Gendered Work: Ideologies and Stereotypes in Action

Abstract

In Chapter 2, it was pointed out that stereotypically gendered speech styles are part of the overarching discourse of gender difference. Within this, hegemonic discourses of femininity and masculinity dictate which speech styles are deemed as more appropriate for women and men to use. In reality, there is much evidence of women and men managers using speech styles stereotypically associated with the other gender, and vice versa, as demonstrated in the previous two chapters. With the linguistic variables chosen to analyse stereotypically feminine and masculine speech styles in this study, unlike the older studies highlighted in Chapter 2, there was no evidence of the dominant speech norms in the workplace being masculine norms. The fine-grained, CofP analyses of managerial speech styles has emphasized the complexities involved in the strategies that women and men managers use to enact their workplace identities, depending upon a whole range of contextual factors including the relative power, status and role responsibility that is enacted between participants.