To hate how women speak tentatively

[amillionnamechangeslater000]

I’ve noticed it on podcasts, Radio 4 and in real life. It seems like everyone has started to add a high intonation when they speak - so a statement sounds like a question.


So Aibu to hate this style of speaking?

[butterpuffed]

I've noticed both men and women using it , it seems to actually be a fashion ~ awful.
A bit like it seems to be a fad recently to miss out the 't' in words such as 'plenty' , 'thirty' etc. So annoying

[thecatsthecats]

I'm working with the new CFO of a multi million pound organisation. She's incredibly sharp, both on her own ground, and in appreciating what she needs to know about areas she doesn't have expertise in.

But Christ alive she puts herself across in an annoying way.

"Now it's probably just me being REALLY silly, but could we just look at the..."
"To my really simple mind, doesn't that mean..."

Grr. What's wrong with:

"I'm not sure about this. Can we look at x/can you explain what your intention is here?"
"I'd like to reduce this to the essential facts..."

Her girlish mannerisms actually remind me of how Dolores Umbridge was played in the HP films.

[Nearlyalmost50]

Also, some male professors do an excellent line in gruff, unapproachable barking at people. This is very convenient for them, as then all the students fill up the office hours of the nicer, more approachable, not scary female lecturer, doing the emotional labour of listening and supporting whilst the male professor cracks on with writing their career-enhancing papers.

[Jennyie1]

I've hated it since I started taking notice of people?!

I can't stand statements or opinions which begin with 'I think' either.

[SanityDecreasing]

It does really annoy me, but I can't say I haven't had to pull myself up on it

It's just so common now, that it's so easy to pick up. Same with the massive overuse of the word "like". Another I have to remind myself not to do! 🤦‍♀️

My 13 year old DD....well, I've given up. *All of her friends speak like that, constantly and I have to stop myself visibly wincing when they're all together.

I wouldn't say it's just a female thing though.

[C8H10N4O2]

From a man these messages were fine. Coming from me, they were not respectful enough apparently hmm

A female director complained that I was “treating her as an equal” by not saying “ if it is ok, and with your permission, we’d like to pull branch 241 ASAP please” she specified my messages were not deferential enough

Time to find a new job because the only way you are going to progress there is to internalise and become part of the problem like your director.

I do see this problem as having a simple answer but I can see that it isn't solved by women playing along to mitigate the shame of their mere presence.

I do believe that women in senior positions have a responsibility to coach juniors who do this and also support them when they are told to be more deferential.

[pandarific]

FFS, this is a really mean spirited thread. I probably come across as very tentative (despite my best efforts), but you know what? A lot of women have in the past been savagely bullied at school or at work, or both - it's a widespread issue.

It really pisses me off when people who haven't had these negative experiences and don't get that the after effects can be long lasting view themselves as superior - no, you've just been fortunate! Perhaps some empathy? And if you're frustrated by your amazing female colleagues being so tentative, perhaps offer some mentoring?

[BayLeaves]

I find this quite a mean and judgy thread TBH. I probably talk this way and use "like" a lot, but why should I force myself to become conscious of the way I speak and awkwardly have to change my tone? Because it doesn't sound "authoritative"? Why should I change to sound more authoritative. To me, intoning things this way means that you're open to having your opinion challenged and that's not a bad thing. Additionally, speech and language changes over time. If we didn't accept changes we would all be aiming to sound like 1950s BBC newsreaders.

Funny how it's always women who are told their tone isn't right. Maybe men should change their tone to sound less arrogant and more open to other opinions.

[Nearlyalmost50]

pandarific

I agree with you. I think criticizing womens' style of speech without considering why they speak like that, structurally, is a bit naive and rude, frankly.

If you have a career as a TV commentator, and have a more decisive speaking style, then perhaps some tips would be in order. But I can honestly say going on live TV as an 'expert' was one of the most intimidating and frightening experiences of my life. If I sounded a little unsure when I got there, well, thank goodness my friends and family weren't all lining up to point this out afterwards! I'm sure if I did it a lot, and had extensive training, then my default speech pattern, developed in a bullish and highly sexist academic department, might be more assertive. It is what it is though.

