Are Women Losing Ground During the Pandemic? The Dynamics Behind Who's Talking

photo credit: Chris Montgomery, via Unsplash

Often, we see anonymous tallies from the GA Tally app submitted with generic labels like “leadership meeting” and “team training”, which we assume are tallies created to track the talk time of internal discussions using the app’s Time Who’s Talking feature. Most of these tallies show men dominating the conversations.

We see more attention being paid to the diversity of who is on stage or in meetings than we did a few years ago, but who is actually talking, steering the conversation, and getting their perspectives heard beyond simply being present matters just as much. What we are seeing from GA Tally results tells us that there is work yet to be done.

There are plenty of studies that show the depth of the disparity: From government to the corporate world to the Supreme Court, women speak less and are interrupted more. I’m sure most GenderAvengers know that anecdotally, but there’s plenty of data out there to validate our experience.

As we wrap up GenderAvenger’s Who’s Talking Month, let’s look at the gender dynamics at play when it comes to who gets the most words in.

What’s up with Chatty Cathy?

photo credit: anne dunne [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via Flickr

Mattel’s Chatty Cathy doll went out of production in 1965, yet the label persists to this day as a way to name people who talk a lot. But is there any substance to the perception that women talk far more than men? The answer is yes, but only in certain settings.

Women tend to talk more than men in personal settings and about personal topics. When it comes to the public dialog and work settings, the opposite is true. A woman who is seen as talkative with friends may clam up in a management meeting.

The perception of women as chatty in meetings, despite being far from accurate, creates a no-win situation. Georgetown professor Deborah Tannen, who has been researching this very topic for years, has a name for such a conundrum: the “double bind”:

“If they [women] talk in ways associated with authority, they can be seen as too aggressive, and subject to the damning labels so readily applied to them. But if they don’t — if they hold back in these and other ways — they risk being underestimated.”

Amazingly, despite speaking less in these settings in general, the perception remains that women speak far more than they actually do. GenderAvenger Deena Baikowitz recently found that while she thought women talked more at a comedy event, men actually talked 14 minutes more than the women. Tally your next meeting, and you might be surprised by the results.

If there is any hope that the era of Zoom calls will change this, let me be the bearer of bad news. According to Tannen, digital platforms compound the problem. Beyond the absence of physical and verbal cues that we would normally see in person, there are gendered differences in communication style which are even more evident online. Women take longer pauses and take up less verbal space (see the “double bind”) while men speak louder, longer, and with fewer pauses, which brings us to interrupting…

Manterrupting Is Real

According to the Chicago Tribune, “sociologists Don Zimmerman and Candace West recorded and analyzed public conversations between two people: 10 between two men, 10 between two women and 11 between a man and a woman. In the same-sex groups, a total of seven interruptions happened. In the male/female group, there were 48 interruptions. And 46 of them were a man interrupting a woman.”

A study conducted by The George Washington revealed similar findings, showing that men were 33% more likely to interject in conversation with a woman versus another man.

Tannen says that men tend to be more sensitive to power dynamics while women tend to be more sensitive to rapport dynamics, which means they tend to read situations differently from each other, “affect[ing] who gets heard and who gets credit”. Given the difference in communication objectives and approaches, women will continue to be at a disadvantage in meetings until we change how meetings are run and learn to respect a broader range of communication styles.

The trends we are seeing play out across the public dialog are disturbing at best as we see women lose important ground by getting even less talk time as we move to virtual meetings and events during the pandemic. It’s time we all pay more attention to who is talking, document our findings with the GA Tally, and make this serious imbalance known.

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Note: You can share your GA Tally anonymously. We know a lot of folks are already keeping track of meetings with the GA Tally but not sharing the results on social media, perhaps because they don't want to publicly embarrass colleagues. Please consider hitting that “submit anonymously” button on your tally so we can post them for you without any identifying information.