Gender and Sexuality

Smith: Everyone should stop interrupting women

In a recent New York Times series focusing on women at work, Sheryl Sandberg and University of Pennsylvania professor Adam Grant co-authored an essay about how men and women are equally likely to cut short a woman in conversation.  We are all equally guilty of silencing half of our population, and this has larger consequences than expected.

Knowing this, everyone should encourage women to speak up and discourage those who discredit women’s input in the workplace.  Women’s talents must be utilized and speaking over them only limits the diversity of ideas in a group.

Even when meetings have equal representations of men and women, that doesn’t matter if only half the room is talking. Ideas that could improve a company go unspoken, over the fear that speaking equates to aggression. Time and time again, women worry that if they take over the conversation they will be seen as too assertive and will leave coworkers uttering the dreaded word: “bossy.”

And there’s good reason for this concern. A 2011 study by Cornell University found “a female CEO who talked disproportionately longer than others was rated as significantly less competent and less suitable for leadership than a male CEO who was reported as speaking for the same amount.” Yikes. To add insult to injury, women were also exhibiting this backlash on other women when rating.

This idea shows that women are still not used to seeing other women in command. If more women are bosses, then it won’t seem as strange to see a woman speak for long periods of time. It will then ease the assumption that talkative women are aggressive. Companies must work toward promoting more women into positions of power, and women cannot fear interruption.



In the same Cornell study, researchers found that women who spoke the least were considered equally as competent and deserving as a man who spoke the most.  Silence should not mean competence for women; just as much as verbosity should not mean competence for men.

Male dominance in the workplace is no new discovery, but women are inching their way into top companies. Just 20 years ago there were no women executives in Fortune 500 companies, now there are 24 according to Pew Research.  Even though this is only a 4.8 percent increase, some men may take a big gulp and wonder what this increase means for them.  After all, if women are moving in, where are men to go?  This mentality then plays into daily interactions, especially in conversations. This isn’t to say all men are interrupting women with aims to squash their aspirations.

According to Georgetown University professor of linguistics Deborah Tannen, conversations are seen differently based on gender roles, as she stated in an interview with The Economist. In her book “You Just Don’t Understand,” she explains that from birth boys and girls are socialized to see conversation differently. Boys see conversation as an opportunity to achieve power; girls see it as a way to draw connections.

If men and women grow up with different ideas on how to approach conversation, it’s no wonder women are frequently interrupted. Men tend to control the conversation through silencing their rival, it just so happens that now women are a part of the dialogue. Since most women do not use conversation as a tool for power, this makes the interruption easier for men. But this is no excuse to silence a gender.

Instead, we should be aware of this inconsistency in discussions and work toward achieving equal time listening and speaking. If more people strive to listen — and more women speak up — just think of the amazing ideas that can flow to create a better workplace.

Julia Smith is a junior newspaper and online journalism and sociology dual major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @jcsmith711.





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