Yes. Research in sociolinguistics has found patterns of speech that differ between women and men. One of the best known is that men tend to take a competitive approach in conversation, while women tend to take a cooperative one.
Some people argue that the answer is obvious and that the sexes do express themselves differently. Others say there is no real difference in how men and women talk: no pattern, only chance. So who is right?
Linguistic and sociolinguistic research supports the first view. The right term, however, is not sex, which refers to the biological difference between men and women, but gender, which refers to categories that society constructs. Social scientists have shown that there are patterns of speech that differ between gender groups.
Note that the study of language and gender is not about the ways language is used to put down a social group. It looks at how the different gender groups actually use language.
How research discovered gender
For a long time, language research ignored the possibility that male and female speakers might differ. Many studies left out female speakers completely and looked at male speakers only. Sociolinguists studied the differences between age groups, educational groups, and ethnic groups early on. Interest in women as a social group of their own came only with the rise of women's studies and the movement for women's rights.
Once researchers saw women as a social group, compared with men, they soon found clear evidence that the genders use language differently. One of the most striking differences was between a competitive and a cooperative approach to conversation.
Competitive and cooperative conversation
Research describes men as tending to take a competitive approach when they talk. They use their turn in a conversation to overturn what an earlier speaker said, and they converse in a more aggressive and assertive way. Women, on the other hand, tend to build on and support what another speaker said, in a more cooperative approach. They are less assertive and pay more attention to the relationship between the speakers.
These are tendencies across groups, not rules for every person: many men talk cooperatively, and many women talk competitively.
In the past, women were often seen to adapt to the way their male colleagues and peers spoke. This happens less and less. Many women accept that their way of speaking is different and embrace it, and research on doctors and their patients suggests that the "female" way can even work better.
Women and men as doctors
Candace West, a professor of sociology, studied how male and female doctors talked to their patients, in work published in the 1980s and early 1990s. Her studies found that male doctors spoke to their patients in a more authoritarian and demanding way, while female doctors spoke in a more sensitive way. Patients were more willing to cooperate, for example to follow the instructions for a treatment, when they dealt with a female doctor. In this setting, the "female" way of communicating was the more effective one.
Patterns, not chance
Sociologists and sociolinguists agree that the speech of women and men shows patterns and regular structures that differ. Competitive and cooperative conversation is one example, and there are more. The second part of this series looks at what writers and grammarians in the past believed about the speech of women and men, and the third part at what sociolinguistic research has found since.