Language in the Workforce Cont.

https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1827&context=ngresearchconf

I have included the link to a pdf that I found that was exactly what I seemed to be experiencing in the workforce in regard to gendered language. The article follows a woman named Hettie, listening to her speak and watching how she conducts herself within the work force.

The article talks about how Hettie "constructs herself as a competent professional, managing a difficult situation well and with dignity through a variety of strategic discursive, lexical and grammatical choices. These choices also present her as a vulnerable, warm-blooded person with strong feelings, and a story-teller who is responsive to her audience". She tries to relate to the person she is assisting and makes her work persona very personable and approachable, while at the same time alluding a ray of authority and professionalism. 

This article then went on to talk about how men and women differ in the fact that women tend to use more "rapport-talk", or rather where more personal information is used in the act of conversation, but I tend to disagree slightly. I disagree in that I do believe a lot of men participate in rapport talk as well. Within my own job the men around me are often telling stories of their past. Mostly because that past consists of serving in the United States Military, and military men are different than normal men - in my opinion, which is a whole other discussion - telling militia tales. 

Differences in Gender Language in the Workforce

For the last couple of weeks I have been working at a technology center for Northwest Savings Bank in Warren, PA. Due to the fact that technology and help support such as this are predominately male dominated, I was able to observe and record the differences in language between male and female coworkers and within different help desk calls received by the desk.

I suppose I should start by explaining what we do: I am one of four interns currently working at the Tech Support Center, with an additional employee-band of ten or less. From that work pool of people there were three girls total, myself included. To me, this was more than I thought there would be when I started working for tech support. During a normal work day we answer close to one-hundred calls each; each call with a different technological issue that needs solving. Now while that sounds impressive, it's merely unlocking user accounts and logging back in.

From performing these calls myself, and also listening into many calls made by others, I was able to observe many different styles of speaking between male and female.

Some of these observations are that, like in school, women tend to tag themselves before speaking. By this I mean, they begin asking their question(s) by saying things such as "I don't know if you'll be able to fix this..." or "hopefully his isn't too tricky...". They never want to outright ask for something to be fixed. And the same goes on my end. After I solved some issues for people I would go to email them back and find myself belittling my own accomplishment of fixing their issue by saying something along the lines of: "everything SHOULD be fixed by now" and "Hopefully it works for you".

But this fact is not the same when it comes to my male coworkers. In observation I decided men are very matter-of-fact. They state what needs to be said, and hardly elaborate more. If the account is unlocked thats all the information they give you. Whereas women tend to add more information than needed. For example I would always add in the note: "If you have any more issues please do not hesitate to call the help desk and someone will take care of it". The men at work hardly ever did a follow up on someone's account or issues that were previously recorded; while women remember the names of frequent callers and have chats about life in between fixing the problem.

There were so many different part about speech and gender in the workforce and I will continue to write and observe more.