Why diminish yourself when you are simply communicating?

I read about how women apologize a lot in emails. Especially with saying the word “just”. I noticed how often I did it and it has been a LONG JOURNEY to remove those things from my email repertoire! No need to excuse myself for doing my job.

I confess I was taken aback by these vignettes.  Although I’ve spent a fair bit of my life observing the policing of language at work, the verbal hygiene practices described in this Twitter thread stand out for both their intrusiveness and their pettiness: managers scrutinizing internal emails in minute detail, and pulling individual employees aside (especially, it seems, if they’re female) to warn them about their tone. How is this a productive use of anyone’s working time?

The women who responded to Meghan Collie were also, for the most part, critical of the practices they described, often stating explicitly that the style they felt obliged to adopt did not reflect their own preferences. Some women clearly resented the tone-policing of their email, and a few reported actively resisting it. Many of these resisters invoked the competing, ‘Just Not Sorry’ genre of verbal hygiene to justify their rejection of ‘weak’ and ‘demeaning’ language. The irony of this–using one kind of sexist bullshit to fight another–isn’t lost on me, but I can’t really quarrel with the perception of ‘Just Not Sorry’ as the lesser of the two evils. ‘Empowerment’ may be a weasel word, but it’s surely preferable to self-abasement.

The ‘Just Not Sorry’ message has had a lot of media exposure because it resonates with the aspirational, ‘lean in’ ethos of the media outlets which commission pieces like the Telegraph’s. Precisely because it can’t so easily be spun as ’empowering’, the ‘Softly Softly’ approach hasn’t attracted the same attention. (I notice that no one has developed an app called ‘Soften Your Message’, or ‘Everything Is Awesome!’, with pop-up messages like ‘if you don’t add a smiley face people will think you’re angry’, or ‘do you love your job? Then say it with !!!’) But despite its low cultural profile. ‘Softly Softly’-style language policing is evidently a reality in many workplaces. What, we might wonder, is this about? Why are women–and, to some extent, men too–being instructed to ‘soften’, ‘lighten up’ or add ‘extra fluff’ to their emails?

On closer inspection, what Meghan Collie and her correspondents call ‘message softeners’–things like exclamation marks, emoji, hedges like ‘just’ and stock phrases like ‘sorry to bother you’ or ‘if that makes sense’–seem to serve two main purposes, which can in turn be related to two overarching norms of workplace communication.

First, there seems to be a clear norm prescribing the explicit expression of positive affect and high involvement. It’s not just that negative messages are frowned on: neutral, low-key formulations like Carlee Barackman’s ‘okay thanks’ are not acceptable either. This is what motivates the liberal use of exclamation marks and emoji (or more exactly, a subset of emoji–smileys and thumbs-up signs rather than, say, piles of poo). As conventional signifiers of excitement, enthusiasm, happiness or satisfaction, they inject a note of unambiguous positivity into even very short and banal communications. Accentuating the positive is also the function of phatic formulas like the Telegraph writer’s ‘hope you’re having a lovely week!’ and the hyperbole of responses like ‘Awesome!’ The message is something like, ‘I want you to know I’m thrilled to be at work, delighted to be communicating with you and eager to show I value your contribution’.

The second overarching norm complements the first: it could be glossed as ‘minimize the risk of conflict or offence by avoiding anything that could conceivably be read as angry, critical, overbearing or even just a bit inconsiderate’. This is the purpose served by formulas like ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, ‘sorry to bother you’ and ‘just a quick question’ (implying: ‘I know your time is precious’). It’s also the point of appending ‘if that makes sense’ to, for instance, a series of instructions or a piece of critical feedback. Here what’s being ‘softened’ is the presumptuousness of judging others or telling them what to do.

As some readers will doubtless have noticed, the two norms just outlined call for, respectively, the use of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ politeness. (These terms are taken from the work of politeness theorists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson: in their model, positive politeness addresses the desire every person has to be approved of or cared about (prototypical positive politeness formulas include ‘have a nice day’, and ‘congratulations!’), while negative politeness addresses people’s desire not to be imposed on (prototypical formulas include ‘excuse me’ and ‘sorry’).)  As I’ve explained in previous posts, one of my main beefs with the ‘Just Not Sorry’ brigade is their insistence on treating politeness features as ‘fluff’ or ‘clutter’, things that detract from the message and so impede communication, when in fact they’re essential elements of any interaction between humans. Politeness per se is not a problem: taking out all the ‘justs’ and ‘sorries’ is only good advice if your ambition is to sound like a jerk. However, two things about the ‘Softly Softly’ approach do strike me as more problematic.

One problem is that the rules are so inflexible. In everyday life, the way we use linguistic markers of politeness reflects our assessment of how seriously what we’re saying might hurt, offend or impose on the other person. You wouldn’t hedge a request to pass the salt in the same way you’d hedge a request to lend you £100; you wouldn’t congratulate someone as enthusiastically on winning a pub raffle as you’d congratulate them on winning a Nobel Prize. In ‘Softly Softly’ world, however, everything gets the same ‘I’m so excited’ or ‘I’m so sorry’ treatment: as some of Meghan Collie’s correspondents observed, maintaining this high level of excitement or solicitude can be exhausting, and it can also come across as quite bizarre.

The other striking thing is the emphasis placed on expressing positive feelings, about everything and to everyone. In workplaces I do think that’s a novel development–particularly if we’re talking about internal back-office communications (accentuating the positive has a longer history in customer service). And what’s behind it, I would argue, is a combination of recent changes in workplace culture and innovations in digital communication.

Over the last 30 years, many workplaces have become less formal and overtly hierarchical, and more focused on collaborative teamwork. In the current era of precarity, companies also tend to have fewer permanent employees and more short-term contract staff. Arguably, these conditions provide fertile ground for things like the demand to accentuate the positive in dealing with co-workers (which displays your credentials as a ‘team player’) and the pressure to display enthusiasm for routine tasks (if you appear bored or disengaged you’re potentially giving your employer a reason not to renew your contract).

