Despite the inroads made by women in the professions, the glass ceiling remains a persistent barrier to their career progression. Using a range of interactional sociolinguistic data this publication investigates the crucial role that gendered discourses play in perpetuating workplace gender inequalities.

Gendered Talk at Work examines how women and men negotiate their gender identities as well as their professional roles in everyday workplace communication. written accessibly by one of the field’s foremost researchers explores the ways in which gender contributes to the interpretation of meaning in workplace interaction uses original and insightfully analyzed data to focus on the ways in which both women and men draw on gendered discourse resources to enact a range of workplace roles illustrates how a qualitative analysis of workplace discourse can throw light on the many ways in which workplace discourse provides a resource for constructing gender identity as one component of our complex socio-cultural identity

This collection offers an essential introduction to the ways in which feminist linguistics and critical discourse analysis have contributed to our understanding of gender and sex. The contributors provide both a review of the literature, as well as an opportunity to follow the most recent debates in this area.

Employing a discourse analytical approach this book focuses on the under-researched strategy of humour to illustrate how discursive performances of leadership are influenced by gender and workplace culture. Far from being a superfluous strategy that distracts from business, humour performs a myriad of important functions in the workplace context.

Providing a unique insight into how gender is performed in contemporary high-tech work and introducing a creative and novel way of analyzing the fluidity and rigidity of gender at work through discourse analytic methods the author highlights how changes in the world of work interact with changes in gender relations.

Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand spent nearly four years (in cloth and paper) on The New York Times Best Seller list and has sold over a million and a half copies. Clearly, Tannen's insights into how and why women and men so often misunderstand each other when they talk has touched a nerve. For years a highly respected scholar in the field of linguistics, she has now become widely known for her work on how conversational style differences associated with gender affect relationships. Her life work has demonstrated how close and intelligent analysis of conversation can reveal the extraordinary complexities of social relationships--including relationships between men and women. Now, in Gender and Discourse, Tannen has gathered together six of her scholarly essays, including her newest and previously unpublished work in which language and gender are examined through the lens of "sex-class-linked" patterns, rather than "sex-linked" patterns. These essays provide a theoretical backdrop to her best-selling books--and an informative introduction which discusses her field of linguistics, describes the research methods she typically uses, and addresses the controversies surrounding her field as well as some misunderstandings of her work. (She argues, for instance, that her cultural approach to gender differences does not deny that men dominate women in society, nor does it ascribe gender differences to women's "essential nature.") The essays themselves cover a wide range of topics. In one, she analyzes a number of conversational strategies--such as interruption, topic raising, indirection, and silence--and shows that, contrary to much work on language and gender, no strategy exclusively expresses dominance or submissiveness in conversation--interruption (or overlap) can be supportive, silence and indirection can be used to control. It is the interactional context, the participants' individual styles, and the interaction of their styles, Tannen shows, that result in the balance of power. She also provides a fascinating analysis of four groups of males and females (second-, sixth-, and tenth-grade students, and twenty-five year olds) conversing with their best friends, and she includes an early article co-authored with Robin Lakoff that presents a theory of conversational strategy, illustrated by analysis of dialogue in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Readers interested in the theoretical framework behind Tannen's work will find this volume fascinating. It will be sure to interest anyone curious about the crucial yet often unnoticed role that language and gender play in our daily lives.

This book employs the image of “shrapnel,” bits of scattered metal that can hit purposeful targets or unwitting bystanders, to narrate the story of workplace power and gender discrimination. The project interweaves stories of gender shrapnel with an examination of national rhetoric surrounding business, education, and law to uncover underlying phenomena that contribute to discourse on privilege and gender in the academic workplace. Using concrete examples that serve as case studies for subsequent discussion of data about women in the workforce, language use and misuse, sexual harassment, silence and shutting up, and hiring, training, promotion, and the glass ceiling, Mayock explores the deeper implications of gender inequity in the workplace.

Written by leading researchers from four continents, this book offers a broad and contemporary assessment of the ways in which gender affects workplace communication and how this in turn influences people’s choices, training, opportunities and career development. A range of work situations are considered (including communication within the normal routine, in a crisis or under pressure, and during those occasions important for career development) and examples are sourced from a variety of contexts (including international business, leadership, service work, and computer-mediated communication). Gender and Communication at Work includes a diversity of theoretical perspectives in order to most successfully map the range of communication strategies, identities and roles which impact upon and are influenced by gender at work.

A timely work that reviews the phenomenon of gender and its many manifestations of equality. Well-suited for increasing awareness and justice in academic and professional environments, this collective work addresses long-standing and ongoing social problems such as discrimination, stereotyping, prejudice, as well as a plethora of societal and industry influences that sustain the trend of gender imbalance. Aiming to span a broad scope in time, backgrounds and implementation, this book presents a wide variety of topics, including a historical overview, contemporary gender-based Issues, gender approaches across the disciplines, and cultural influences. The reader is guaranteed to confront existing biases when digesting topics related to gender communication differences, stereotypes, tensions and resistances, assigned social roles, transgenderism, non-binary identities, tension fields between equality and equity, relational aggression, and more. A critical underlying aim of this book is to contribute constructively and progressively to the dialogue on the definition of gender, thus addressing an ongoing challenge for policy makers, organizational leaders, and scholars.