Language, Sex, And Power: Women In The Workplace By R. Koonce

After reading the article "Language, sex, and power: Women & men in the workplace" by R. Koonce, I can relate to Socio-linguist Deborah Tannen. I completely agree with the fact that women are treated much differently in the workplace regardless of their status. I also believe that there are many times where a woman will do the exact same job as a man but will receive half of the recognition for it. As Professor Tannen states in the article, " Men tend to view conversations as negotiations in which they try to achieve status or gain independance." Being a man myself, I can attest to that being a very real fact. More often times than not, men are fixated on image or their ego. So much so that they tend to lack the appropriate communication skills that are needed in order to sucessfully communicate with the opposite sex effectively. On the other side of this, women are much more intuitive and more emotionally connected. Even though women can have an agressive side to them, most people, including myself tend to associate a women with kindness, warmth, and affection. Maybe it has something to do with learning these atributes from the first woman I

Personally, I was always inclined to want to perform better while employed by a female because I always felt that their general communication style was much more geared toward the individual employee and a happy employee wants to work hard. On the flip side of that, I did notice that the women employers needed to work much harder than most male employers. I never really understood this until I saw it firsthand, but as per our society, in order to be sucessful it is almost an expectation to have a certain behaviour pattern and more often, men tend to exibit those behaviours. As Professor Tannen said "Women either have to change their behaviour or the people who decide the promotions need to change their