At the same time, more and more workplace interactions that would once have been conducted face-to-face have moved online. Email, though still available for the purposes it originally served in business contexts (sending the digital equivalent of letters and internal memos), has also become a medium for co-workers to ask each other quick questions, give brief reports and engage in rapid-fire problem-solving interactions. And what seems to have happened is that the workplace email has borrowed some of the strategies developed for text-based interaction outside work (e.g. on social media and via instant messaging apps), such as the repurposing of punctuation marks to signal affect. (As any teenager will tell you, not putting an emoji or a ! at the end of a text message risks coming across as angry; ending texts with a traditional full stop is rude because it signifies disapproval–though the students who made me aware of this say they try not to judge clueless old people like their mothers too harshly for this offence.)

Imported into the workplace, however, these strategies can create problems that don’t arise, or not so markedly, in other contexts. Some people find email messages larded with emoji and exclamation marks contextually inappropriate–too informal for professional settings, or too personal for interaction with non-intimates. Others find this mode of expression insincere—and not without reason, since at work you’re very likely to be communicating feelings or attitudes you don’t actually have, to people who also know you’re faking, because they’re doing the same thing themselves. (Has anyone ever read a message like ‘I’m so excited for this afternoon’s meeting!!!’ and taken it as a faithful reflection of the writer’s true feelings?)

In principle, the new workplace norms apply to everyone, men as well as women: one man told Meghan Collie that ‘In a previous role, I was told to be “20% friendlier” in my emails and to soften them with smileys’. In practice, however, many contributors to the thread believed that women’s language was more heavily policed than men’s. Whereas men’s failure or refusal to comply with the rules was frequently tolerated (even, reportedly, when this involved such gross breaches as ranting at length in all caps), women could rarely get away with even slight deviations from the prescribed style.

This double standard isn’t hard to explain. The new workplace verbal hygiene is about fostering co-operation and maintaining harmonious relationships by paying solicitous attention to people’s feelings–a responsibility that has been assigned to women since time immemorial. Women are thought to be ‘naturally’ caring, more emotionally expressive than men and more sensitive to others’ needs. We expect them to do more emotional caretaking, we hold them to higher standards, and we punish them more severely when they fall short.

But as depressing as all this is, the Twitter comments quoted earlier give me hope. They show women aren’t just sucking it up: they are critical of the linguistic demands made in their workplaces, and in some cases they are refusing to ‘soften their message’. This rejection of sexist bullshit has my full and unequivocal support. Rise up, sisters: you have nothing to lose but your !!! 😊😊–if that makes sense.

Mind the respect gap

There’s a woman I know who does a lot of broadcast interviews, because she’s an expert on something that’s often in the news. And she’s noticed something annoying: the interviewers she talks to—not all of them, but quite a few—are in the habit of addressing her with just her first name, whereas the male experts on the same programme are typically given an academic title. ‘Thank you, Dr Jones. Now Sarah, if I could turn to you…’.  ‘I’m not usually precious about titles’, she says, ‘but I’ve got a Ph.D too’.

Sarah’s experience is not unusual. I regularly get emails from students which hail me as ‘Ms’ or ‘Mrs’ Cameron, though my official title (‘Professor’) is on everything from my office door to the university website. Do the same students address my male colleagues as ‘Mr’? I have no way of knowing, but I doubt it happens very often. The writer and university teacher Rebecca Schuman agrees, reporting that she often hears male faculty members referred to as ‘Dr’ or ‘Professor’ by people who routinely address her as ‘Ms Schuman’. ‘It happens all the time’, she emphasises, ‘and I often hear a sneer in the “izzzzz”’.

This isn’t just an issue in academia. It’s also been noted in another titled profession, medicine. In a study published earlier this year, researchers analysed video-recordings of a medical ritual known as Grand Rounds—a sort of regular mini-conference where hospital doctors present recent cases to their colleagues and medical students. They focused on the part of the proceedings where presenters are introduced by a colleague, and recorded, for each introduction sequence, whether the introducer named the presenter as ‘Dr X’, ‘Joe/Joanne X’ or ‘Joe/Joanne’. Then they crunched the numbers to see how the choice was affected by the sex of the introducer and the presenter. They found a clear pattern: in a context where every speaker is by definition ‘Dr X’, women were significantly less likely to be referred to by that title.

Actually, that wasn’t the only noteworthy finding, so let’s just unpack some of the details. The researchers found that women performing introductions at Grand Rounds nearly always introduced presenters, of both sexes, as ‘Dr X’: they used first names in just four cases out of a total of 106. Male introducers had a much lower overall usage of ‘Dr’ (which suggests that in general they favoured a more informal style), but the sex of the presenter made a significant difference. Men used ‘Dr’ far more frequently when introducing other men (72%) than when introducing women (49%).  It’s true that factors other than sex might play some part in this: we know, for instance, that the use of titles is influenced by age and professional status/seniority (variables which unfortunately this study did not investigate). But while those variables might account for some proportion of the male/female difference, at this point in the history of medicine it seems unlikely they could explain it all. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s a tendency for men to withhold professional recognition from women, because subconsciously they don’t regard women as equals.

The pattern revealed by this study is reminiscent of some other patterns I’ve discussed in earlier posts, like the tendency for men to dominate discussion in professional contexts and their habit of using endearment terms like ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart’ to female co-workers. It’s more evidence of what we might call, by analogy with the gender pay gap, the gender respect gap: other things being equal, women get less respect than men. But what I want to talk about in this post isn’t just the title-vs-first naming pattern itself–I’m sure that will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog. It’s also my own (and I think, many other feminists’) ambivalence about it.

When I first read the Grand Rounds study, I thought: ‘yes, that’s happened to me’—and then I thought, ‘and actually I’ve been complicit in it’. I don’t think I’ve ever asked a media interviewer or the person introducing me at a conference to use my academic title rather than my first name. If students send emails to ‘Ms Cameron’ I normally let that pass too. And if I do ever feel moved to say something, I have the same impulse Sarah had to preface my complaint with a disclaimer: ‘I’m not usually precious about titles, but…’.  I don’t think this is because I suffer from that much-discussed female malady, impostor syndrome (‘don’t mind me, I shouldn’t really have this title anyway’). It’s more that, on the question of professional titles, feminists are caught between a political rock and a hard place.

