Gender and Politeness challenges the notion that women are necessarily always more polite than men as much of the language and gender literature claims. Sara Mills discusses the complex relations ...between gender and politeness and argues that although there are circumstances when women speakers, drawing on stereotypes of femininity to guide their behaviour, will appear to be acting in a more polite way than men, there are many circumstances where women will act just as impolitely as men. The book aims to show that politeness and impoliteness are in essence judgements about another's interventions in an interaction and about that person as whole, and are not simple classifications of particular types of speech. Drawing on the notion of community of practice Mills examines the way that speakers negotiate with what they perceive to be gendered stereotypes circulating within their particular group.
Motivated by the lack of scholarly understanding of the substantial gender difference in attitudes toward the use of military force, Richard C. Eichenberg has mined a massive data set of public ...opinion surveys to draw new and important conclusions. By analyzing hundreds of such surveys across more than sixty countries,Gender, War, and World Orderoffers researchers raw data, multiple hypotheses, and three major findings.
Eichenberg poses three questions of the data: Are there significant differences in the opinions of men and women on issues of national security? What differences can be discerned across issues, culture, and time? And what are the theoretical and political implications of these attitudinal differences? Within this framework,Gender, War, and World Ordercompares gender difference on military power, balance of power, alliances, international institutions, the acceptability of war, defense spending, defense/welfare compromises, and torture. Eichenberg concludes that the centrality of military force, violence, and war is the single most important variable affecting gender difference; that the magnitude of gender difference on security issues correlates with the economic development and level of gender equality in a society; and that the country with the most consistent gender polarization across the widest range of issues is the United States.
Conversation analysts have begun to challenge long-cherished assumptions about the relationship between gender and language, asking new questions about the interactional study of gender and providing ...fresh insights into the ways it may be studied empirically. Drawing on a lively set of audio- and video-recorded materials of real-life interactions, including domestic telephone calls, children's play, mediation sessions, police-suspect interviews, psychiatric assessments and calls to telephone helplines, this volume is the first to showcase the latest thinking and cutting-edge research of an international group of scholars working on topics at the intersection of gender and conversation analysis. Theoretically, it pushes forward the boundaries of our understanding of the relationship between conversation and gender, charting new and exciting territory. Methodologically, it offers readers a clear, practical understanding of how to analyse gender using conversation analysis, by presenting detailed demonstrations of this method in use.
Age is by far the most underdeveloped of the sociolinguistic variables in terms of research literature. To-date, research on age has been patchy and has generally focused on the early life-stages ...such as childhood and adolescence, ignoring, for the most part, healthy adulthood as a stage worthy of scrutiny. This book examines the discourse of adulthood and accounts for sociolinguistic variation, with regards to age and gender, through the exploration of a 90,000 word age-and gender-differentiated spoken corpus of Irish English. The book explores both the distribution and use of a number of high frequency pragmatic features of spoken discourse that appear as key items in the corpus. Part 1 of the book provides an introduction, a theoretical overview of age as a sociolinguistic variable and a description on how to compile a small spoken corpus for sociolinguistic research. Part 2 consists of five chapters which investigate and explore key features such as hedges, vague category markers, intensifiers, boosters and high-frequent items of taboo language in relation to the variables, age and gender. The book is of interest to undergraduates or postgraduates taking formal courses in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, pragmatics or discourse analysis. It is also of interest to students and researchers interested in using corpus linguistics in sociolinguistic research.
Despite the growing number of meta-analyses published on the subject of workplace mistreatment and the expectation that women and racial minorities are mistreated more frequently than men and Whites, ...the degree of subgroup differences in perceived workplace mistreatment is unknown. To address this gap in the literature, we meta-analyzed the magnitude of sex and race differences in perceptions of workplace mistreatment (e.g., harassment, discrimination, bullying, incivility). Results indicate that women perceive more sex-based mistreatment (i.e., mistreatment that explicitly targets a person's sex) in the workplace than men (δ = .46; k = 43), whereas women and men report comparable perceptions of all other forms of mistreatment (δ = .02; k = 300). Similarly, although racial minorities perceive more race-based mistreatment (i.e., mistreatment that explicitly targets a person's race) in the workplace than Whites (δ = .71; k = 18), results indicate smaller race differences in all other forms of workplace mistreatment (δ = .10; k = 61). Results also indicate that sex and race differences have mostly decreased over time, although for some forms of mistreatment, subgroup differences have increased over time. We conclude by offering explanations for the observed subgroup differences in workplace mistreatment and outline directions for future research.
