Women Talk Research Articles

Langage adressé au bébé et exploration visuelle chez le bébé de 4,5 mois : mise en évidence d’un effet de genre

Background & aimInfant directed speech (IDS) is a simplified form of language known to capture infant visual attention. IDS is an early form of communication to which infants are particularly sensitive beginning at birth and play an essential part in the acquisition of language and in the development of social cognition. The present research aims at determining whether an infant as young as 4.5months explores different face zones of a person talking to her when the form of speech employed is either IDS or adult directed speech (ADS). We wish to bring more insight in the relation between the way an adult talks to an infant and the infant's visual attention, such a relation being a central tenet to understanding early interactions. MethodsEighteen 4.5month-old infants were presented videos of a woman talking either IDS or ADS, each video played with and without soundtrack. The total time focused respectively on eye areas and mouth area was collected with an eye-tracking system (Tobii 2150). Results and conclusionResults showed evidence of more visual exploration when the soundtrack was played as opposed to silence while exploration focused more on the eye area. Moreover, interaction effects were observed involving a gender effect. These results raise the question of the importance of infant's gaze and attention directed to the face, and specifically to the eyes of the partner. Indeed, eyes of a talking face seem of great importance at 4.5months of age, i.e., long before an infant is known to be able to interpret a referential gaze. Our results also add to the gender effect differences found in early interactions between infant and social partners. A better understanding of what infant attention focuses on in a communication-oriented situation, including infant gender impact, would not only help to detect early parent-infant communication distortions but add to a more adapted and efficient clinical follow-up.

Performing identities: Women in rural–urban migration in contemporary China

This paper is centred on the process of identity and belonging negotiation of rural women in their migration to urban employment in contemporary China. Employing a unique mobile method, the author follows rural women’s migration by gathering data from both sending and receiving areas, and captures the dynamic and situated, fluid nature of rural migrant women’s identity deconstruction and reconstruction processes. The study reveals that rural migrant women readily depart from peasant identity, rejecting the identity of ‘dagongmei’, and at the same time draw up boundaries against other rural migrants in different contexts. The boundaries they draw, however, are not static, but are fluid and ever changing in different circumstances and contexts. Paradoxically, such boundaries serve to reinforce the differentiation among rural migrant women and undermine their solidarity.

So Many Ways to Love You/Self

Borders, prisons and social norms institute visible or invisible modes of surveillance and control to regulate female desires. Gender-segregated prison spaces, cultural codes of “honor” and the hostile border regulations operate in multiple ways to establish their control. Female desire is primarily seen in terms of the sexual threat that it poses and is often understood in that limited sense. Through an analysis of the narratives of young Bangladeshi women prisoners in two correctional homes in Kolkata, I argue that despite the restrictions and impediments posed by borders, prisons or social norms, female desires flourish in a multitude of forms which may not be explicitly sexual. This paper will illustrate the ways in which young Bangladeshi women negotiate, manipulate and resist both societal and institutional norms they encounter and get involved in relationships of “love.” It will mark the dynamic ways in which they, through their perceptions and expressions of love, challenge two intrinsically patriarchal power structures: first, the institutionalized, emotionally sanitized, gender-segregated space of the prison, and second, the heterosexual, monogamous, normative notion of love with sex and marriage as its telos. They do this subtly as well as overtly, in myriad ways by rejecting and more often than not adhering to feminine roles based on an understanding of their responsibilities as Bangladeshi women. Love enables them to preserve a sense of self as well as explore the possibility of a “new” self in a prison in a foreign land.

Self-esteem and Women's Performance in Mixed-Gender Negotiation

Past research shows gender stereotype threat effect negatively affects women's economic negotiation outcomes, but little is known about moderators of this effect. The present research investigated self-esteem (SE) level and social contingent self-esteem (SCSE) as potential buffers to the gender stereotype threat effect. Based on the contingencies of self-worth model (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001), we hypothesized that SE level interacts with SCSE to determine women's outcomes at the bargaining table such that high SE women with low SCSE do not confirm gender stereotypes and achieve higher performance in mixed-gender negotiations. Drawing on the integrated process model of stereotype threat effects (Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, 2008), we further hypothesized that anxiety mediates this interaction effect. Results from two experiments were generally consistent with our predictions. Our research highlights the importance of individual differences in SE level and SCSE, as well as anxiety, in understanding the stereotyp...