As I’ve explained before, what address terms convey depends not only on which terms you choose, but also on whether or not they’re used reciprocally. Reciprocal usage of titles signals mutual respect between equals, along with a degree of social distance and formality; non-reciprocal usage (e.g., you call me ‘Professor’ but I call you ‘Susie’) suggests a status hierarchy in which one person must defer to the other. With first names and endearment terms, reciprocal usage signals intimacy or solidarity, whereas non-reciprocal usage, once again, implies a hierarchy. This dual-axis system (status versus solidarity, hierarchy versus equality) is what makes professional titles potentially a difficult area for feminists to negotiate. We may resent being addressed as ‘Sarah’ when the man beside us is ‘Dr Jones’, but we also tend to be uncomfortable demanding deference from others. We’re in favour of equality and reciprocity, not hierarchy.

This isn’t just a feminist thing. For people of my generation (I was born in the late 1950s), the use of first names rather than titles was one symbolic expression of the egalitarian values championed by progressive social movements in the 1960s and 70s. By the time I went to university in 1977, our teachers divided neatly along generational lines. The old guard maintained the traditional etiquette of distance and deference (we called them Dr/Professor, they called us either by our given names, or in some cases Mr/Miss), while the young Turks marked their cool, lefty credentials by telling us to call them ‘Bob’ (obviously they weren’t all named Bob, but they were, almost without exception, men).

Of course, this didn’t mean there was no hierarchy—the Bobs were marking our exams, not vice versa—but we liked the idea that they were treating us as equals, and encouraging us, as we also used to say, to ‘relate to them as people’. So when I became a lecturer myself, I found it natural to ask my own students to use my first name. As I saw it, insisting on a title meant you were old and out of touch, not to mention self-regarding and/or socially conservative. I wanted to make clear that I was none of those things.

The trouble is that, like so many symbolic gestures, this one doesn’t work for women or minorities the same way it works for white men—a point made forcefully by the Australian academic Katrina Gulliver, who explicitly takes issue with the young Turk tendency:

In most departments there is the species of (white) male professor, who wants to be seen as “cool” (you know the one, who shows up dressed like he’s come to mow the lawn), who invites all the youngsters to “call me Dave,” resting safely in the comfort of assumed male authority. If you’re one of these guys: you are not helping the rest of us.

Gulliver got a lot of flak for this, with many commenters telling her that she just didn’t understand Australian culture (she mentioned in the piece that she had previously worked in Germany). We’re more relaxed here, they said, we don’t go in for all that stuffy formality. But while it’s true there are cultural differences, we should be suspicious of the claim that first-naming is just about informality. Findings like the ones reported in the Grand Rounds study show that this isn’t the whole story: there really is a gender respect gap, and the ‘let’s not fixate on titles’ argument is too often trotted out on autopilot by people who don’t want to acknowledge that or to think about its real-world consequences. People like Will Miller, whose response to Gulliver was this:

I worry about making sure I deserve the respect of my students rather than expecting my title or position to simply demand it. I want students to respect me as an individual, not solely for my role, title, or degrees.

This pious sentiment is hard to argue with, because today it is a truism that people should be respected for what they do rather than who they are, what they wear or what title they go by (whether that’s ‘Lord Muck’ or ‘Professor Miller’). But while in principle feminists also subscribe to this belief, we have reason to know that in practice respect, like money, is not distributed purely on the basis of individual merit.

Rebecca Schuman’s answer to Miller was scathing: ‘It takes a particularly privileged individual’, she commented, ‘to insist, though he commands unearned respect when he walks into a room (even in jeans), that respect must be earned’. Her point was that the Bobs, Daves and Will Millers can have their cake and eat it too. As members of the social group that provides our cultural template for authority, they can expect to retain students’ respect while also getting extra credit for not insisting on the deference to which their status in theory entitles them. Women, on the other hand, have often discovered that a symbolic display of humility from them is interpreted less as principled egalitarianism and more as a confirmation of their assumed inferior status. When it comes to authority, Katrina Gulliver suggests, a woman must either use it or lose it:

So, I’ll keep insisting on formality from my students, even if they make comments about my being pedantic or bossy on their student evaluations.

But that ‘if’ clause points to a further complication. A woman who is—in Sarah’s words—‘precious about titles’ does risk being labelled bossy (not to mention arrogant, unfriendly and uncool). She can easily be cast as one of the stereotypical ‘nasty women’—the schoolmarm, the nagging nanny or the hideous old battleaxe—who turn up with such monotonous regularity in cultural representations of powerful women. All her options have costs as well as benefits; for her there is no magic ‘get out of jail free’ card. So what, in practice, should women do?

What I do myself is what I’ve always done: I ask students to use my first name, and—since language is my subject—I take a moment to discuss with them what this might communicate in the specific context of higher education (not that I want to be their friend, but that I recognise them as fellow-adults and expect them to act accordingly). I have never, personally, had much trouble with students being openly disrespectful: the sexism I’ve encountered has been more the ‘she’s a scary old battleaxe’ variety. At my advanced age and career stage, I can live with that (which is not to say I like it or think it’s fair). But when I read about other women’s experiences, I do wonder if I’m doing a disservice to my colleagues—especially the young women and women of colour who are likely to encounter a more extreme version of the respect gap.

I’m under no illusion that language on its own can close the gap. As I’ve said more than once on here, patterns of language-use do not arise in a social vacuum: ultimately I don’t think there is any kind of sexism which can be effectively addressed using purely linguistic measures. But language is part of the bigger picture. Is it incumbent on all of us to be ‘precious about titles’ so that the larger message about equality comes across more clearly and consistently? So that a title like ‘professor’ will stop automatically conjuring up a picture of a middle-aged white man in a tweed jacket?

