Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work

Chapter One:

Women and Men Talking on the Job

Amy was a manager with a problem: She had just read a final report written by Donald, and she felt it was woefully inadequate. She faced the unsavory task of telling him to do it over. When she met with Donald, she made sure to soften the blow by beginning with praise, telling him everything about his report that was good. Then she went on to explain what was lacking and what needed to be done to make it acceptable. She was pleased with the diplomatic way she had managed to deliver the bad news. Thanks to her thoughtfulness in starting with praise, Donald was able to listen to the criticism and seemed to understand what was needed. But when the revised report appeared on her desk, Amy was shocked. Donald had made only minor, superficial changes, and none of the necessary ones. The next meeting with him did not go well. He was incensed that she was now telling him his report was not acceptable and accused her of having misled him. You told me before it was fine, he protested.

Amy thought she had been diplomatic; Donald thought she had been dishonest. The praise she intended to soften the message This is unacceptable sounded to him like the message itself: This is fine. So what she regarded as the main point—the needed changes—came across to him as optional suggestions, because he had already registered her praise as the main point. She felt he hadn’t listened to her. He thought she had changed her mind and was making him pay the price.

Work days are filled with conversations about getting the job done. Most of these conversations succeed, but too many end in impasses like this. It could be that Amy is a capricious boss whose wishes are whims, and it could be that Donald is a temperamental employee who can’t hear criticism no matter how it is phrased. But I don’t think either was the case in this instance. I believe this was one of innumerable misunderstandings caused by differences in conversational style. Amy delivered the criticism in a way that seemed to her self-evidently considerate, a way she would have preferred to receive criticism herself: taking into account the other person’s feelings, making sure he knew that her ultimate negative assessment of his report didn’t mean she had no appreciation of his abilities. She offered the praise as a sweetener to help the nasty-tasting news go down. But Donald didn’t expect criticism to be delivered in that way, so he mistook the praise as her overall assessment rather than a preamble to it.

This conversation could have taken place between two women or two men. But I do not think it is a coincidence that it occurred between a man and a woman. This book will explain why. First, it gives a view of the role played by talk in our work lives. To do this, I show the workings of conversational style, explaining the ritual nature of conversation and the confusion that arises when rituals are not shared and therefore not recognized as such. I take into account the many influences on conversational style, but I focus in particular on the differing rituals that typify women and men (although, of course, not all individual men and women behave in ways that are typical). Conversational rituals common among men often involve using opposition such as banter, joking, teasing, and playful put-downs, and expending effort to avoid the one-down position in the interaction. Conversational rituals common among women are often ways of maintaining an appearance of equality, taking into account the effect of the ex-change on the other person, and expending effort to downplay the speakers’ authority so they can get the job done without flexing their muscles in an obvious way.

When everyone present is familiar with these conventions, they work well. But when ways of speaking are not recognized as conventions, they are taken literally, with negative results on both sides. Men whose oppositional strategies are interpreted literally may be seen as hostile when they are not, and their efforts to ensure that they avoid appearing one-down may be taken as arrogance. When women use conversational strategies designed to avoid appearing boastful and to take the other person’s feelings into ac-count, they may be seen as less confident and competent than they really are. As a result, both women and men often feel they are not getting sufficient credit for what they have done, are not being listened to, are not getting ahead as fast as they should.

When I talk about women’s and men’s characteristic ways of speaking, I always emphasize that both styles make sense and are equally valid in themselves, though the difference in styles may cause trouble in interaction. In a sense, when two people form a private relationship of love or friendship, the bubble of their interaction is a world unto itself, even though they both come with the prior experience of their families, their community, and a life-time of conversations. But someone who takes a job is entering a world that is already functioning, with its own characteristic style already in place. Although there are many influences such as regional background, the type of industry involved, whether it is a family business or a large corporation, in general, workplaces that have previously had men in positions of power have already established male-style interaction as the norm. In that sense, women, and others whose styles are different, are not starting out equal, but are at a disadvantage. Though talking at work is quite similar to talking in private, it is a very different enterprise in many ways.

WHEN NOT ASKING DIRECTIONS IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH

If conversational-style differences lead to troublesome outcomes in work as well as private settings, there are some work settings where the outcomes of style are a matter of life and death. Health-care professionals are often in such situations. So are airline pilots.