Challenging current theories about gender and achievement, this book assesses the issues at stake and analyses the policy drives and changing perceptions of gender on which the 'gender and ...achievement' debates are based.
This new topical book guides the reader through the different theories and approaches, drawing together and reviewing work on gender and educational performance. The authors also highlight the continuing problems experienced by girls in terms of achievement and classroom interaction. The subjects covered include:
perspectives on gender and achievement
the construction of gender and achievement in education policy
evaluating boys’ underachievement
the future for boys and girls?
raising achievement: 'What works in the classroom?'
Teachers, education professionals and students engaged in teacher training will welcome the editors' objective yet critical expertise.
'This book leaves readers with the assertion that a commitment to diminishing gender differences is closely aligned to facilitating achievement for both boys and girls in schools. In this sense, it raises important questions about the processes of degendering and regendering that need to occur in order to address the limits imposed by the remasculinization of schooling that are engendered by the forces of neo-liberalism and their legitimation through educational policy.'
- Wayne Martino , Faculty of Education, The University of Western Ontario,Canada
'Francis and Skelton provide an excellent overview of the various theories and explanatory frameworks that have been mobilized for making sense of gender differences in achievement.' - Wayne Martino, Faculty of Education, The University of Western Ontario,Canada
The BBC Loneliness Experiment provided a unique opportunity to examine differences in the experience of lonelines across cultures, age, and gender, and the interaction between these factors. Using ...those data, we analysed the frequency of loneliness reported by 46,054 participants aged 16–99 years, living across 237 countries, islands, and territories, representing the full range of individualism-collectivism cultures, as defined by Hofstede (1997). Findings showed that loneliness increased with individualism, decreased with age, and was greater in men than in women. We also found that age, gender, and culture interacted to predict loneliness, although those interactions did not qualify the main effects, and simply accentuated them. We found the most vulnerable to loneliness were younger men living in individualistic cultures.
•Younger people reported more loneliness than the middle-aged.•The middle-aged reported more loneliness than older people.•Men reported more loneliness than women.•People in individualistic (vs. collectivist) countries reported more loneliness.•Age, gender, and culture interacted to predict loneliness.
Although large international studies have found consistent patterns of sex differences in personality traits among adults (i.e., women scoring higher on most facets), less is known about ...cross-cultural sex differences in adolescent personality and the role of culture and age in shaping them. The present study examines the NEO Personality Inventory-3 (McCrae, Costa, & Martin, 2005) informant ratings of adolescents from 23 cultures (N = 4,850), and investigates culture and age as sources of variability in sex differences of adolescents' personality. The effect for Neuroticism (with females scoring higher than males) begins to take on its adult form around age 14. Girls score higher on Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness at all ages between 12 and 17 years. A more complex pattern emerges for Extraversion and Agreeableness, although by age 17, sex differences for these traits are highly similar to those observed in adulthood. Cross-sectional data suggest that (a) with advancing age, sex differences found in adolescents increasingly converge toward adult patterns with respect to both direction and magnitude; (b) girls display sex-typed personality traits at an earlier age than boys; and (c) the emergence of sex differences was similar across cultures. Practical implications of the present findings are discussed.
Age effects on cognitive functioning are well-documented, but effects of sex on trajectories of cognitive aging are less clear. We examined cognitive ability across a variety of measures for 1,065 to ...2,127 participants (mean baseline age 64.1 to 69.7 years) from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging who were repeatedly tested over a mean follow-up interval of 3.0 to 9.0 years with a mean of 2.3 to 4.4 assessments. Memory and other cognitive tests were administered at each visit, assessing mental status, verbal learning and memory, figural memory, language, attention, perceptuomotor speed and integration, executive function, and visuospatial ability. Importantly, participants free from cognitive impairment at all time points were used in the analyses. Results showed that for all tests, higher age at baseline was significantly associated with lower scores, and performance declined over time. In addition, advancing age was associated with accelerated longitudinal declines in performance (trend for mental status). After adjusting for age, education, and race, sex differences were observed across most tests of specific cognitive abilities examined. At baseline, males outperformed females on the 2 tasks of visuospatial ability, and females outperformed males in most other tests of cognition. Sex differences in cognitive change over time indicated steeper rates of decline for men on measures of mental status, perceptuomotor speed and integration, and visuospatial ability, but no measures on which women showed significantly steeper declines. Our results highlight greater resilience to age-related cognitive decline in older women compared with men.
Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In ...this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (
N
= 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development-including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth-were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men's personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.
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