Women and Language

The biases of language are a fascinating topic. From gendered speech to gendered language, there are a lot of subtle differences between speech used by and used on men, and the speech used by and on women. The differences even appear in intonation and stressed words.

After class, I couldn’t help looking up the site about gendered RateMyProfessor adjectives, and spent over half an hour just plugging in random words and looking at the results on my own. It fascinates me, particularly due to the split between predictable results and the truly unexpected results. As far as predictable goes, I was unsurprised that “old” describes more men than women (especially since older men seem to show up more often in teaching jobs than old women), “funny” is largely dominated by men, “ugly” is mostly for women, and “annoying” describes significantly more women than men, just to name a few. However, there were some interesting outliers to my expectations: both “strong” and “power” had a decent lean towards women, and “sensitive” was used to describe more men (since sensitive can mean either empathetic or emotional, I guess there are two ways to interpret this). 

And perhaps most interesting of all, at least to me, was the clear female lead in “Confident”. Often I notice that the women around seem less sure of themselves than men- be it from their own insecurities or simply because the men around them don’t leave space for as much female confidence. Even in class, we discussed the way women hedge their language to come off as less confident or assertive. (Side note: “Assertive” was also used to describe significantly more female teachers). 

At first, I thought that maybe this was a complaint similar to “ugly”, where female teachers don’t meet a student’s expectations like beauty and submission and insecurity, so they point it out. But of course, confidence is a positive thing, most of the time, and it’s an even clearer gender split when the negative reviews are filtered out.

And here’s where it gets interesting: “Overconfident” was mostly used to describe men.

This seems to correspond to the claims of the article that Ms. Slater showed us—sometimes, things like hedging language can make a person seem more reasonable, less affronting, and can lessen the blows. As the article indicated, maybe differences like these are what have edged women away from being “overconfident” and the men towards it, leaving women with a good balance of surety and awareness.