Of all the examples of women’s and men’s characteristic styles that I discussed in You Just Don’t Understand, the one that (to my surprise) attracted the most attention was the question Why don’t men like to stop and ask for directions? Again and again, in the responses of audiences, talk-show hosts, letter writers, journalists, and conversationalists, this question seemed to crystallize the frustration many people had experienced in their own lives. And my explanation seems to have rung true: that men are more likely to be aware that asking for directions, or for any kind of help, puts them in a one-down position.

With regard to asking directions, women and men are keenly aware of the advantages of their own style. Women frequently ob-serve how much time they would save if their husbands simply stopped and asked someone instead of driving around trying in vain to find a destination themselves. But I have also been told by men that it makes sense not to ask directions because you learn a lot about a neighborhood, as well as about navigation, by driving around and finding your own way.

But some situations are more risky than others. A Hollywood talk-show producer told me that she had been flying with her father in his private airplane when he was running out of gas and uncertain about the precise location of the local landing strip he was heading for. Beginning to panic, the woman said, Daddy! Why don’t you radio the control tower and ask them where to land? He answered, I don’t want them to think I’m lost. This story had a happy ending, else the woman would not have been alive to tell it to me.

Some time later, I repeated this anecdote to a man at a cocktail party—a man who had just told me that the bit about directions was his favorite part of my book, and who, it turned out, was also an amateur pilot. He then went on to tell me that he had had a similar experience. When learning to fly, he got lost on his first solo flight. He did not want to humiliate himself by tuning his radio to the FAA emergency frequency and asking for help, so he flew around looking for a place to land. He spotted an open area that looked like a landing field, headed for it—and found himself deplaning in what seemed like a deliberately hidden landing strip that was mercifully deserted at the time. Fearing he had stumbled upon an enterprise he was not supposed to be aware of, let alone poking around in, he climbed back into the plane, relieved that he had not gotten into trouble. He managed to find his way back to his home airport as well, before he ran out of gas. He maintained, however, that he was certain that more than a few small-plane crashes have occurred because other amateur pilots who did not want to admit they were lost were less lucky. In light of this, the amusing question of why men prefer not to stop and ask for directions stops being funny.

The moral of the story is not that men should immediately change and train themselves to ask directions when they’re in doubt, any more than women should immediately stop asking directions and start honing their navigational skills by finding their way on their own. The moral is flexibility: Sticking to habit in the face of all challenges is not so smart if it ends up getting you killed. If we all understood our own styles and knew their limits and their alternatives, we’d be better off—especially at work, where the results of what we do have repercussions for coworkers and the company, as well as for our own futures.

TO ASK OR NOT TO ASK

An intern on duty at a hospital had a decision to make. A patient had been admitted with a condition he recognized, and he recalled the appropriate medication. But that medication was recommended for a number of conditions, in different dosages. He wasn’t quite sure what dose was right for this condition. He had to make a quick decision: Would he interrupt the supervising resident during a meeting to check the dose, or would he make his best guess and go for it?

What was at stake? First and foremost, the welfare, and maybe even the life, of the patient. But something else was at stake too—the reputation, and eventually the career, of the intern. If he interrupted the resident to ask about the dosage, he was making a public statement about what he didn’t know, as well as making himself something of a nuisance. In this case, he went with his guess, and there were no negative effects. But, as with small-plane crashes, one wonders how many medical errors have resulted from decisions to guess rather than ask.

It is clear that not asking questions can have disastrous consequences in medical settings, but asking questions can also have negative consequences. A physician wrote to me about a related experience that occurred during her medical training. She received a low grade from her supervising physician. It took her by surprise because she knew that she was one of the best interns in her group. She asked her supervisor for an explanation, and he replied that she didn’t know as much as the others. She knew from her day-today dealings with her peers that she was one of the most knowledgeable, not the least. So she asked what evidence had led him to his conclusion. And he told her, You ask more questions.

There is evidence that men are less likely to ask questions in a public situation, where asking will reveal their lack of knowledge. One such piece of evidence is a study done in a university class-room, where sociolinguist Kate Remlinger noticed that women students asked the professor more questions than men students did. As part of her study, Remlinger interviewed six students at length, three men and three women. All three men told her that they would not ask questions in class if there was something they did not understand. Instead, they said they would try to find the answer later by reading the textbook, asking a friend, or, as a last resort, asking the professor in private during office hours. As one young man put it, If it’s vague to me, I usually don’t ask. I’d rather go home and look it up.