I’m not sure what the answer is, and to be honest I can’t see myself changing the professional habit of a lifetime. But writing this has prompted me to make one new resolution. The next time I hear a woman expert being treated like Sarah—first-named by a media presenter who uses formal/deferential address terms with the male experts on the programme—I’m going to complain. And before you ask, yes, I’ll be signing the complaint ‘Professor’.

The comic book image in this post shows the 1940s character Jill Trent, Science Sleuth.

 

 

Familiarity and contempt

Earlier this month, in an English court, a man who had just been sentenced to 18 months told the judge she was ‘a bit of a cunt’. To which she replied: ‘You’re a bit of a cunt yourself’. Complaints about her language are now being considered by the Judicial Standards Investigation Office*. But plenty of people applauded her, calling her a ‘hero’, a ‘role model’ and a ‘legend’.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the New York Times reported that sexist endearment terms like ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie’ were no longer acceptable when addressing women in court. The American Bar Association had adopted Resolution 109, which makes it a breach of lawyers’ professional standards to engage in ‘harmful verbal or physical conduct that manifests prejudice and bias’.

These two stories might seem to belong to different worlds: one where a judge can be hailed as a hero for calling a man a cunt, and another where lawyers can be fined for calling a woman ‘sweetie’. (I can hear the denizens of the manosphere now, muttering darkly about feminazis and their double standards.) But ultimately I think they’re both about the same thing: the ongoing, messy and often confusing struggle over what counts, in the 21st century, as ‘appropriate’ or ‘offensive’ language.

Resolution 109 is an example of a kind of verbal hygiene which has loomed large in recent decades: regulating language-use in an effort to combat prejudice and discrimination. This is popularly known as ‘political correctness’, and it is, of course, highly controversial. Although the resolution passed, it was not unopposed. And opinions were particularly divided on the inclusion of endearment terms in the category of ‘harmful verbal conduct’.

Some of the reasons for this disagreement became apparent when the New York Times invited lawyers to share their views on its Facebook page: the resulting thread attracted more than 500 comments. Many came from female lawyers who shared their own experiences of being addressed with terms they found demeaning:

I was called ‘young lady’ today while I was in court. I am 42.

I have been called honey, sweetie and missy.

Called ‘blondie’ by a sitting federal judge

I’ve been called ‘sweetheart’, ‘honey’, my first name and asked to get coffee.

But there were also a number of contributors who defended the use of endearment terms, arguing that

1. In some US regions (e.g. the south and south west) the use of endearments is just ordinary politeness.
2. It’s not just men who use endearment terms and it’s not just women on the receiving end.

As one commenter said, putting the two arguments together:

Good luck with that in Texas. This 70 year-old male has been called [honey] by women for 25 years.

It’s true that there are regional differences in modes of polite address. It’s also true that women use endearment terms to men (as well as to other women: the only potential speaker-addressee pairing you don’t typically get is men using ‘honey’/ ‘sweetheart’/ ‘darling’ to other men—though they may use other comparable terms, like ‘mate’, ‘dude’, ‘bro/bruv’ or—to younger men—‘son’). But that doesn’t mean the women lawyers’ complaints are unjustified. To see why, let’s take a closer look at the underlying sociolinguistic principles.

In 1960 Roger Brown and Albert Gilman published a now-classic article entitled ‘The pronouns of power and solidarity’.  Its subject was the alternation (lost in modern standard English, but still present in many other languages), between familiar and polite second person pronouns (Brown and Gilman referred to these in shorthand as T (familiar) and V (polite), from the Latin ‘tu’ and ‘vos’). They pointed out that what these pronouns communicate doesn’t just depend on which one you choose, but also on whether they’re used reciprocally or non-reciprocally. If two people address each other with the same pronoun, either T or V, they are treating each other as equals. Between equals, reciprocal use of the familiar T implies intimacy; reciprocal use of the polite V implies a more distant relationship of mutual respect. When the pronouns are used non-reciprocally, however, they imply an unequal, hierarchical relationship: the higher-ranked person addresses the lower-ranked person with T, while expecting to receive V in return. In this situation, the speaker who addresses you with T is not saying ‘I think of you as an intimate’, but rather ‘I think of you as an inferior’.

The same kind of analysis can be extended to other forms of address like names and titles. In hierarchical institutions these are used reciprocally among peers but non-reciprocally between people at different levels of the hierarchy. In the military, for instance, you address subordinates by their surnames and superordinates with ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’.  School students call their teachers ‘sir’,  ‘miss’ or ‘Mr/Ms X’, while teachers call students by their given names.

Exchanges between unacquainted adults offer more freedom, but our choices are not just random. In customer service interactions (to take one common situation in which strangers address each other), the server may call the customer by a generic respect title like ‘sir/madam/ma’am’, a familiar term like ‘honey/dear/mate’, or neither. Here the choice will probably depend not only on the status of the two parties (e.g., their relative ages), but also on the type of establishment and the service being provided. I’d be surprised to be called ‘honey’ in a fancy restaurant, but I wouldn’t find it surprising in a diner. Nor would it offend me in a diner, because I wouldn’t suspect the server of patronising me: I’d understand the endearment as a form of politeness, treating a stranger like a friend or family member to signal that you are positively disposed towards them. In more formal contexts, though, politeness demands an overt show of deference (which can be accomplished by using a respect title), or at least the avoidance of familiarity (which can be accomplished by using no address term at all).

The fact that the same address forms (T/V pronouns, given names/family names, endearment terms/respect titles) have both a ‘power’ meaning and a ‘solidarity’ meaning offers a useful get-out clause for men who are accused of talking down to women. They can say, in effect, that the women have mistaken one meaning for the other: what they intended to communicate was a solidary form of politeness (‘I am positively disposed towards you’), but the women have interpreted it as an example of the power meaning (‘you are my social inferior’) and taken offence where none was meant.  Several of the comments on the Times’s Facebook thread suggested that women don’t find it easy to dismiss this possibility. Knowing that endearment terms can sometimes be used in a solidary way, even when the parties are not actually intimate, they do wonder if they might sometimes be judging men’s motives unfairly.