It is also interesting that when women do speak decisively, they are perceived as arrogant and biased- see Emily Maitlis for an example of this. Jeremy Paxman spoke rudely, directly and in an partisan way all the time on Newsnight, so does Andrew Neill, but they don't get 40,000 complaints they are biased and have to take a break to keep their job. In fact, interrupting and being rude was Jeremy's 'thing'.

[UntamedWisteria]

Yup.

Starting an email with "Just ..." is another one that annoys me.

[pigsDOfly]

I remember when this started and people were blaming Home and Away and Neighbours.

Yeah, my DD, now in her mid 30s used to watch the Australian soaps and she and all her school friends started talking like that. It was everywhere.

It certainly had nothing to do with tentative speech. It was copied by kids because it they thought copying the cool kids in the Australian soaps made them sound cool.

It's bloody irritating and not in the least engaging, on the contrary, every time I hear someone talking like that my mind tends to switch off from what they're saying because they sound so annoying.

[nettie434]

@BayLeaves

I find this quite a mean and judgy thread TBH. I probably talk this way and use "like" a lot, but why should I force myself to become conscious of the way I speak and awkwardly have to change my tone? Because it doesn't sound "authoritative"? Why should I change to sound more authoritative. To me, intoning things this way means that you're open to having your opinion challenged and that's not a bad thing. Additionally, speech and language changes over time. If we didn't accept changes we would all be aiming to sound like 1950s BBC newsreaders.

Funny how it's always women who are told their tone isn't right. Maybe men should change their tone to sound less arrogant and more open to other opinions.

Yes to men changing their tone! Younger men are more likely to talk this way, Bayleaves, which made me wonder if the people on this thread who didn't think there was a difference between men and women are younger.

I don't think the OP was just referring to upspeaking, I think it is also about the little phrases like 'could we just...' or 'this is probably really silly but...'

It's good to for us all to think about we come across and if speaking in a diffident unconfident way means other people have less respect for our views but equally there's a balance between doing this and policing an individuals own vocal style.

[corythatwas]

The problem with this kind of thread is it encourages us to focus on the way people speak, on their lack of confidence as the problem, rather than on their lack of power.

In my experience as a university lecturer, the high terminal rise is more prevalent among young working class women, whether because they do feel less confident or simply because they don't realise that what they hear all around them is supposed to be wrong.

Now encourage us to think of their inflection as the problem and you can see what that will do to the chances of young women from a working class background to get their views hear in the boardroom.

[corythatwas]

It's bloody irritating and not in the least engaging, on the contrary, every time I hear someone talking like that my mind tends to switch off from what they're saying because they sound so annoying.

This is the problem. Right here. Every month we have threads on MN telling us that phrases or inflections or ways of speech or baby names that are commonly used in other parts of the country or other demographics are wrong and irritating and means nobody can take you seriously.

Folks, if you have the attitude that you don't have to listen to what somebody from a different class or a different region has to say, then YOU ARE THE PROBLEM! CHANGE YOURSELVES! CHANGE ATTITUDES AMONG YOUR COLLEAGUES!

[SporadicNamechange]

Thing is, there's lots of research to show that when women mimic men in their assertiveness, they are condemned for it. So, it can't be as simple as mimic men's speech or men's email tone. Women are more likely to be judged harshly for this, as a couple of people on this thread have illustrated.

This has been my experience too. I am nicer to my students than male colleagues, but apparently my refusal to make myself sound unthreatening and a bit useless is unacceptable to them. It’s also unacceptable to several arsehole male colleagues, who expect some sort of deference from women.

