You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

By Deborah Tannen, PhD

Originally published in 1995 by Virago

The book’s thesis is that, from childhood, boys and girls learn different approaches to language that result in communication problems when they get older. She calls these different approaches “gender-lects.”

For most women, Tannen says, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport, a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships. For most men, it is primarily a means to preserve independence and negotiate and maintain status in a hierarchical social order.

So, for example, men often dominate conversations, even where they know less about a subject than a female interlocutor. And women often listen more because they have been socialized to be accommodating.

These patterns mean that men are far more likely to interrupt another speaker and not take it personally when they are themselves interrupted, while women are more likely to finish each other’s sentences.

I thought Tannen’s most interesting point was that these patterns have paradoxical effects. Men use the language of conflict to create connections. Conversely, women can use the language of connection to create conflict.

More takeaways:

* Women try to be equal to each other; men try to one-up each other.

* Women judge how something impacts relationship symmetry; men judge how something impacts relationship asymmetry and hierarchy.

* Women favor rapport talk, which is about sharing personal information to create connection; men favor report talk, which is about sharing impersonal information to create connection.

* By understanding certain differences in how we speak, we can learn to better understand the other person’s “gender-lect.”

Critical Reviews 

“Deborah Tannen combines a novelist’s ear for the way people speak with a rare power of original analysis. It is this that makes her an extraordinary sociolinguist, and her book such a fascinating look at that crucial social cement, conversation.” (Oliver Sacks)
 
“[A] refreshing and readable account of the complexities of communication between men and women [with] vivid examples and lively prose.” (New York Times Book Review)
 
“Tannen has a marvelous ear for the way real people express themselves, and a scientist’s command of the inner structures of speech and human relationships…. A chatty, earnest, and endearing book that promises here-and-now rewards.” (Los Angeles Times)

“Utterly fascinating.” (San Francisco Chronicle)