But if we’re not sure whether the person who calls us ‘honey’ is being courteous or condescending, the analysis I’ve just sketched out gives us some tests we can apply. One is whether there is, or could be, reciprocity: if an address form is used non-reciprocally, you’re generally looking at power rather than solidarity. With judges, in particular, the answer is clearly ‘no’—a lawyer could not address the judge as ‘honey’ and then claim they were ‘just being polite’. Some Facebook contributors did suggest that if the endearment came from opposing counsel (i.e. a peer rather than a superordinate) you could retaliate by addressing him similarly. But their comments implied this would be seen as a hostile act. So, it seems the ‘just being polite’ excuse does not pass the reciprocity test, at least in the courtroom context.

Context, of course, is an important influence on what counts as polite behaviour, and the second test we can apply to doubtful cases is whether the claim that someone ‘was only being polite’ is contextually plausible. Are we dealing with a situation (like getting served in a diner or at a market stall) where we’d expect informal friendliness, or is it the kind of situation where we’d expect to hear the more formal language of distance and deference?  One contributor to the Facebook thread, a lawyer practising in Canada, made an interesting observation on that point. She hadn’t had to deal with being called ‘honey’, she said, because the Canadian courts (like the British ones they are presumably modelled on) require lawyers to refer to one another formally using stock phrases like ‘my learned friend’. Some kinds of courts and court proceedings may be less formal than others, with less strict (and less archaic) rules of address, but it’s hard to imagine any court of law being as informal as a diner or a market stall.

Then again, we have the example before us of the judge who called a man she’d just sentenced ‘a bit of a cunt’.  That happened in an English court; why wasn’t it prevented by the contextual norm of formality?

In this case there may be a very specific reason. The man in question had a long history of launching racist tirades at passing strangers. He had been prosecuted after breaching—for the eleventh time—an order prohibiting this behaviour. So, as well as responding to his immediate provocation, the judge might have wanted to give him a taste of what he’d inflicted on many others over the years. I suspect that’s why so many people applauded her: despite the obvious contradiction (using abusive language to someone you’ve just sent to prison for using abusive language), the nature of the man’s offence made her response seem like poetic justice.

I’m not sure the JSIO investigators will share that view: they’ll probably be more concerned that a judge who uses words like ‘cunt’ is compromising the dignity of her office. But from a linguist’s perspective there’s another question here. Should the judge have engaged in any kind of informal exchange with a defendant (regardless of whether obscenities were involved), or should she have maintained the formality of the proceedings by responding to his intervention with a formal rebuke?

Historians of English generally agree that since the late 20^th century there’s been a shift towards greater informality in both speech and writing. This has happened, it’s argued, because of changes in the wider society: we’ve become less deferential and more egalitarian, as well as (in Britain), less reserved in our dealings with others. Formal politeness has come to be seen as old-fashioned and patrician—a throwback to the bad old days when everyone wore a hat and kept a stiff upper lip. Institutions which have preserved the traditional formalities, like the law courts and Parliament, are often accused of being remote, inaccessible and off-putting to the ordinary citizen.

Like most people, I have no desire to return to the days of obsequious forelock-tugging and stiff upper lips.  But the contemporary preference for informality and familiarity over formality and distance is not without its problems—especially for women.

Most people are offended or irritated when strangers address them in a way they consider over-familiar. But for women, enforced familiarity and intimacy are more than just irritants: they’re part of the apparatus that’s used to subordinate and control us. Catcalling, casual touching, groping, unwanted personal comments or sexual overtures, being followed on the street, being verbally abused or threatened if you ignore a man’s demand for your attention—these are everyday experiences for women in public places, and they all rest on the assumption that any man has an automatic right to treat any woman as an intimate: get close to her, touch her, make demands of her. The non-reciprocal use of endearment terms to women is another manifestation of the same thing. And if a woman objects to it, the excuses men make (disingenuously or otherwise) are the same ones they make about street harassment. ‘I was only being friendly’. ‘It’s just banter’. ‘Can’t you take a compliment/a joke?’

These excuses can be effective in derailing complaints of sexism. Measures like Resolution 109, targeting discriminatory language, are easiest to apply to cases like racist and homophobic slurs, where the offensiveness of the words is not disputed. They work less well when the issue isn’t the use of an inherently offensive word, but rather the allegedly offensive use of a word which also has legitimate, non-discriminatory uses. Endearment terms are an example: there’s always scope for argument about what the speaker ‘really meant’.

But in contexts like the courtroom we could cut through this by stipulating that professionals must use formal modes of address. No one can deny that endearment terms are informal, so insisting on formality—the reciprocal formality that signals mutual respect between non-intimates—would make their use inappropriate regardless of the user’s intentions.

You might be thinking: ‘but this is 2016!’ As I said before, today it’s usually assumed that what we want in public institutions is more informality rather than less: formal language is seen as elitist and exclusionary, whereas informal language is more inclusive and democratic. But maybe this is something we should reconsider. Many subordinated groups—including women, Black people and working class people—have a long history of being addressed with familiar terms; not as a token of friendship or positive regard, but as a mark of contempt for their ‘inferior’ social status. There is surely something to be said for breaking with that tradition, and showing people the explicit respect that more formal terms communicate. Put simply: intimacy should be our choice, and respect should be our right.

*Update: since this post was originally published the Judge has been cleared of misconduct.

Sorry, but it’s complicated

‘Sorry’ may have been the hardest word for Elton John, but to women it comes as naturally as breathing. Women, as everyone knows, apologise. They apologise constantly. They apologise unnecessarily. They apologise for things that aren’t their fault, and for things that require no apology from anyone. They’re like the proverbial cracked records with their ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’.

Recently we’ve become obsessed with the problem of the over-apologetic woman. She seems to pop up everywhere—not just where you’d expect to find her, in listicles with titles like ‘The Seven Ways Women Undermine Themselves At Work’ and products like the ‘Just Not Sorry’ plug-in which I wrote about last year, but also in shampoo adverts, comedy sketches and various other forms of humour (check out #7 in this set of cartoons).