I vividly remember doing a class with a male academic whose lectures were much, much less accessible than mine (peer review confirmed this). But the (predominantly female) students all crowed about how wonderful he was - so clever and brilliant and bollocks like that. But I was terrible apparently: I use ‘too many big words’, I’m horrible, aggressive, etc, etc. The same students highly rate female colleagues who purposefully come across as mumsy, exaggeratedly local (I’m not from round here but 95% of the students are), or even ditsy 🙄.

I’ve had several different colleagues peer review my teaching and I am none of the things the students claim. Two separate colleagues told me that they think the student reviews I receive are very heavily influenced by both sexism and prejudice against Scots (because everything I say it do is ‘aggressive’ apparently) and that’s reinforced by the extremely dodgy (and bullying) behaviour of several colleagues (the ones who do the unthreateningly mumsy thing in particular).

Any other women in the department who aren’t willing to pretend to be incompetent and unknowlegeable have the same issue. Although the accent thing makes it worse (and it’s even more infuriating when the same students adore a male colleague with a strong, and fairly stereotypical, Glasgow accent who is often aggressive in his manner and always lazy and disorganized). But anything other than simpering from me is unacceptably aggressive.

It’s awful, especially given that the cohort of students is almost 100% female. And no level of management has any desire to do anything to try to change their attitudes towards women’s speech and demeanor.

It’s even worse when I see young women in the class hiding their own competence and knowledge because they’ll be ostracized for not conforming to the model of acceptable feminine behaviour they strongly hold on to. Many of these young women have told me that they feel they can’t share ideas in class or try out ideas because of the atmosphere in the classroom. They will be marginalized for trying to use ‘big words’ or even for admitting to have read and understood the material. And I have no institutional support to try to change any of it.

The single worst thing is that a large number of the students want to go into teaching and other professions where these ideas about gender will be extremely damaging to the children they work with (of both sexes).

I’m not planning to continue in this job, as you can imagine. I’ve had enough.

[GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER]

@pigsDOfly, exactly.

I should imagine that anyone old enough to have had kids of Neighbours-addicted age when it was at its height of popularity, will agree. It simply wasn’t a thing you heard before.

[Neap]

Hear, hear, @SporadicNamechange. Good post.

[AriettyHomily]

The rising inflection became very very trendy amongst my group when we all went travelling in the early 90s. It died out though and now as the majority of us are professional women I really don't notice it. It doesn't happen in the grads that come through for employment either.

[PuntoEBasta]

YANBU but it's not new. It's a 'high-rising terminal'. There's a poem by a spoken word poet called Taylor Mali about it:

I watch a lot of quiz programmes and it is always really interesting to see which contestants answer with a declarative tone rather than a rising terminal. There is a bias on gender but it isn't universal.

[LightenUpSummer]

ostracized for not conforming to the model of acceptable feminine behaviour

This is it in a nutshell. I think it's cruel and lacking in intelligence to criticise women and girls for doing what we're shoehorned into. Bit of understanding please. We'll never fix the problem unless we understand it.

[puffinandkoala]

I think it's two different things - the rising inflection (which seems to have moved to the middle of sentences now) which both sexes do and the tentative thing, which women do because if they dare to be anything less than "gentle" they get accused of being abrasive and aggressive (whereas a man would be considered to be assertive).

[SporadicNamechange]

@LightenUpSummer There is often very little appetite to change any of this. It’s much easier just to demonise women who don’t conform.

[pigsDOfly]

corythatwas It's got absolutely nothing to do with class or where people grew up, certainly not in this country.

It's an affectation adopted, as I said in my pp, by young people who aped the speech of the Australian soaps because the thought it made them sound cool.

It was used by both males and females, and had nothing to do with females speaking with hesitance.

GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER Absolutely, never heard it before these soap became popular and then suddenly all the youngsters were speaking like that.

[JustHereWithMyPopcorn]

It's a young thing too. My 12yo DS does this because he watches a lot of american tv. We have many heated discussions..

[RiftGibbon]

It irritates me. I don't do it. I'm encouraging DC not to either but it's every presenter in any programme at the moment.
I've started to respond with, "that sounds like a question"