THE EFFECT OF GENDER STEREOTYPES IN LANGUAGE
ON ATTITUDES TOWARD SPEAKERS

by
Christy L. Dennison
B.A., English, Chatham College, 1999

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh

2006

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UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
ARTS AND SCIENCES
This thesis was presented
by
Christy L. Dennison
It was defended on
December 15, 2005
and approved by
Shelome Gooden, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Linguistics
Amanda Godley, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Instruction & Learning
Thesis Advisor: Scott F. Kiesling, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Linguistics
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THE EFFECT OF GENDER STEREOTYPES IN LANGUAGE
ON ATTITUDES TOWARD SPEAKERS

Christy L. Dennison, M.A.
University of Pittsburgh, 2006

This study uses a matched guise technique to elicit evaluations of men and women from
participants based solely on what they hear. Four speakers (two men and two men) created two
recordings, one in which they incorporated “women’s language” into their speech and the other
using “standard” language. One hundred university students listened to each recording and
evaluated the speaker in terms of twelve personality traits. Results showed a significant
difference in how male and female speakers were perceived, regardless of the language style
they employed. Women’s language and “standard” language were also perceived differently
regardless of speaker gender.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.0
INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 1
2.0
REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE.............................................................. 3
3.0
METHODOLOGY..................................................................................................... 13
3.1
PARTICIPANTS ............................................................................................... 13
3.2
MATERIALS ..................................................................................................... 14
3.3
PROCEDURE .................................................................................................... 17
4.0
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ................................................................................ 19
4.1
FACTOR ANALYSIS ....................................................................................... 19
4.2
PERCEPTION OF SPEAKERS ...................................................................... 21
4.3
THE MATCHED GUISE.................................................................................. 22
4.4
DIMENSIONS SCORES................................................................................... 30
4.4.1
Masculinity .................................................................................................. 30
4.4.2
Femininity.................................................................................................... 32
4.4.3
Nurturance................................................................................................... 34
4.5
EFFECT OF PARTICIPANT GENDER ........................................................ 41
5.0
CONCLUSION........................................................................................................... 45
5.1
DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH .................................................. 46
APPENDIX A .............................................................................................................................. 49
APPENDIX B .............................................................................................................................. 52
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 53
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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Matched Guise Recording Content by Speaker............................................................. 15
Table 2: Factor Matrix (Omitting "Analytical" and "Individualistic") ........................................ 21
Table 3: Comparing Perceptions of Same Speaker When Using Different Language Styles ..... 23
Table 4: Comparing Perceptions of Different Speakers (A and C) Using Same Language Style27
Table 5: Comparing Perceptions of Different Speakers (B and D) Using Same Language Style28
Table 6: Summary of Two-way (speaker gender X speaker language style) ANOVA on
Masculinity Scores........................................................................................................................ 30
Table 7: Means and Standard Deviations of Masculinity Scores by Speaker Gender and
Language Style.............................................................................................................................. 31
Table 8: Summary of Two-Way (Speaker Gender X Speaker Language Style) ANOVA on
Femininity Scores ......................................................................................................................... 32
Table 9: Means and Standard Deviations of Femininity Scores by Speaker Gender and Language
Style .............................................................................................................................................. 33
Table 10: Summary of Two-way (speaker gender X speaker language style) ANOVA on
Nurturance Scores......................................................................................................................... 34
Table 11: Means and Standard Deviations of Nurturance Scores by Speaker Gender and
Language Style.............................................................................................................................. 35
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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Comparison of Masculinity Scores for Each Speaker by Language Style................... 24
Figure 2: Comparison of Femininity Scores for Each Speaker by Language Style .................... 25
Figure 3: Comparison of Nurturance Scores for Speakers Based on Language Style................. 26
Figure 4: Comparison of Masculinity Scores by Gender and Language Style............................ 31
Figure 5: Comparison of Femininity Scores by Gender and Language Style ............................. 33
Figure 6: Comparison of Nurturance Scores for Speaker Gender by Language Style ................ 35
Figure 7: Comparison of Masculinity Scores for Men Using Women's Language and Women
Using "Standard" Language Based on Participant Gender........................................................... 42

