A study by Alice Deakins analyzed the topics that women and men talk about. Deakins did what is called an eavesdropping study: While seated alone in a dining room where bank officers had lunch, she noted what people at adjacent tables were talking about. This was not a situation where the men were executives and the women their wives and secretaries. The men and women in Deakins’s study were all bank officers, meeting as equals at work.
Deakins found that when there were no women present, the men talked mostly about business and never about people, not even people at work. Their next most often discussed topic was food. Another common topic was sports and recreation.
When women talked alone, their most frequent topic was people-not people at work so much as friends, children, and partners in personal relationships. The women discussed business next, and third, health, which included weight control.
When women and men got together, they tended to avoid the topics that each group liked best and settle on topics of interest to both. But in discussing those topics, they followed the style of the men alone. They talked about food the way men did, focusing on the food they were eating and about restaurants rather than diet and health. They talked about recreation the way men did, focusing on sports and vacations rather than exercising for diet or health, as the women did when they were alone. And they talked about housing in the way men did, focusing on location, property values, and commuting time, rather than the way women did, focusing on the interiors of houses (for example, layout and insulation) and what goes on among people inside houses (for example, finding cleaning help).
-Deborah Tannen
Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
