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]]]]]]]]]]]]]] LOOK, JUST DON'T INTERRUPT! [[[[[[[[[[[[[[
By Geoffrey W. Beattie
Geoffrey Beattie considers the chatter of the sexes.
Dr Geoffrey W. Beattie is at the Department of Psychology in
the University of Sheffield.
(From New Scientist, 23 September 1982, pp. 859-860)
[Kindly uploade by Freeman 10602PANC]
[Though this six-year-old article is a reply to a piece in a
British newspaper, it has important lessons about points-of-view,
`feminist science' and the acceptance and spread of what becomes
`common knowledge'. -- OP ]
Women are oppressed, so the media are wont to tell us. The
``Naked Ape'' column of the Guardian's women's page acts as a
nagging reminder. Recently, ``Guardian Women'' went further. On
the 23 August, Dale Spender produced scientific evidence for the
verbal oppression of women. Women, it seems, can't get a word
in. The reason apparently is that when they attempt to talk, men
interrupt -- ``I found that not only do men do most of the
talking -- they do almost all of the interrupting, taking over
the topic of conversation and cutting off the previous speaker.''
This might come as some surprise given the traditional wisdom
that women talk the most -- ``Si femme il y a, silence il n'y
a'', or Washington Irving's ``a woman's tongue is the only weapon
that sharpens with use''. Dale Spender says much folk wisdom is
simply wrong. ``Women are the talkative sex. Right?'', she
asks. ``Wrong'', she replies.
The evidence comes from linguistics. The classic study which
she mentions, although not by name, is the one that Don Zimmerman
and Candace West carried out at the Santa Barbara campus of the
University of California in the early 1970s. In conversations
between men and women, men, it seems, were responsible for 96 per
cent of all interruptions. Zimmerman and West are in no doubts
as to what this means. Interruptions, they interject, are ``a
display of dominance or control to the female (and to any
witnesses) and ... a control device since the incursion
(particularly if repeated) disorganizes the local construction of
a topic.'' Dale Spender puts it more simply: ``Those with power
and status talk more and interrupt more''. No whining here --
``Women are oppressed''. Wham! there's the evidence.
But how sound are Zimmerman and West's observations? In my
view, despite this study being very frequently quoted, both by
academics and most feminist authors of the past few years, the
answer is, ``Not very''. The sample in the study is small and
unrepresentative, the figures misleading and the interpretation
too narrow. First, the sample, 31 conversational snatches or
``segments'', consist of everyday ``chit-chat''. We are not,
however, told anything about the length of these segments. All
the people recorded were middle-class, under 35 and white.
Moreover, we are simply told that in 11 conversations between men
and women, men used 46 interruptions, but women only two. The
problem with this is that you might simply have one very voluble
man in the study which has a disproportionate effect on the
total. Indeed, one man did contribute 11 interruptions (nearly
one quarter of the total). This means that the other 10 men
contributed on average just 3.5 each. If there was another
particularly voluble man in the sample, these figures would again
drop dramatically.
Zimmerman and West also studied only conversations between two
people where it may not be necessary to interrupt to gain the
floor. In a series of studies on interviews with Margaret
Thatcher by Denis Tuohy, Brian Walden, Llew Gardner, and others
on television, I found that she is interrupted more often by her
interviewer than she herself interrupts, although of course she
speaks much more than her interviewer. In other words, we cannot
draw any conclusions about the amount of talk allowed on the
basis of frequency of interruption in conversations involving two
people. I have analysed rates of interruption in larger groups
(Linguistics, 1981). I based my study on university tutorials,
where it may be necessary to interrupt to gain the floor since
there are more people to whom the current speaker can hand the
floor. It involved about 10 hours of tutorial discussion and
some 557 interruptions (compared with 55 in the Zimmerman and
West study), I found that women interrupted men in 33.8 per cent
of floor exchanges, and men interrupted women in 34.1 per cent of
floor switches. No difference!
There are further problems in the Zimmerman and West study.
They provide no evidence of how men behave with other men.
Perhaps men not only oppress women but also oppress each other as
well. Zimmerman and West, however, combine interruption rates
for men by men and women by women. They report only seven
interruptions for conversations between members of the same sex.
Does that mean in such conversations people do not interrupt, or
alternatively where the segments shorter in these conversations?
Zimmerman and West tell us nothing about the length of the
segments in the study nor do they attempt to standardise
interruption rates. Again, in my study, there was no difference
in the rate of interruption of men by men, and women by women.
Zimmerman and West's data are weak but their subsequent
interpretation is also too narrow. Why do interruptions
necessarily reflect dominance? Can interruptions not arise from
other sources? Do some interruptions not reflect interest and
involvement as in the following exchange:
TUTOR: ... so he he gives the impression that he he wasn't
able to train any of them up ("Now"
(
STUDENT: ("He" didn't try hard enough
heh heh heh
This would be classified as an interruption by Zimmerman and
West because it involves simultaneous speech (the words in
[double quotes]) and the first speaker's utterance in not
complete. Here, however, the student interrupts not, I think to
appear dominant but to make a witticism which reflected interest
and involvement in the proceedings. In my study of tutorials I
found that students interrupted tutors more frequently than
vice-versa. Interruptions, therefore, cannot always reflect
dominance. Anne Cutler, from Sussex University, and I have
carried out experiments that suggest some interruptions in Mrs
Thatcher's interviews arise because at some points people think
she has completed her turn when she has not. It is not that
interviewers are trying to dominate her in conversation (even
though she is a woman) but that they are interpreting certain
signals in her speech incorrectly.
Women may indeed be oppressed, and linguistic science may come
up with evidence that women are oppressed in conversation. The
evidence so far, however, is weak. ``Si femme il y a, silence il
n'y a?'' -- peut-etre, peut-etre [circumflex accent on the first
`e' in `etre'].
* * *
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