How Gujarati Hindu Migrant Women Negotiate Identity and Belonging within their Religious Community: An Ethnographic Study

This article examines the ways in which a group of Gujarati migrant women in Sydney, Australia, negotiate belonging within the context of their religious community or satsang. Using multi-sited ethnography in India and in Australia, the work interrogates the religious community as the institutional site in which boundaries of belonging and identity are delineated. It reveals that women negotiate belonging in the temple space around three primary areas: foodwork, bodily practices such as headcovering and information communication technologies or virtual space. Results indicate the ways in which women construct themselves as cultural gatekeepers around foodwork practices and the way in which headcovering becomes a site of contestation over claims of doctrinal or cultural authority. Finally, the study reveals the way in which women's participation in virtual religious space opens up possibilities for multi-layered ways of belonging and new ritual practices that challenge gendered norms.

Does consistency pay?The effects of information sequence and content on women's negotiation outcomes

Women are usually perceived as warm or competent, but rarely both. This research investigates how the sequence and content of warmth-relevant relational information and competence-relevant performa...

The Effects of Teaching Eng as a Profession on the Status of Palestinian-Israeli Women

In the Israeli society, English language is considered a prestigious language and a gateway to higher education [26]. The high status accorded to English acquisition by the Israeli community can lead to parental pressure for English instruction at home, and a willingness to pay extra for private lessons to improve proficiency [5]. In this article, I analyze the association between English teaching as a profession and the social status of female Palestinian-Israeli English teachers. In particular, I examine how these English teachers experience their social status in their work contexts and communities, and their profession’s relation to economic independence and professional development. The research sample was composed of 12 Palestinian-Israeli women who are English teachers at three schools in the Northern Triangle in Israel. The main tool used in this qualitative research was the semi-structured oral interview. By analyzing the women's talk, I found that being an English teacher played a significant role in raising the social status of the investigated teachers. Additionally, it helped them create a professional identity, and positively affected them economically and psychologically.

Navigating the Labyrinth: Examining the Importance of Context and Stereotypes in Gender Research

In this symposium, five papers explore the importance of context and/or stereotypes in explaining men and women’s organizational experiences. First, Fletcher and McGinn examine situational ambiguity as a driver of gender differences in dysfunctional competition. Across two experiments, the authors show that when signals are weak or ambiguous, or when there are high levels of social comparison, men and women differ in their propensity to engage in dysfunctional competition, a type of competition where an individual will sacrifice their interest to harm a competitor. Second, Martin, Phillips and Akinola show that that in situations where the importance of the task is ambiguous, women attach more importance and are less likely to delegate said task. Under situations where the task importance is unambiguous and clear, women and men do not differ in their propensity to delegate. Further, the authors show that regardless of the ambiguity of task importance, men and women have different emotional consequences to delegating, with women experiencing more guilt and requiring more trust in their employees. Third, Raz, Thomas-Hunt, Quental and James examine how lack of structural norms affect women’s reluctance to enter into compensation negotiations, showing that when norms to ambiguous the gender gap between men and women’s initiation of negotiation is much larger than when norms are unambiguous. Further, these authors explore the importance of social risk and stereotypes in the propensity to initiate negotiations. Fourth, Kennedy, Kray, and Van Zant examine how gender stereotypes affect the propensity to mislead women in negotiations. In three studies these authors show how stereotypes that women are not confident and are anxious in negotiations affect an individual’s likelihood to mislead and deceive women. Finally, Loyd, Kern and Gonzalez show that black females are buffered from the negative stereotypes, such as dishonest and unintelligent, often associated with black males. Overall, these five papers shed light on the importance of context and stereotypes in gender research, moving away from research on inherent and stable gender differences towards examining second-generation issues affecting women and men in the workplace. Getting What You Ask For: Peer Information & Authority Influence Men & Women's Negotiation Behavior Presenter: Kachelit Raz; U. of Virginia Presenter: Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt; U. of Virginia Presenter: Camilla Quental; Audencia Nantes School of Management Presenter: Erika H. James; U. of Virginia Gender Differences in Delegation: The Role of Guilt and Trust Presenter: Ashley E. Martin; Columbia Business School Presenter: Katherine W. Phillips; Columbia U. Presenter: Modupe Akinola; Columbia U. Winning at All Costs: Dysfunctional Competition and Gender Presenter: Pinar Onur Fletcher; Harvard U. Presenter: Kathleen L. McGinn; Harvard U.

