This week has all the usual topics and players with continuing bad news and a smattering of good news. Perhaps the most important discussion this week was about Matt Lauer’s questioning and interrupting of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in this week’s Commander in Chief forum. Eight questions about Clinton’s private email server while Secretary of State. Let’s see—where does that rank in the questions about foreign policy and war? And about being the Commander in Chief? And Lauer interrupted Clinton’s answers over and over. The good news here is that for once much of the media condemned Lauer’s performance in his role as one of the questioners in the forum. Reporters (and everyone else who watched or listened) condemned the behavior, a rare moment when people realized that Hillary Clinton was being treated quite differently than her opponent with the orange toupee.
As a linguist, I can tell you that the scholarly and empirical research on men and women in conversation show the same thing, over and over again. Though not enough research has yet been done on how this works out all the way across the gender spectrum, men interrupt women—no matter how you define interruptions—at a considerably higher rate than women interrupt men. Most of this research has been conducted on white, middle class speakers, and research into cross-sex conversations in the African American community indicates that the outcomes and interruptions may be quite different than the white, middle class version. But . . . male working class patients interrupt women physicians during office visits. Male students interrupt female instructors in conferences. Men in academic meetings interrupt women, even when women are the majority in the meeting. Corporate work meetings also show women being interrupted, silenced, ignored in various configurations. Linguists now observe that what is driving these male behaviors toward women in conversations is more a reflection of power dynamics than gender. But this week, for just a moment, a number of watchers and listeners recognized how the extraordinarily qualified woman speaker was treated by a male, sophomoric, talk show host.
On to the week’s news.