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

De-Gendering Gendered Occupations brings together contributions from researchers on language and gender studies and workplace discourse to unpack and challenge hegemonic gendered norms encoded in what are traditionally considered female occupations. The volume integrates a range of theoretical frameworks, including conversation analysis, pragmatics, and interactional sociolinguistics, to analyse data from such professions as primary education, healthcare, and speech and language therapy across various geographic contexts. Through this lens, the first part of the book examines men’s linguistic practices with the second part offering a comparative analysis of 'male' and 'female' discourse. The settings discussed here allow readers to gain insights into the ways in which cultural, professional, and gendered identity intersect for practitioners in these professions and in turn, future implications for discourse around gendered professions more generally. This book will be key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, gender studies, cultural studies, and professional discourse.

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.

This book examines the professional discourses produced in women’s media in Malaysia and the subject positions that they make available for career women. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis, critical stylistics and feminist conversation analysis, it identifies a range of gendered discourses around employment and motherhood that are underpinned by postfeminism and neoliberal feminism. Through close linguistic analysis of magazine and newspaper articles and radio talk, the study reveals that these discourses substitute balance, individual success, self-transformation and positive feelings for structural change, and entrench the very issues hindering gender workplace equality. Chapters discuss topics such as sexism, work-family balance, extensive and intensive mothering, breadwinning, gender stereotypes, beauty work, ‘synthetic sisterhood’, media practices and gender equality policies. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of language and gender, discourse analysis, and media, communication and cultural studies as well as policy-makers, media practitioners and feminist activists.

"De-gendering Gendered Occupations brings together contributions from researchers on language and gender studies and workplace discourse to unpack and challenge hegemonic gendered norms encoded in what have been traditionally considered "female" occupations in which men are the minority. The volume integrates a range of theoretical frameworks, including conversation analysis, pragmatics, and interactional sociolinguistics, toward analyzing data from such professions as primary education, healthcare, and speech and language therapy across various geographic contexts. Through this lens, the first part of the book examines men's linguistic practices with the second part offering a comparative analysis of "male" and "female" discourse. The settings discussed here offer researchers the opportunity to explore the ways in which cultural, professional, and gendered identity intersect for practitioners in these professions and in turn, future implications for discourse around gendered professions more generally. This book will be key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, gender studies, cultural studies, and professional discourse"--

The first collection to bring together well-known scholars writing from feminist perspectives within Critical Discourse Analysis. The theoretical structure of CDA is illustrated with empirical research from a range of locations (from Europe to Asia; the USA to Australasia) and domains (from parliament to the classroom; the media to 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.

The chapters in this book illustrate a range of cutting edge research in language and gender studies, with contributions from a number of internationally recognised experts. The three themes, femininity, feminism and gendered discourse are central to research in language and gender, and the book thus makes a valuable contribution to a number of current debates. Femininity comprises a central aspect of gender performance and the process of “gendering” individuals is on-going and unavoidable. For many people, the word “femininity” has associations with “frilly pink party dresses,” with demureness, deference, and lack of power and influence. The first section of this book demonstrates some alternative conceptions of femininity, and a range of ways in which femininity is performed in different contexts and cultures. The analyses illustrate that we are all continually performing aspects of femininity (and masculinity) in flexible, dynamic, ambiguous, predictable and unpredictable ways. Language and gender research has a long tradition of engagement with the political, and specifically with feminism and feminist goals. The chapters in the second section of this book demonstrate the value of identifying gendered patterns in order to challenge their potentially repressive effects in social interaction in a range of spheres. The researchers analyse contemporary international evidence of sexism in language use, including material from Japanese spam emails expressing sexual desire, and from media reporting on male and female candidates in the 2007 French elections. The final section of this book focuses on the different ways in which we negotiate our gender through discourse. Gender is just one of many facets of our intrinsically hybridized social identities. Nevertheless, it is a very significant facet, a salient dimension in everyday life, with a pervasive social influence on everything we do and say. Interaction is typically viewed through “gendered” spectacles much of the time. The chapters in the third section focus in detail on diverse ways in which gender is constructed through discourse, examining the interaction between individual agency and the larger constraining social structures, including socio-cultural norms, within which that agency is enacted. Finally, the different contributions in this book represent research from a multiplicity of geographic and cultural backgrounds, supporting efforts to internationalise language and gender research, and to raise awareness of empirical studies undertaken in a wide range of linguistic and cultural contexts.