The Curious Absence of Love Stories in Women's Talk

Sociological debate has dealt with love in a number of different ways. For some, love offers a unique opportunity; it is a path to salvation ( Jackson, 1993 ; Langford, 1999 ). Others, however, take a more sceptical approach to love in modern society: for Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995) love represents the path to extreme individualization, for Illouz (1997) it is ultimately underpinned by consumerism, and perhaps most extreme, for Bauman (2003) love has been destroyed. Giddens offers a slightly different (and more hopeful) perspective and suggests that with growing choice and freedom, love has become ‘confluent’ and temporary subject to individuals' needs ( Giddens, 1992 ). When adult women were asked about love and how they have experienced love in their own lives, however, few of these themes emerged. Instead many women found it difficult to talk about their feelings generally and love in particular. There was an absence of falling in love stories and rather, women explained that they ‘drifted’ into relationships, or they ‘just happened’. The discourses and languages that these women used to explain love and their relationships will be explored in this paper. Love was simultaneously loudly absent and quietly present.

Women in Negotiation: Effects of Gender and Power on Negotiation Behavior

AbstractResearch on gender and negotiation has shown that women are often left worse off at the negotiation table and tend to negotiate less favorable outcomes than men. These findings may be, in part, due to the socialization of men and women, which has resulted in a greater negotiation advantage for men than for women. It is, however, hypothesized that power affects men's and women's negotiation behavior in such a way that it positively influences women's negotiation behavior while men remain unaffected by it. In an experimental setting using a face‐to‐face distributive bargaining situation, participants were primed with the experience of having power and were subsequently asked to negotiate with an opponent about the asking price of a house. The results of this study show that women who were primed with the experience of having power made better first offers and negotiated better outcomes than women who were not. Men's first offers and negotiation outcomes turned out not to be affected by power. Moreover, results also show that power significantly reduced differences in negotiation outcomes between men and women. All in all, this study shows that power influences men's and women's behavior in negotiation differently.

Communication essentials for female executives to develop leadership presence: Getting beyond the barriers of understating accomplishment

Statistics about women's presence as CEOs, directors, and board members show relative stagnation over the last few years. Many theories exist to explain this problem, but there is a paucity of specific suggestions targeted at individuals seeking to rise to the top of their organizations. In this article we propose that changing the way women talk about accomplishments can improve leadership presence and aid in promotion. We analyzed video interviews of 20 men and 20 women in leadership roles at Fortune 50 companies. Since leaders will inevitably confront this when interviewing for promotions, we chose to focus on the question: “In your career, what are the accomplishments you are most proud of?” We analyzed content, syntax, gestures, and facial expressions, and identified significant differences in the way men and women talked about accomplishment. Based upon our research, we identify six communication essentials that can help women project confidence: (1) starting strong, (2) staying succinct, (3) dimensionalizing content, (4) owning voice, (5) controlling movement, and (6) projecting warmth.

Embodied Subjectivities: Nine Young Women Talking Dance

The purpose of this paper is to examine nine Australian young women's embodied experiences of dance. The young women were all amateur dancers involved in weekly jazz, tap, and ballet dance classes at the same dance studio. In this paper, embodiment is defined as multidimensional (Burkitt 1999). The authors explore the ways the corporeal and the discursive converage to make possible particular experiences in dance and particular gendered selves. The analysis highlights the dominance of traditional notions of femininity and beauty in shaping the embodied experiences of these young women dancers. This paper discusses the need for conceptualizing the body's role in the production of gendered selves. Teachers can encourage students to question and challenge the dominant gendered discourse, while also recognizing the importance of the bodily investments of individuals in particular gendered identities.