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1.0
INTRODUCTION
Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place (LWP), published in 1975, was one of the first
publications of its time to address the relationship between language and gender. As a result,
LWP served as the impetus for both linguists and feminists alike to look more closely at gender
variation in language. Many studies expanded on Lakoff’s argument that language embodies
gender inequity. As stated in LWP, there is a direct correlation between the inequity in language
and the inequity in men and women’s social statuses. “Women’s language”, a term coined by
Lakoff, became a commonly used identifier among language and gender researchers. According
to Lakoff, women’s language describes how women use language and how language is used to
talk about women, both which position women as powerless. This position has been adopted by
a number of sociolinguistics and feminists. In an effort to support Lakoff’s rationale with
empirical evidence (Lakoff’s argument was based entirely on personal observation), many
studies focused on identifying and quantifying the linguistic resources that men and women
utilize when they speak. The overall goal of such studies has often been the classification of
certain linguistic features as occurring more often in women or in men. However, other
researchers have found that gender variation in language is not as clearly and easily defined as
much of the earlier research may claim. The influence of context (local and global), social
factors other than gender (ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status), and issues of power have also
been found to play a role in how men and women use language.
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Although it takes a different approach to the sociolinguistic exploration of gender
inequity in language, this thesis incorporates much of the work that linguists like Lakoff have
contributed to the field. Instead of focusing solely on speakers and the linguistic resources they
employ, this study also investigates how speakers are evaluated by listeners. The argument for
such an approach regards it as insufficient to invest all of our attention into how gender
stereotypes are perpetuated by the speaker alone (for example, because a woman uses linguistic
feature X, she is, as Lakoff would claim, weak or ineffectual). It is also necessary to consider a
listener’s attitude toward the man or woman speaking, as the interpretation of speech can have
significant implications for the nature of social relationships. For example, Delph-Janiurek
(1999) found that the manner in which college professors spoke had a profound effect on how
students evaluated them, specifically regarding gender. Voice qualities such as a lack of
enthusiasm and emotion were considered by students to be “masculine” (in men and women),
whereas instructors (both men and women) with more “emotional” vocal performances that
involved breathiness or a higher pitch were viewed as “feminine”.
Along these same lines, this thesis addresses how men and women are evaluated (in
terms of personality traits) by listeners. Taking into account the gender-specific functions that
have been attached to language (as first posited by Lakoff), this thesis asks the following
questions: first, is there evidence that these gender-specific functions play a role in how a
listener perceives a speaker? In other words, does a listener’s evaluation of a speaker
demonstrate an awareness of stereotypically gendered language characteristics, such as women’s
language? And second, if we elaborate on the first question posed, would a woman using
women’s language be subject to the same evaluation as a man using women’s language?
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2.0
REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE
The research questions posed in this thesis address Lakoff’s claim in LWP that certain linguistic
features have very specific gendered connotations. In her discussion of women’s language,
Lakoff describes features such as tag questions (“this election mess is terrible, isn’t it?”), rising
intonation on declarative statements (responding to a request for the time with “Six o’clock?”)
and hedges (“That’s kinda sad”, or “I’m sort of angry with you”), all of which function to
mitigate a woman’s position. For example, according to Lakoff’s argument, a tag question
usually indicates a speaker’s uncertainty or lack of commitment to what is being said. It would
follow then, based on Lakoff’s theory, that women use more tags than men since they are
“weaker” and, thus, less likely to make an unmitigated statement. However, this did not always
turn out to be the case empirically.
Because Lakoff’s claims were based solely on her own observations and introspection,
many sought to support her statements with empirical evidence. Fishman (1980), a well known
study about women’s interactional “work”, focused on how the verbal interaction between
intimate heterosexual couples created and maintained the hierarchical social relationship between
men and women. Positioned within Lakoff’s framework that identifies certain linguistic
resources as functioning solely to weaken the speaker’s position, Fishman’s analysis suggests
that women work harder than men in interaction, and that interaction between men and women is
most often on men’s terms. The data consisted of over fifty hours of interaction between couples
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in their homes, and revealed that women ask more questions and use more devices described as
insuring rights to speak (saying “D’ya know what?” at the beginning of a conversation) and
establishing interest (“This is interesting” as an introduction to a topic) than men. Furthermore,
according to Fishman, men and women used minimal responses (using words such as “uh-huh”
and “right” while someone is talking - also known as backchanneling) quite differently – for
women, it is “support work” used to indicate that they are attending to their male partner’s
speech. But for men, Fishman states, the use of this device shows a lack of interest in what the
woman is saying. Additionally, Fishman found that men made more statements that received a
response (such as a lengthy conversation) than women did. Many, if not most, of women’s
statements did not get a response from men which, for Fishman, implies that men only engage in
conversation on their own terms.
While it is ideal to investigate language use within real interaction as Fishman did, as
opposed to a context-free vacuum, the analysis of Fishman’s data is problematic. Details about
the context in which the interactions occurred are completely disregarded. In her analyses,
Fishman mapped salient gender stereotypes (for example men are dominant, while women are
childlike) onto linguistic forms and provided no other possibilities for interpretation of these
interactions. It was revealed that women used devices to insure their right to speak twice as
often as men and to establish interest in a subject thirty-four times compared to men’s three
times; however, men did employ these devices (albeit less often), so it cannot be said that only
women used them. Unfortunately, the analysis gives no explanation as to the function these
devices had for men within the interactions, regardless of how infrequently they occurred.
Instead, Fishman focused solely on frequency and argued that since women used these devices
more often than men, they must function to keep women “in their place” (that is, in a powerless
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Document Outline

• COVER PAGE
• ABSTRACT
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• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
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