Gender Theorists

• Wanted to find out if the presence of uncooperative interactive features (interruptions) depended on gender.
• Found 90% of conversations included such features.
• In mixed sex coversations men were more likely to interrupt, use explicit negative sanctions and have delayed minimal responses to women,
• Women obey rules of turn taking, are silent between utterances and don't overlap.
• In same sex conversations interruptions were more evenly spread.

• Studied relationships between girls and boys and how it effected their grammar.
• Research in Reading looking at language of teenagers.
• When put into groups, she found that when the same gendered groups were talking together they were more liekly to conform against the subject topic.
• Boys use non standard forms more than girls - use of "ain't", multiple negation.
• Believed to be because boys were members of ‘denser networks’ and thus their language converged towards the vernacular to show social solidarity.

• Focused on the use of tag questions used in mixed gender conversation.
• Found that tag questions are used by women after declarative clauses in order to maintain/continue conversations with males.
• Used due to lack of confidence in conversation with men and help women to feel like they have control in the conversation.
• Fishman argues that women have to do the majority of the 'conversational shitwork' when interacting with men, because men, in their dominant role, are less concerned to do so.

• Created the Difference Theory which includes 6 different contrasts: status vs support, advice vs understanding, independence vs intimacy, information vs feelings, conflict vs compormise and order vs proposals.
• Found that through these contrasts, the way men and women thing and talk among eachother differ.
• Women would want to have support and understanding, whereas men are more likely to want to stand alone and do things their own way.

• The Gender 'Performativity' Theory.
•  Language is used to project an identity rather than reinforce gender stereotypes.
• Sex is performativiety constructed in the sense that it represents an essentially arbitrary distinction between individuals that is drawn and later reinforced through speech acts such as "It's a boy!".

• Conforms with the Difference Approach.
• Conducted research on conversations in a bakery for 9 motnhs to look at male and female conversations.
• Found that women are more collaborative in same sex relationships - aim to maintain relationships.
• Men were competitive, hallenged eachothers' points of view and tended to disagree with one another

• Study focused on whether men and women speak differently and whether the differences are related to gender, status and power.
• Found in doctor-patient conversations female doctors were interrupted more often than male physicians.
• In business organisations men tended to dominate the interactions (fits the sterotype of men having more power and authority and are superior to women)
• Women pay and recieve more compliments and regard them as a politeness device.
• Men tend to see compliments negatively and as face threatening.

Studied women's oral culture, which she calls Gossip and made four categories:

• House Talk - its distinguishing function is the exchange of information and resources connected with the female role as an occupation. 
• Scandal - a considered judging of the behaviour of others, and women in particular. It is usually made in terms of the domestic morality, of which women have been appointed guardians. 
• Bitching - this is the overt expression of women’s anger at their restricted role and inferior status. They express this in private and to other women only. The women who ***** are not expecting change; they want only to make their complaints in an environment where their anger will be understood and expected. 
• Chatting - this is the most intimate form of gossip, a mutual self-disclosure, a transaction where women use to their own advantage the skills they have learned as part of their job of nurturing others. 

• Acknowledges the tendency of girls to stick to playing in smaller groups (with one or two other girls) and their relationship is based predominantly on talk.
• Boys play in larger, hierarchical groups which are based on joint activity (e.g. sport) where there is often an undisputed 'boss'.
• Certain language techniques, such as keeping a conversation going, aren’t signs of inferiority or insecurity – that they actually show intelligence and perhaps power. 
• An example she found of girls speaking differently because of gendered friendship groups was their use of epistemic modal forms (e.g. perhaps, sort of, probably etc) to avoid face-threatening facts.

• The gender similarities hypothesis states that women and men are, for the most part, the same for many but not all psychological varaibles. Women and men are more similar than different.
• Brought women and men into an experimental setting and told them traditional gender roles and ideologies do not apply.
• Found few differences except for that men were more likely to display physical aggression.

• In all male talk amongst members of a rugby team, men were likely to pay less attention to the need to save face and instead use insults as a way of expressing solidarity.
• Believes in the difference approach.