Why What Women Talk About Matters
I’m a conversations person. A big conversations person. I like having conversations that stir my soul or my intellect. The surest way I will notice and remember someone is from the quality of my conversation with them. The period of my life when I felt an acute lack of intellectual conversations, I took to drinking at social gatherings. For twenty seven years of my life, I did not taste alcohol. And all it took to convert me were endless droll conversations about the latest sales and whose husband preferred eating what for dinner.
The alcohol made it all better. I could escape from these conversations scot-free and crack jokes instead. I could gleefully extract myself from the female-only table and interact with the men discussing work or sports, and not be called ‘one of those girls’. I am aware that all of this might sound terribly suburban, maybe even outdated. It did happen to me in a small, constricted city. So I imagined that when I moved to the capital of the country, things might get better. Much to my disappointment, there was no significant improvement.
I then told myself that I just needed to find the right forum. Despite the fact that I worked in a company with many female employees, I never managed to have a single conversation with any woman that left me feeling inspired or stimulated. So I joined an organization designed only for working women, an events-led LinkedIn of sorts. I was excited to attend a networking event in my city and took a colleague along. What I witnessed there was a cocktail-making workshop, a session with a skin and beauty expert, and an open-floor networking opportunity. I remember my dismay over it all (only mildly mitigated by the free kombucha I got to take home). I have nothing against bartending or aestheticians, but why a female leadership event should include these was beyond me.
Once again, I am aware that a lot of the aforementioned evidence is purely anecdotal. I have had some great first conversations with very inspiring women as well, but they have been so rare that they’ve always taken me by surprise. The problem, I’ve gathered, is what women talk about collectively.
Being inducted into a ‘girl gang’ happens organically for many girls. Not so much for me. I’ve seen it happen countless times - women I’ve met an equal number of times will disband into smaller groups and have inside jokes that I’m not privy to, despite the fact that I may have had some great one on one interactions with them. I won’t lie, it is not a great feeling. For a very long time now, I’ve questioned what might be wrong with me. Am I just incapable of making girl friends? But then I think about my closest friends and they are all girls, just not a gang of girls. The induction into a girl gang relies heavily on small talk and rituals of affirmation. Talking about clothes, boys or gossip puts other women at ease. Complimenting each other’s skin or outfit lowers walls. Women have been conditioned to view other women as threats, and only when you indulge in the ‘group dynamics’ of a girl gang will they trust you enough to not treat you as an outsider.
There simply isn’t enough research on this, but fortunately Deborah Tannen has been researching this for a while now. In her article on The Power of Talk for The Harvard Business Review, she points out-
The research of sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists observing American children at play has shown that, although both girls and boys find ways of creating rapport and negotiating status, girls tend to learn conversational rituals that focus on the rapport dimension of relationships whereas boys tend to learn rituals that focus on the status dimension.
Girls tend to play with a single best friend or in small groups, and they spend a lot of time talking. They use language to negotiate how close they are; for example, the girl you tell your secrets to becomes your best friend. Girls learn to downplay ways in which one is better than the others and to emphasize ways in which they are all the same. From childhood, most girls learn that sounding too sure of themselves will make them unpopular with their peers—although nobody really takes such modesty literally. A group of girls will ostracize a girl who calls attention to her own superiority and criticize her by saying, “She thinks she’s something”; and a girl who tells others what to do is called “bossy.” Thus girls learn to talk in ways that balance their own needs with those of others—to save face for one another in the broadest sense of the term.
I now fully understand why I’ve always felt uncomfortable when a boy complimented me in front of girls - it immediately created a divide between the other girls and me and ensured I’d remain an outsider. I’m always trying to fit in with the other girls and displaying signs of being better or smarter in any way can be very alienating. Little wonder then, that like many other girls, I learnt to downplay all that set me apart. And also little surprise that I mostly feel at ease only around women who seem smarter or more accomplished than me. I don’t have to pretend or keep up an act. This also means that I am much more comfortable around men.
In the same article, Professor Tannen continues -
Boys tend to play very differently. They usually play in larger groups in which more boys can be included, but not everyone is treated as an equal. Boys with high status in their group are expected to emphasize rather than downplay their status, and usually one or several boys will be seen as the leader or leaders. Boys generally don’t accuse one another of being bossy, because the leader is expected to tell lower-status boys what to do. Boys learn to use language to negotiate their status in the group by displaying their abilities and knowledge, and by challenging others and resisting challenges. Giving orders is one way of getting and keeping the high-status role. Another is taking center stage by telling stories or jokes.
I studied in an all-girls school, and for the first 16 years of my life, I was blissfully unaware of how gender plays a role in how we communicate. I was the alpha in school - the popular girl participating in every activity, effortlessly getting good scores, making people laugh, representing my school. I had girls wanting to be my friends, and it was all effortless and genuine. We were all on an equal footing and so we could all be ourselves. Cut to the real world where various dynamics exist - how women talk to men, how women talk to women, how women talk to subordinates, how women talk to superiors, how women talk to their partner’s families and so on.
How women talk is less about the woman and more about who they interact with.
I suddenly faced an identity crisis so severe, I never found my way back. From flourishing in school, I had to suddenly adjust my edges to fit into moulds. Women reacted differently to me, some even hated me because men gave me attention. Most men felt emasculated when I indulged in an intellectual conversation that usurped their authority in a group. At work, male subordinates found it difficult to take ‘orders’ from me and so my superiors would sometimes suggest I balance my seniority with ‘likeability’. Wherever I went, I constantly felt like I had to sense a response before I chose what to say. So I reduced my being. I spoke less, my voice became softer, my posture droopy and I tried to steer myself away from leadership - just happy to be left alone to my own devices. Cracking jokes and being awkward became an intrinsic part of my personality in a bid to seem less intimidating and more likeable.
Sophia Ripley’s 1841 article ‘Woman’ urged readers to consider women as intellectual beings rather than through the lens of an idealistic, unrealistic ‘muse’. The fact that this view is held even almost two centuries later is testament to how important feminism still is.
Many times, I am told that this is all in my head. That it is wrong to generalize such things based on gender. And maybe things really are changing. I do see women calling men out for sexism, unafraid to voice their opinions. I now sometimes see some men shrinking in fear of offending a woman (not ideal, but a topic for later). However, within ‘girl gangs’, I am inclined to say that things function pretty much the same.
Outliers exist when generalizations are made, and thank god for that. But generalizations can be an important wake up call.
How women talk has developed over years of conditioning, and unless we realize what is wrong with that, we will continue to live by the same narrative. How women talk has also impacted what they talk about. Maybe what women talk about can impact how they talk. I yearn to enter a party and see a circle of women discuss politics, business, philosophy, even fashion intellectually. I yearn to hear opinions and to feel stimulated in these conversations. By cultivating the nature of our conversations, we can very directly impact the nature of our articulation, our tone of voice and our confidence. I yearn to be part of a world where I can go back to flying instead of having to shrink myself and my personality - a querencia of sorts.
Margaret Fuller started the Boston Conversations for women to discuss topics like art, politics and science. Fuller and many others like her believed that the way to emancipate women was through education. The same rings true till this date.