Of course, this does not mean that no men will ask questions when they are in doubt, nor that all women will; the differences, as always, are a matter of likelihood and degree. As always, cultural differences play a role too. It is not unusual for American professors to admit their own ignorance when they do not know the answer to a student’s question, but there are many cultures in which professors would not, and students from those cultures may judge American professors by those standards. A student from the Middle East told a professor at a California university that she had just lost all respect for one of his colleagues. The reason: She had asked a question in class, and the offending professor had replied, I don’t know offhand, but I’ll find out for you.

The physician who asked her supervisor why he gave her a negative evaluation may be unusual in having been told directly what behavior led to the misjudgment of her skill. But in talking to doctors and doctors-in-training around the country, I have learned that there is nothing exceptional about her experience, that it is common for interns and residents to conceal their ignorance by not asking questions, since those who do ask are judged less capable. Yet it seems that many women who are more likely than men to ask questions (just as women are more likely to stop and ask for directions when they’re lost) are unaware that they may make a negative impression at the same time that they get information. Their antennae have not been attuned to making sure they don’t appear one-down.

This pattern runs counter to two stereotypes about male and female styles: that men are more focused on information and that women are more sensitive. In regard to classroom behavior, it seems that the women who ask questions are more focused on in-formation, whereas the men who refrain from doing so are more focused on interaction—the impression their asking will make on others. In this situation, it is the men who are more sensitive to the impression made on others by their behavior, although their concern is, ultimately, the effect on themselves rather than on others. And this sensitivity is likely to make them look better in the world of work. Realizing this puts the intern’s decision in a troubling perspective. He had to choose between putting his career at risk and putting the patient’s health at risk.

It is easy to see benefits of both styles: Someone willing to ask questions has ready access to a great deal of information—all that is known by the people she can ask. But just as men have told me that asking directions is useless since the person you ask may not know and may give you the wrong answer, some people feel they are more certain to get the right information if they read it in a book, and they are learning more by finding it themselves. On the other hand, energy may be wasted looking up information someone else has at hand, and I have heard complaints from people who feel they were sent on wild-goose chases by colleagues who didn’t want to admit they really were not sure of what they pretended to know.

The reluctance to say I don’t know can have serious consequences for an entire company—and did: On Friday, June 17,1994, a computer problem prevented Fidelity Investments from calculating the value of 166 mutual funds. Rather than report that the values for these funds were not available, a manager decided to report to the National Association of Securities Dealers that the values of these funds had not changed from the day before. Unfortunately, June 17 turned out to be a bad day in the financial markets, so the values of Fidelity’s funds that were published in newspapers around the country stood out as noticeably higher than those of other funds. Besides the cost and inconvenience to brokerage firms who had to re-compute their customers’ accounts, and the injustice to investors who made decisions to buy or sell based on inaccurate information, the company was mightily embarrassed and forced to apologize publicly. Clearly this was an instance in which it would have been preferable to say, We don’t know.

Flexibility, again, is key. There are many situations in which it serves one well to be self-reliant and discreet about revealing doubt or ignorance, and others in which it is wise to admit what you don’t know.

NEGOTIATING FROM THE INSIDE OUT OR THE OUTSIDE IN

Two coworkers who were on very friendly terms with each other were assigned to do a marketing survey together. When they got the assignment, the man began by saying, I’ll do the airline and automobile industry, and you can do the housewares and direct-mail market. The woman was taken aback. Hey, she said. It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out. As a matter of fact, I’d like to do airlines and autos. I’ve already got a lot of contacts in those areas. Oh, he said, a little chagrined and a lot surprised. She continued, I wish you wouldn’t come on so strong. Well, how would you have started? he asked. She said, I wouldn’t have just said what I wanted to do. I would have asked, ‘What parts do you want to do?’ This made no sense to him. Then what are you complaining about? If you had asked me what parts I wanted to do, I would have said, ‘I’ll do the airlines and autos.’ We would have ended up in the same place anyway.