The advice and coaching industry has an obvious interest in endlessly recirculating the idea that women apologise too much (it’s in the same category of female verbal misdemeanours as uptalk and ‘just‘ and ‘I feel like‘–all of them gifts that keep on giving if your business is creating problems that people will then pay you to solve). It’s not so obvious why it also gets uncritically recycled by feminists (there’s an example in this Woman’s Hour interview with the historian Amanda Foreman). It might seem that feminists have nothing to gain by repeating what is, after all, a negative stereotype; but some evidently see it as proving a point about the harmful effects of female socialisation. Excessive apologising, they say, is the behaviour of a person who’s been trained from early childhood to think of herself as a lesser being: to devalue and efface herself, put others’ needs before her own, take up as little space in the world as possible, and defer, in particular, to men.

As a feminist myself I don’t doubt that female socialisation has many damaging consequences for girls and women. But I still don’t buy the argument that women over-apologise because they’ve been socialised to be self-effacing and deferential. It may sound plausible, but here’s why I don’t think it’s true.

First, let’s just go back a step. So far I’ve been taking it for granted that women really are the more apologetic sex. But that shouldn’t be accepted without question: the evidence from research is mixed. Some studies have found women apologizing more than men, but others have found no difference. Which findings you give more weight to is a judgment call, and researchers have different views.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that there probably is a tendency for women to apologise more frequently than men (though the usual caveats apply: this generalisation may not be valid for every group of women in every context, and it certainly won’t be valid for every individual woman). However, there’s a difference between description and interpretation: even if we accept that this tendency exists, it doesn’t follow that women apologise ‘too much’ (too much in relation to what?), nor that the reason must be their socialised unassertiveness and deference. In fact, if you dig a bit deeper into the research, you discover there are other patterns which don’t fit with that assumption.

One of the most detailed investigations of gender differences in apologising was done in the 1990s by the New Zealand linguist Janet Holmes. Holmes recorded naturally-occurring talk in a range of social situations, and extracted all the sequences that included apologies (183 in total). As well as counting the frequency with which men and women apologised, she looked at who they apologised to, what they apologised for, how they formulated their apologies and how those apologies were received.

Holmes’s is one of the studies I mentioned earlier which did find women apologising more than men. A lot more, in fact: women produced nearly three quarters of all apologies. But there was another, equally striking pattern: the majority of female apologies, accounting for 55% of all the apologies in the data, were cases of women apologising to other women. Apologies from women to men accounted for about 18% of cases, apologies from men to women for about 17%, and apologies from men to other men for just 8.5%.

These figures are hard to reconcile with the belief that women’s apologies are displays of deference and subordinate status. If that were the issue, you’d expect women to apologise more frequently to men than to other women; you might also expect women, as the subordinate sex, to receive fewer apologies from men than they give to men. In this study, however, cross-sex apologies occurred with more or less equal frequency in both directions. Almost the whole of the overall gender difference was the result of the very large difference between women’s behaviour towards other women and men’s towards other men.

What Holmes actually found, then, was not a general tendency for men and women to behave differently, but a more specific tendency for them to behave very differently with members of their own sex. The standard story about unassertive and deferential women doesn’t explain that. Why would women become less deferential when addressing their social superiors, men, and conversely why would men defer to their subordinates, women, twice as often as they defer to their male peers?

But if it isn’t about deference, what is the gender difference about? Holmes offers two suggestions.

The first is that men and women may understand the act of apologising differently, with women seeing it primarily as a way of maintaining good relationships by displaying concern for others, whereas men see it primarily as an admission of inadequacy or guilt. This second interpretation is more negative, and that may explain why men avoid apologising (or dare I say, ‘under-apologise’?) with other men who share their understanding of it as demeaning. (Though it doesn’t really explain why men are more willing to apologise to women: perhaps they think women won’t judge them in the same way, or perhaps they don’t care so much what women think.) Among women, on the other hand, apologising is interpreted more positively: it need not diminish your status, and it may even earn you credit for being a nice person.

Holmes’s second suggestion is that men and women may have different perceptions of what’s offensive enough to require an apology. In her data, a higher proportion of men’s apologies were for relatively serious offences (like forgetting a date with someone or damaging one of their possessions). This led her to wonder if women apologised more because they felt the need to apologise for things men would dismiss as trivial. (Interestingly, she found women were more likely than men to apologise for what she calls ‘space and talk offences’—things like inadvertently touching or interrupting another person. She suggests that women may be more sensitive to these transgressions because they’re so often committed against women–most typically, of course, by men.)

The idea that men have a higher threshold for perceiving behaviour as offensive has received some support from other research. The psychologists Karina Schumann and Michael Ross  got research subjects to keep a diary of all their offensive acts, and to say, in each case, whether they had apologised. They found that women and men reported apologising for a similar proportion of the offences they’d committed, but the raw numbers—of both offensive acts and apologies—were higher for the women than the men. This suggested that women had considered more acts offensive enough to need redress. To test this hypothesis, the researchers designed an experimental task where subjects had to rate the seriousness of various offences. They found, as they expected, that their female subjects gave higher ratings.

Readers who know something about the study of language and gender may think that Holmes’s arguments are somewhat reminiscent of what’s been labelled the ‘difference’ or ‘two cultures’ approach, because it treats differing patterns of language-use among men and women as the product of quasi-cultural differences. The idea is that the sexes behave differently because they understand things differently, and they understand things differently because their experiences and values are different. But you can’t say that one sex’s way of doing things is better or worse than the other’s, any more than you would say Japanese culture is better or worse than Greek culture. They’re just different: ‘different but equal’. The classic statement of this position is Deborah Tannen’s popular bestseller You Just Don’t Understand, which has been criticised by other scholars (full disclosure: I’m one of them) for glossing over the issue of structural sexual inequality. Does Holmes’s explanation of gender differences in apologising invite the same criticism? Is she saying that women’s tendency to apologise more than men has nothing to do with power and inequality?

The short answer is no: Holmes’s position is not the same as Tannen’s. She believes that ultimately, ‘power is the issue’:

Women’s ways of talking differ from men’s because each group has developed interactional strategies which reflect their societal position. The different patterns of interaction into which girls and boys are socialised are not randomly different. Their features are attuned to the requirements of the society.

