My “try to blog rather than write long Twitter threads” rule means I’m literally putting this together on the tube, so bear with me!
So, every so often there’s a spate of new articles about how (as a general rule) women tend to speak differently to men; in short, women tend to use more “hedging”/”filler” words, and we tend to apologise more. There’s then a whole conversation about why that is and how women are socialised to be less confident, which is covered far more eloquently elsewhere, but I wanted to talk about the direction this conversation inevitably seems to take.
It always seems to end up at “Women: have you tried just changing everything about how you speak?” Just magically undo years of conditioning and stop saying “I think”! Don’t say sorry, say thank you! (I couldn’t get that one off my social media for months…) “Like” and “just” make you look weak now, so maybe it’s best not to talk at all in case you hesitate?
It’s well-meaning, but in practice it’s just yet another thing to make women more insecure and hesitant to speak up. Inevitably, nitpicking at women for signs of finding “confident” speaking difficult is going to target those who find it more difficult to begin with – marginalised women, neurodivergent women, young women, or pretty much anyone who might not be 100% certain of their own views or fluent in giving them verbally… that is, basically everyone. The end result is things like journalists mocking a 17-year-old for saying “um” a lot when asked for political views on the spot. And then getting lots of likes and retweets because that tone is apparently more important than what she was actually saying. Or, to give a less serious example, that one time a tutor spent quite some time ranting about how other women should speak more confidently in response to me saying “sorry” mid-sentence. Y’know, that vocal tic I have. (Funnily enough, I wasn’t so vocal after that…) That might not be what you think you mean by “just say thank you instead of sorry” but it’s what ends up happening in practice.
Besides, why are filler and “I think” and “just” so bad? Why would it “make other women look weak” unless we decide that not necessarily having instant natural confidence in speaking (again, that’s lots of marginalised people) is inherently weak? Besides, there are lots of specific uses for so-called “feminine” language that often get overlooked. Apologising is good sometimes. Maybe men – and all of us!! – should apologise more.
And maybe we should stop policing women’s language and start actually listening to the content of what we have to say.
Mind the Flap 