The woman saw his point. But if the conversation had gone that way, she still would have been frustrated. To her, the question What parts of the survey would you like to do? is not an invitation to grab the parts he wants and run away with them. It’s an invitation to talk about the various parts—which ones interest him, which he has experience in, which he would like to learn more about. Then he would ask, What do you want to do? and she would say what interests her, where her experience lies, and where she’d like to get more experience. Finally, they would divvy up the parts in a way that gave them both some of what they wanted, while taking advantage of both their expertise.

Making decisions is a crucial part of any workday. Daily, weekly, monthly, decisions must be made with never enough information and never enough time. People have very different ways of reaching decisions, and none is clearly better than others. But when two people with different styles have to make decisions together, both styles may have worse results than either would have if their styles were shared, unless the differences are understood and accommodated.

Beginning by stating what you will do is a style of negotiating that starts inside and works its way out. If others have different ideas, you expect them to say so, and you’ll negotiate. Opening with a question like What would you like to do? or What do you think? is a style that begins by being vague and works its way in. It specifically invites others to express their perspective. Either style can work well. What makes the machine go TILT! is the difference in styles. Someone who expects negotiation to proceed from the inside and work its way out hears a vague question as an invitation to decide; someone who tends to negotiate from the out-side in hears a specific claim as a nonnegotiable demand. In this sense, both styles are indirect—they depend on an unspoken understanding of how the subsequent conversation is expected to go. This is a sense in which conversation is ritualized: It follows a preset sequencing scheme that seems self-evidently appropriate.

WHEN IS THE WAGE GAP A COMMUNICATION GAP?

There are those who claim that what’s really important is economic issues like the salary gap—equal pay for equal work. Why do women still make less than men, on the average, and why, if efforts are made to equalize salaries in a given setting, is it only a few years before the women’s pay once again falls behind? This too can be a matter of ways of speaking, since anything you get depends on talking.

Marjorie and Lawrence Nadler suspected that getting raises, promotions, and other advantages depends on people’s ability to negotiate, and that women might be at a disadvantage in this regard. They tested this by asking 174 students to role-play negotiations for salary, and sure enough, they found that the women in their study ended up with lower raises than men. The researchers turned up a slew of other fascinating results too: On the average, male students role-playing supervisors gave lower raises than females in the same role, even though the males started out by offering more than the females. In other words, the women playing supervisors raised their offers much more as a result of negotiation. Even more interesting, and more worrisome, male students playing supervisors ended up giving higher raises to male student-subordinates, though this may be related to the fact that male student-subordinates made higher initial demands than females did. In the end, the lowest raises were negotiated by female students playing subordinates in negotiation with males as bosses.

This does not mean that differences in ways of speaking are the only reason for the salary gap. Nadler and Nadler found not only that men in their role-plays ended up with higher raises than women as the outcome of negotiation, but that men were offered higher raises to start with, before negotiation. Most distressing, the lowest initial offers were made by female students playing supervisors negotiating with females as subordinates. It could be that the women started with low offers to women because they knew they would raise the offers as a result of negotiation. In the end, the researchers found that higher final offers were made when the negotiators were of the same sex.

A real-life incident sheds light on another phenomenon that could affect relative wages. Doreen had advanced gradually but inexorably up the ladder in her company, until she held one of the highest positions in the firm. She had advanced at each stage along with Dennis, who had been hired at the same time as she. It seemed that the executives at the top were reluctant to give her a promotion or raise unless they felt that Dennis merited the same recognition, even though their jobs were by now quite different, and hers involved more responsibility as well as a higher operating budget. At one point, when she asked for a raise to bring her salary up to that of the other managers who had jobs comparable to hers, she was told that the firm couldn’t manage raises for her and Dennis at that time. Doreen was taken aback by the reference to Dennis; she had simply asked about her own salary. But she was also enlightened; this tipped her off that her bosses regarded the two of them together and did not feel they could let her salary get ahead of his.

It may well be that some people have a gut-level, not-logically-thought-out sense that women should get less, either because they are expected to have lower abilities, or because they do not display their abilities, or because their rank and salaries are being measured against those of other women rather than their male peers. There may also be an unarticulated sense that women need less: Whether or not an individual woman is self-supporting or the main or sole support of her family, the image of a woman does not readily suggest breadwinner.