As a general observation this is not, of course, incompatible with the popular story about over-apologetic women (which says that women’s societal position requires them to be unassertive and deferential). The trouble with that story is that it leaves some patterns unexplained (in particular, the difference Holmes observed between cross-sex and same-sex behaviour). The relationship it posits between apologising and subordinate status is too simple and general to account for the reality of women’s (or men’s) behaviour. But there’s another way to relate apologising to the requirements of an unequal, male dominated society. Rather than treat it as a general expression of female powerlessness, we could connect it to a more specific feature of social structure which is directly linked to women’s subordinate status: the division of labour which makes caring for others a female responsibility.

The aim of an apology is to maintain or restore harmony. Apologising says: ‘I accept that I have given (or might give) offence, I regret that and I ask for your forgiveness’.  By implication it also says: ‘your feelings matter to me: I understand that you may feel bad and I want you to feel better’. In that sense apologising can be seen as a form of emotional labour, part of the work of managing your own and others’ feelings. And willingness to perform emotional labour is one of the most basic things that’s expected of women just because they are women. Even when they’re not explicitly cast in a caring role (like ‘mother’), women are routinely expected to pay attention to others’ feelings, and pour oil on troubled waters when harmony is threatened. They’re expected both to apologise when others are or could be offended, and to forgive when others have offended them (Holmes found that women were less likely than men to reject an apology and more likely to accept one).

I would argue that women’s apologising behaviour has more to do with these gendered expectations than it does with lack of confidence and self-esteem. In fact, I suspect that for some women, this behaviour may actually be a source of self-esteem. Not all women embrace their prescribed role with joy, but even if we don’t much like our jobs, most of us derive some satisfaction from being good at them. And while selflessness and nurturance may be poorly rewarded in material terms, they do come with moral and social benefits.

In this case one key benefit may be the approval of your female peers. Although you often hear women castigating themselves publicly for the sin of ‘over-apologising’ (a term  which covertly treats what men do as the norm), the high frequency of apologies between women suggests that privately they may not regard men’s behaviour as the gold standard. And indeed, why should they? What’s wrong with showing concern for others? From a feminist perspective, nothing: the problem isn’t that caring is inherently worthless or degrading, it’s that the responsibility for caring is unfairly distributed, obliging most women to do too much while most men do far too little.

This already unfair distribution of rights and obligations can give rise to a further injustice, with men getting more credit than women when they do show consideration for others. In a study conducted by a group of researchers in Israel, subjects were asked to imagine that a work colleague had scheduled a meeting and then failed to turn up for it. They were then given a letter which the colleague had supposedly written, apologising for the inconvenience and promising it would not happen again. The letter was always the same, but some subjects were told that the writer was their boss, others that the writer was their subordinate. In addition, the writer was presented to some subjects as male (‘David’) and to others as female (‘Rachel’). After reading the letter, the subjects were asked to judge the sincerity of the apology and to say how willing they were to forgive the writer.

The researchers found that people’s judgments were influenced by both status and gender:

the most effective apology was by a male manager, followed by a female manager, a male subordinate and finally a female subordinate.

They explain:

The less expected an apology, the more effective it is.  …When an apology is not socially obligatory, [it] will be more accepted and more highly esteemed.

A subordinate who apologises to the boss is merely doing what’s expected, whereas a boss who apologises to a subordinate is perceived as displaying unusual magnanimity. Gender has a similar (though slightly weaker) effect. A woman who apologises is meeting others’ expectations, whereas a man is exceeding them, and the response is therefore more positive. The researchers conclude by suggesting that managers shouldn’t treat apologising as a ‘powerless’ and therefore risky move: done strategically, it can actually enhance your reputation. Especially, it seems, if you’re a man.

Where does this leave us? Again, I’d say it’s complicated. On one hand, I think we should reject the popular stereotype of the over-apologetic woman, along with the language-policing it’s used to justify. It isn’t true that women ‘over-apologise’ because they are timid, deferential creatures: the fact (if it is one) that they apologise more than men seems to have more to do with showing concern for others’ feelings. Do feminists really want to disparage that as a weakness?

On the other hand, as Janet Holmes points out, women and men don’t make linguistic choices in a vacuum: they are expected to behave in certain ways, and if they choose not to they will pay a price. Maintaining harmonious relationships is an obligation imposed on women rather than something that just comes naturally; it is one of the many unjust burdens women carry in this world, and as such there is every reason for feminists to criticise it. The question is whether we can find a way to do that without ridiculing, shaming or bullying women for the way they do or don’t speak.

A matter of opinion

I feel like opinion pieces on the state of the language are getting more annoying all the time.

If you’re wondering where that came from, the answer is that I’ve just read a New York Times opinion piece published this weekend, in which the history professor Molly Worthen complains that young people preface everything they say with ‘I feel like’.

[They] don’t think, believe or reckon. They “feel like.” Listen for this phrase and you’ll hear it everywhere, inside and outside politics. This reflex to hedge every statement as a feeling or a hunch is most common among millennials. But I hear it almost as often among Generation Xers and my own colleagues in academia. As in so many things, the young are early carriers of a broad cultural contagion.

The contagion she’s talking about is relativism: we no longer deal in facts or principles, only personal feelings which brook no argument or disagreement. Also—although this might seem to be in tension with the first, ‘no arguing with my feelz’ point—we’re not willing to commit to our beliefs because we’re worried about causing offence. According to a student Worthen quotes, saying ‘I feel like X’ is ‘an effort to make our ideas more palatable to the other person’.

The student has a point. Hedging–using linguistic devices that reduce the strength of your commitment to a proposition—is often done for purposes of politeness, or in other words to make whatever you’re saying or doing ‘more palatable to the other person’. That’s why we often write something long-winded and tentative like ‘I was just wondering if you’d got my email’ rather than the blunter, slightly accusatory ‘did you get my email?’ Or respond to a caller we don’t know with ‘I think you’ve got the wrong number’ rather than just ‘wrong number!’

