"He" to "he/she" to "they" to...?

One of the passages that interested me in our textbook was the section on the gradual shift away from using masculine words as generic forms. For a long time, it was commonly accepted practice to use “man” as synonymous with “humankind,” to use the pronoun “he” by default when referring to an unknown individual, and so on. This only changed around the 1970s, prompted by the second wave of feminism. Generic “he,” and considering men the default in general, started to fall out of favor. Today, the generic “he” seems old-fashioned, and it’s more common to see “he or she,” “he/she,” “(s)he” or some other variation on including both male and female pronouns. Another option, which I haven’t seen as frequently, is to alternate the pronouns used for the unknown or hypothetical person every time you start a new sentence.

Even more recently, though, singular “they” has been making a comeback- probably helped along by many people (including myself!) using it as a personal pronoun. The advantages of “they” in place of “he/she” are greater inclusivity, eliminating the need for one pronoun or the other to come first, and generally being less clunky to write, read, and say. However, it also has its disadvantages, such as the possibility of confusion if a single unknown person is referred to with “they” in the same passage where a group of people is also referred to with “they.” This can be avoided with careful enough phrasing, but having to phrase things carefully to avoid pronoun confusion can get annoying.

So, after reading about how quickly the generic “he” became “he or she,” and knowing that “he or she” now seems to be turning into singular “they,” I’ve been wondering: is there going to be another shift? If we move away from “they,” where will we go next? Or do you think we’ll be sticking with it for a while, until it’s swept away in some big social movement? I don’t know if anyone is still looking at this blog, since the semester is over, but if anyone does read this, I’d like to hear your thoughts!

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.

The Language Police

I am incredibly conscious of the way that I speak.

I teach dance at a local studio to four year olds. I know that when I am with my students my voice gets extra loud and peppy to try and keep their attention -- and when a friend comes to pick me up from work and hears me teaching, I am self-conscious that they had to hear my "teacher voice". When I lead meetings for College Democrats, I try to speak calmly and at a lower volume so that my cohorts take me seriously -- and I am constantly stressed, hoping that I am doing a good job. When I meet with local political leaders, who are predominately male, I get worried that my voice is too high-pitched and as such, they won't care what I have to say. This is just a small sampling but I am sure you all can also think of times in your own life where you have changed how you speak to fit the situation.

I promise I have a point to these anecdotes! It relates to the article I found this week relating to gender and speech called "From Upspeak to Vocal Fry: Are We 'Policing' Young Women's Voices?" by NPR.

In the article, it focuses on a female journalist who, after venturing into the world of podcasts, was criticized for the way that she sounded. In particular, listeners disliked her "upspeak" tendencies. The complaints got so bad that she eventually went to a voice coach in order to change the way she spoke in an attempt to placate the audience.

This opened up broader concerns about how women's voices are particularly targeted by those who dislike "upspeak" and vocal fry -- while ignoring the fact that men also use the same sounds. The linguist interviewed for the article, Penny Eckert, was angered by the fact that people try to hypocritically police women's voices. She wrote that she was particularly angry because, "the biggest users of vocal fry traditionally have been men, and it still is; men in the U.K., for instance. And it's considered kind of a sign of hyper-masculinity." Therefore, is it surprising that in a male-dominated society women have attempted to use their speech patterns to be taken seriously? It is a disheartening reality that women have to try and speak in ways to please others instead of being able to speak how they wish.

The final point from the article that really stuck with me was in the conclusion. Our journalist from the beginning of this tale decided to stop going to a voice coach. She explained that "I have started thinking of voice almost as the way I think about outfits. If I'm going for a job interview I'm going to wear a different outfit than when I'm out with my friends...now I do think of it a little bit more as these two separate things, whereas before I had zero awareness of it. And I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing. I think it's just about wanting to change for yourself instead of feeling like you're being forced to change by external forces." Her way to deal with the negativity surrounding her voice was not to change it in all situations but instead to use different voices depending on the situation.

This opens up a whole can of worms that I wanted to ask you all about. What do you think of the idea of changing your voice to fit situations? Do you think that it is useful? Bad?

Furthermore, what do you think of the idea that society polices women's voices? Why does this happen? Do you think there is a way to change this in the future?

If you haven't, I highly recommend taking a look at the article as well.

Ideas to Be Thinking About

So what are we going to do with ourselves the rest of the semester, besides read some stuff and talk about it? I have always, with this class, made a point of doing a class project—interviewing people (check: did that), collecting data about some aspect of dialect, testing a theory—and I am loath to let that go, even in our diminished sequesterment.*

    

     * New word. You saw it here first, folks!

At our first Zoom session (which turned out to be fun, I thought), we talked about a few ideas for potential surveys (online, obviously, given the present circumstances). As I recall, these were as follows:

Pittsburghese — There are reports that Pittsburghese is experiencing considerable dialect swamping, and is beginning to fade in the speech of younger generations. Conversely, to what extent are incoming outsiders picking up aspects of Pittsburghese in their own speech as tokens of acculturation? Can we figure out a way to explore these questions?

Dialect & Gender — There are all kinds of ways in which our gender influences our speech. Reading up and focusing on some of those patterns, can we devise some kind of survey that would show this in action?

Language of Social Media — There is a lot of research on this of late, but I don't know what's in it. People would have to read into it and figure out how to do something with it. Could be very interesting...

Loss of Rural Vocabulary — A whole lexicon of older mostly rural expressions of Western Pennsylvania seem to be disappearing. The last time I taught this class we looked into some of this; there is a lot more to explore...

Personally, I think they all sound like fantastic research avenues. So why don't yinz-all think about them and decide which ones you think sound interesting to you, that we might like to work on as a class in the time we have left. Maybe we could even break into groups to tackle more than one of them...

Thoughts, anyone? (You can blog on these ideas yourselves, as well...)