All of this is to say that results like the salary gap may result from a range of factors, including ways of speaking as well as pre-conceptions about women and men.

MORE ON NEGOTIATING STYLES

The managers of a medium-size company got the go-ahead to hire a human-resources coordinator, and two managers who worked well together were assigned to make the choice. As it turned out, Maureen and Harold favored different applicants, and both felt strongly about their preferences. Maureen argued with assurance and vigor that the person she wanted to hire was the most creative and innovative, and that he had the most appropriate experience. Harold argued with equal conviction that the applicant he favored had a vision of management that fit with the company’s, whereas her candidate might be a thorn in their side. They traded arguments for some time, neither convincing the other. Then Harold said that hiring the applicant Maureen wanted would make him so uncomfortable that he would have to consider resigning. Maureen respected Harold. What’s more, she liked him and considered him a friend. So she felt that his admission of such strong feelings had to be taken into account. She said what seemed to her the only thing she could say under the circumstances: Well, I certainly don’t want you to feel uncomfortable here; you’re one of the pillars of the place. If you feel that strongly about it, I can’t argue with that. Harold’s choice was hired.

In this case, the decision-making power went not to the manager who had the highest rank in the firm (their positions were parallel) and not necessarily to the one whose judgment was best, but to the one whose arguing strategies were most effective in the negotiation. Maureen was an ardent and persuasive advocate for her view, but she assumed that she and Harold would have to come to an agreement in order to make a decision, and that she had to take his feelings into account. Since Harold would not back down, she did. Most important, when he argued that he would have to quit if she got her way, she felt she had no option but to yield.

What was crucial was not Maureen’s and Harold’s individual styles in isolation but how their styles interacted—how they played in concert with the other’s style. Harold’s threat to quit ensured his triumph—when used with someone who would not call his bluff. If he had been arguing with someone who regarded this threat as simply another move in the negotiation rather than as a nonnegotiable expression of deep feelings that had to be respected, the result might have been different. For example, had she said, That’s ridiculous; of course you’re not going to quit! or If that’s how shallow your commitment to this firm is, then we’d be better off without you, the decision might well have gone the other way.

When you talk to someone whose style is similar to yours, you can fairly well predict the response you are going to get. But when you talk to someone whose style is different, you can’t predict, and often can’t make sense of, the response. Hearing the reaction you get, if it’s not the one you expected, often makes you regret what you said. Harold later told Maureen that he was sorry he had used the argument he did. In retrospect he was embarrassed, even a bit ashamed of himself. His retrospective chagrin was like what you feel if you slam down something in anger and are surprised and regretful to see that it breaks. You wanted to make a gesture, but you didn’t expect it to come out with such force. Harold regretted what he said precisely because it caused Maureen to back down so completely. He’d known he was upping the ante—he felt he had to do something to get them out of the loop of recycling arguments they were in—but he had not expected it to end the negotiation summarily; he expected Maureen to meet his move with a balancing move of her own. He did not predict the impact that personalizing his argument would have on her. For her part, Maureen did not think of Harold’s threat as just another move in a negotiable argument; she heard it as a personal plea that she could not reject. Their different approaches to negotiation put her at a disadvantage in negotiating with him.

How CERTAIN ARE YOU OF THAT?

Negotiating is only one kind of activity that is accomplished through talk at work. Other kinds of decision-making are also based as much on ways of talking as on the content of the arguments. The CEO of a corporation explained to me that he regularly has to make decisions based on insufficient information—and making decisions is a large part of his work life. Much of his day is spent hearing brief presentations following which he must either approve or reject a course of action. He has to make a judgment in five minutes about issues the presenters have worked on for months. I decide, he explained, based on how confident they seem. If they seem very confident, I call it a go. If they seem unsure, I figure it’s too risky and nix it.

Here is where the rule of competence and the role of communication go hand in hand. Confidence, after all, is an internal feeling. How can you judge others’ confidence? The only evidence you have to go on is circumstantial—how they talk about what they know. You judge by a range of signs, including facial expression and body posture, but most of all, speech. Do they hesitate? Do they speak up or swallow half their words? Is their tone of voice declamatory or halting? Do they make bald statements (This is a winner! We’ve got to go for it!) or hedge (Urn ... from what I can tell, I think it’ll work, but we’ll never know for sure until we try)? This seems simple enough. Surely, you can tell how confident people are by paying attention to how they speak, just as you can tell when someone is lying.