Something from Nothing:

The relentless negations in these lines—denials of action, thought, being, and feeling—emphasize the narrator’s lack of productive intellectual or social influence and his emotional void. Yet “nothing” takes on an allegorical force as it “cometh or gooth” and as the narrator describes his “felyng in nothyng.” This allegory illogically suggests that the Dreamer finds something—a feeling—in nothing, a paradoxical notion that anticipates a deep

Deviant Women: Transgressing Interactional Rules

Everyday conversation appears to proceed unproblematically: the rules of interaction are taken for granted and shared by participants. This paper examines data from same- and mixed-sex conversations which show that linguistic practices are constantly at play in interaction, asserting that there are rules and controlling transgressions from implicit norms. Covert features such as silence, interruption and overt criticism are revealed as powerful strategies for determining who will speak and to imply stylistic value. The paper discusses the enactment of micropolitical social practices in informal talk, and argues that these practices may function to maintain a dominant status quo. Some theories claim that the styles of talk of women and men differ, with women’s talk featuring shared floors and men’s sole-speaker floors. This stylistic difference has implications for the meanings of overlapping speech, with overlap being preferred in female, but not in male speech. The data show that transgressions of dominant discursive rules are negatively sanctioned, with censure resulting in silence or withdrawal from the speaking floor. The analysis and discussion draw on theories from linguistics, ethnomethodology and sociology, commenting on seminal work and ongoing debates and demonstrating the value of a critical interdisciplinary approach.

Ambivalent horizons: competing narratives of self in Irish women's memories of pre-marriage years post-war England.

Over the past-20-years research into the experiences of Irish female migrants in twentieth century Britain has been steadily accumulating. Based largely on the use of oral history, this work has been important in shedding light on various aspects of women's experiences, including how young women negotiated unfamiliar urban spaces and asserted an 'ethnic' identity in England. The dynamics shaping the re/construction of such experiences, and what they can tell us about the fashioning of gendered migrant selves, has, by contrast, received relatively little attention. Based on an in-depth analysis of the personal migration narratives of three women who migrated from southern Ireland to England between 1945-69, this article aims to provide insight into how migrants' early experiences of settlement in post-war England were conditioned by the consumption and internalization of a number of competing constructions of femininity circulating within British and Irish culture during the post-1945 period. While these constructions made available a number of different frameworks on which women could draw to order their experiences and fashion an identity, tensions within and between them could also create problems for the process of self-construction. As well as the particular circumstances of each individual's encounter with their new environment, the distinctive character of women's negotiation of these tensions alludes to the different ways women sought to construct a preferred version of their past in post-war England, raising questions about the ways past and present, public and private, interact in the production of migrant histories.

Family Planning Perspectives of Couples Affected by Sexual and Gender‐based Violence in Post‐conflict Democratic Republic of Congo

QuestionHow did the conflict in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) impact family planning perspectives among survivors of sexual violence and their partners?AimExamine access, knowledge, and utilization of family planning as well as attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that support and/or prevent family planning services among female survivors of sexual and gender‐based violence (SGBV) in rural DRC.BackgroundIn DRC, one‐third of women want to space their births. However, in conflict‐ridden eastern DRC contraceptive use is as low as 3%. This enormous, unmet need for family planning services strains already vulnerable families when economic resources are scarce and stability is tenuous. Developing effective programs to address unmet family planning need is critical for efforts to rebuild health, economic, and social supports in the DRC. At present, there is no information on how family planning within relationships is impacted by the health and social complexities of SGBV.MethodsMixed‐methods design using 31 surveys, 31 interviews, and 8 focus groups with a sample of 70 (36 men; 35 women) community members including 11 couples. Data were collected in April and July of 2012 and analyzed using quantitative description and thematic analysis.ResultsAnalysis is ongoing. Preliminary analyses suggest poor understanding, availability, and use of family planning methods, and strong themes about the impact of poverty on desired family size and the influence of male power and intimate partner violence on family planning.DiscussionFindings suggest the war's violence continues in couples today, negatively impacting access to and use of family planning. Efforts to improve women's negotiation skills with respect to family planning and dispel myths related to certain methods are critical features of any program to improve family planning use.

Eve's emancipation or lingering subordination to Adam?

