Gender, Androgyny, and Conversational Assertiveness

Abstract

When a society differentiates between women's roles and men's roles, one is hardly astonished to learn that men and women speak about different things. Perhaps more surprising is the observation that women and men differ in the manner or form of their talk as well as in the content of their talk. Yet, since the days of Jespersen (1922), linguists and anthropologists have documented gender differentiation in language form in a variety of cultures (Bodine, 1975).