Well, maybe not. Psychologist Paul Ekman has spent years studying lying, and he has found that most people are very sure they can tell when others are lying. The only trouble is, most can’t. With a few thus-far inexplicable exceptions, people who tell him they are absolutely sure they can tell if someone is lying are as likely to be wrong as to be right—and he has found this to be as true for judges as for the rest of us.

In the same way, our ability to determine how confident others are is probably quite limited. The CEO who does not take into account the individual styles of the people who make presentations to him will find it difficult, if not impossible, to make the best judgment. Different people will talk very differently, not because of the absolute level of their confidence or lack of it, but because of their habitual ways of speaking. There are those who sound sure of themselves even when inside they’re not sure at all, and others who sound tentative even when they’re very sure indeed. So being aware of differences in ways of speaking is a prerequisite for making good decisions as well as good presentations.

FEASTING ON HUMBLE PIE

Although these factors affecting decision-making are the same for men and women, and every individual has his or her own style, it seems that women are more likely to downplay their certainty, men more likely to downplay their doubts. From childhood, girls learn to temper what they say so as not to sound too aggressive—which means too certain. From the time they are little, most girls learn that sounding too sure of themselves will make them unpopular with their peers. Groups of girls, as researchers who have studied girls at play have found, will penalize and even ostracize a girl who seems too sure she’s right. Anthropologist Marjorie Harness Goodwin found that girls criticize other girls who stand out by-saying, She thinks she’s cute, or She thinks she’s something. Talking in ways that display self-confidence are not approved for girls.

It is not only peers who disapprove of girls talking in ways that call attention to their accomplishments. Adults too can be critical of such behavior in girls, as was a woman who wrote a letter that was published in a magazine. The letter-writer was responding to an article about a ten-year-old girl named Heather DeLoach who became a child celebrity by tap-dancing in a bee costume on a rock video. Heather was portrayed in the magazine as still being awed by others’ fame (I got to meet Pauly Shore and Janet Jackson, and I got Madonna’s autograph, but I wasn’t allowed to take pictures) and unawed by her own (I see myself so much on TV that when the Bee Girl comes on, I just click right through the channel). Sounding very much like other girls, she hedged when mentioning her good grades (sort of like straight-A). But she was also quoted as saying, I’m extremely talented. I guess when the director first set eyes on me, he liked me. I try my best to be an actress, and I’m just great. I’m the one and only Bee Girl.

Although the article did not explain what question the interviewer asked to elicit Heather’s truthful description of herself, the disapproving reader zeroed in on those words and admonished, Heather DeLoach, the Bee Girl, describes herself as ‘extremely talented’ and ‘just great.’ Perhaps 10-year-old Heather should stop being a bumblebee and start being a humble bee. Not only did this reader tell the child star to start being more humble, but she also told her to stop being a bumblebee—that is, doing what she’s so good at that it’s bringing her attention, reward, and too much— or too obvious—self-confidence.

Reactions like these teach girls how they are expected to talk in order to be liked. It is not surprising that when she spoke in this guileless way, Heather DeLoach was ten. By the time she gets through junior high school and puberty, chances are she will have learned to talk differently, a transformation—and loss of confidence—that white middle-class American girls experience at that stage of their lives, according to a great deal of current research. But it is crucial to bear in mind that ways of talking are not literal representations of mental states, and refraining from boasting may not reveal a true lack of confidence. A pair of studies by a team of psychologists makes this clear.

Laurie Heatherington and her colleagues had student experimenters ask hundreds of incoming college students to predict how they thought their first year at college would go by forecasting the grades they expected to get. In some cases, the predictions were made anonymously: They were put in writing and placed in an envelope. In others, they were made publicly, either orally to the experimenter or by writing on a paper that the experimenter promptly read. The researchers found that women predicted lower grades for themselves than men did—but only when they made their predictions publicly. The predictions the women students made in private did not differ from the men’s, just as the grades they actually earned as the year progressed did not differ from the men’s. In other words, their lower predictions evidenced not lack of confidence but reluctance to reveal the level of confidence they felt.

The same researchers conducted a second study that captured women’s characteristic balancing act between their own interests and those of the person they are talking to.