PurposeThe current study aims to examine couples' conjoint negotiation with a third party, testing the effects of asymmetrical contextual ambiguity, gender stereotypes' priming and egalitarianism. It predicted differences in the processes of decision making between egalitarian and traditional couples, reflected in choices of female or male negotiator.Design/methodology/approachEgalitarianism levels were measured by the Altrocchi and Crosby Marriage Questionnaire. The asymmetrical contextual ambiguity was manipulated through two newly constructed negotiation cases – one feminine‐stereotyped and the other masculine‐stereotyped, based on Miles and LaSalle. Priming of gender stereotypes was manipulated using two passages inducing explicit or implicit priming, based on Kray, Galinsky and Thompson. Primary statistical analysis was χ2 test for equal proportions.FindingsThe hypotheses were by and large supported: as expected in all four experimental conditions, traditional couples chose men as their negotiator. By contrast, egalitarian couples tended to nominate their negotiator depending on the situation (feminine, masculine, and under implicit priming). In addition, under explicit priming their selection was in the predicted direction but not significant.Practical implicationsThis study provides insights with respect to effective ways to conduct conjoint negotiations. In addition, it indicates the need to enhance women's negotiation self‐efficacy, so that they can become more active in negotiation processes.Originality/valueThe current study explored real‐life couples' conjoint negotiation with a third party, rather than examining couples' internal negotiation processes or individuals' dyadic negotiation, which prevailed in extant research. Future research should adopt the focus on genuine couples' conjoint negotiation, employed in this study.

'The weekend starts here': young women, pop music television and identity

Central to the design of the project ‘A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947–1989’ was the incorporation of a rarely undertaken research method, one in which audience, textual and production research approaches are used in synergy. This progressive research approach has allowed interview data to direct our research route into the archives, and has created some surprising project findings. The academic field of gendered viewing preferences has historically been skewed by an over-investigation of genres such as soap opera and other dramas.1 This project's research, however, wanted to interrogate what constitutes television for women from industry, academic and audience perspectives. During a series of interviews conducted with women about their memories of watching television, designed to uncover which programmes women felt had particularly resonated with them during the period of interest, many of the programmes spoken about have not been the ones we might expect or categorize as ‘television for women’. The interviews have revealed, for instance, complex and passionate relationships formed around pop music programming during women's negotiation of their adolescent years. This has been surprisingly consistent across women of different generations.

Love hurts: Cheating and violence in teenage women's talk of boyfriends

abstract Teenage love is embedded in ideologies of gender and routine practices of subordination which produce gender inequalities. This Perspective examines the importance the local constructions of gender and the ideologies of love as expressed by young coloured working-class teenage women in Wentworth. Focus group interviews with six participants aged 16–17 years old, and from a predominantly coloured community in Durban, demonstrated the ways in which love and desire interlock with social circumstances. From the data it was evident that whilst there are young women who are complicit in accepting gender inequalities, there is also an emergence of young coloured teenagers with agency, rejecting male dominance. Teenage girls who reject abusive partners, exercise agency and choice, even though they run the risk of losing their boyfriends in the process. There is a need in the South African context to study young teenage women, in specific contexts to understand their relationships, loves, struggles and their vulnerabilities and thus through research, empower young women to resist the gender inequalities that lead to violence and HIV infection. This Perspective seeks to highlight the importance of research in working-class contexts with young women to inform gender violence intervention programmes.

Strategies for taming a Swahili husband: Zanzibari women's talk about love in Islamic marriages

abstract This Article uses Swahili audio recordings of marital instruction and interviews with Zanzibari Muslim women to investigate their conception of ‘love’ within Islamic marriages. When seen through a language socialisation framework, their talk illustrates how Swahili women socialise one another into not only particular ways of using language within marriage but also a particular discourse about the ideal means to mitigate their precarious status within the institution of marriage. A focus on grammatical subjecthood in the verb -penda, ‘love’, reveals that women idealise speaking and behaving in ways that will engender husbandly love, thereby protecting themselves from the financial risks of divorce. Discourse about their own loving feelings occurs only in constructed dialogue, suggesting their greater concern with saying “I love you” than with experiencing marital love. These findings contradict Swahili stereotypes about women as more emotional than men, and suggest that they are strategically agentive.