This is normal linguistic behaviour, and you might think it’s preferable to showing no consideration for anyone else’s feelings. But people who write opinion pieces on language (or give ‘expert’ advice on language) have got it into their heads that hedging is the enemy of effective communication. According to them, it’s clutter. It’s ‘weak’.  It detracts from your message and undermines your authority. And–not coincidentally–it’s the particular vice of women.

Opinion pieces on this subject invariably feature women who’ve seen the light and repented of their sins. They’ve cut down on ‘just‘ and taken ‘sorry‘ in hand. In Molly Worthen’s column there’s another quote from a student who’s trying to cure herself of ‘feel like’:

I’ve tried to check myself when I say that. I think it probably demeans the substance of what I’m trying to say.

In 2013, Jezebel ran a piece entitled ‘Ladies, what’s up with the “I feel like” verbal tic?’ The writer begins with a confession: she’s searched for the phrase ‘I feel like’ in her Gmail inbox, and been overwhelmed by the number of results. Her correspondence is full of sentences like, ‘I feel like I look too meek in my profile picture’. Or, ‘I feel like I’m being unhelpful’. She comments:

We are feeling so many feelings, and we are very aware that we are feeling these feelings.

Ah yes, feelings. As everyone knows, women are emotional creatures who talk endlessly about their feelings–whereas men by implication converse in a mixture of syllogisms and statistics. The writer suggests that ‘I feel like’ sounds ‘indulgent, verging on narcissistic’;

when I say “I feel like” I feel like (ha) a touchy-feely liberal girl who learned to talk about her feelings in school.

It’s this self-indulgent touchy-feeliness that bothers Molly Worthen. She downplays the association with women, saying that men in her classrooms also say ‘I feel like’ all the time. But she continually invokes the opposition between thinking and feeling, reason and emotion, which in western thought, as many feminists have pointed out, is gendered through and through. As Genevieve Lloyd puts it, ‘rationality has been conceived as transcendence of the feminine‘.

Worthen’s argument that we’ve become too touchy-feely rests largely on an observation about the contemporary use of words–that ‘feel like’ is now preferred to ‘think’–and on closer inspection this is linguistically naive. The phrase ‘I think’, which she takes to be both completely different from and self-evidently preferable to ‘I feel like’, actually does the same job: it too can be used as a hedge. So can other verbs of knowing or sensing, like ‘believe’, ‘understand’, ‘guess’, ‘imagine’, ‘see’, ‘hear’. We often use them to indicate that something we’re saying might be speculative, provisional, open to doubt or disagreement. (‘She’ll be 90 this year, I believe’. ‘I imagine you’ll want to put this on the agenda’.)  And then there’s ‘seem’, as in ‘it seems to me…’. It may sound a touch more formal, more the sort of thing a middle-aged academic would say, but otherwise, how exactly is prefacing a point with ‘it seems to me’ any different from beginning it with ‘I feel like’?

I suspect Worthen’s preference for ‘think’ reflects the simple idea that the core meaning of ‘think’ is about cognition whereas the core meaning of ‘feel (like)’ is about emotion. At one point she worries that ‘the more common “I feel like” becomes, the less importance we may attach to its literal meaning’. But that ship sailed long ago: when they’re used in the way she’s talking about, the sense-perception verbs ‘feel’, ‘see’ and ‘hear’ are metaphors for more complex cognitive processes. If you tell someone ‘I see what you mean’, you haven’t literally ‘seen’ anything, you have grasped the import of something. Similarly, many uses of ‘feel’ carry little or no trace of either the ‘touch’ or the ’emotion’ senses of the word–they are metaphors for inferring or judging (‘Members of the jury, you may feel that the prosecution’s evidence…’)

The Jezebel piece included various quotes from women repeating the same folk-theory about ‘I feel like’ privileging emotion over reason and inoffensiveness over rigorous argument.

It takes the teeth out of any argument you make and makes it okay for you to be wrong. Like you don’t have to stand by your opinion because it came from a temporary, emotional place. I use it a lot when I don’t want to offend anyone.

I feel like is used for girls to tentatively express their opinion in a nonthreatening way, in a way that can either be added on to or diminished depending on how the other person reacts to it.

Is it, in fact, for girls? The writer of the Jezebel piece contacted the linguist and blogger Mark Liberman to ask whether it was true that ‘I feel like’ is used mostly by women and millennials. Using data from a corpus of telephone conversations, Liberman found that the the short answer is ‘yes’: younger speakers use ‘I feel like’ more than older ones, and female speakers use it more than male ones. However, the gender gap is probably explained by something I’ve mentioned on this blog before—the tendency for young women to be linguistic trendsetters, adopting innovative ways of speaking before their male age-peers. If something really is a trend, the men will eventually catch up.

The alternative explanation—that women use ‘I feel like’ more because it’s a hedge and women hedge more—was not supported by the telephone corpus data, which suggest that men hedge just as much as women, they just use different linguistic forms to do it. For instance, men use ‘I guess’ more often than women. (Though not ‘I think’, where it’s the women who are slightly ahead.)

Most people are small-c conservatives when it comes to language: they rarely hail new usages with delight, and often spend decades denouncing them as abominations. What bothers me about this isn’t the reaction itself, it’s the accompanying tendency to construct elaborate justifications for it. Instead of just saying ‘I find this way of speaking annoying’, pundits insist that it’s a symptom of some larger social disease. Vocal fry is a sign that young women are throwing away all the gains of the last 50 years. ‘I feel like’ threatens the foundations of democracy because it’s ‘a means of avoiding rigorous debate’.

This is overblown nonsense, and it also has the effect of making the most innovative language-users, young people and especially young women, into objects of relentless criticism–and not only of their speech, but sometimes also of their character. Criticism which they internalize, as is illustrated in some of the quotes I’ve reproduced. When young women are worried that the way they express themselves demeans them, when they’re berating themselves for being ‘indulgent verging on narcissistic’, it might be time for the people who write this stuff to consider keeping their opinions to themselves.