Gender differences in conversational rituals in a Philippine banking institution

• Main Author: Yunzal, Eduardo J., Jr.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2001
• Subjects: Conversation; Sex differences; Speech; Language and Literacy Education
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/2553
• Institution: De La Salle University

This study investigates the claimed differences between the speech of males and females in terms of the following conversational rituals: 1) aggrandizing 2) apologizing 3) asking questions 4) interrupting and 5) praising.The participants were limited to employees of a commercial bank particularly the officers and staff (i.e., Rank and File, henceforth R&F) of the Operations Supervision Division (OSD) which has an equal number of male and female employees (17 and 19, respectively). Since the study is about language differences between the genders, the recordings were generally categorized into two, namely: all-male recordings and all-female recordings. However, to further gain insights on the subject, mixed-gender conversations were also recorded.Participant R&F employees (both male and female), had age ranged of from 25 to 30. They were all analysts (operations, systems and methods), had technical job grade level (highest R&F level), and most of the male R&F employees were married (7 out of 11) while less than half of the female R&F (5 out of 12) were married. For officers, the males ranged in ages of from 40 to 45, while the females, from 30 to 35. For the female employees, who were all married, 4 were section heads and 3 were unit units. Among the male officers, there was an equal number of single and married employees (3 each).The participants regularly eat their lunches together, thus no pre-arranging of time was made to record the conversations. Conversations were then, relaxed and spontaneous. To answer the problem how freguently Filipino males and females used the conversational rituals in focus and to check whether a certain gender used one conversational ritual more frequently than the other gender, the Chi-square Test of K Proportions was used to determine if there were significant differences between pairs or among groups.The results showed that generally, there was a significant difference between the males and the females in their use of the conversational rituals in focus. This general statement, should be qualified further as it is true only in the context of same-gender conversations where the males were found to use more aggrandizing and interrupting statements and the females were found to ask questions and praise more the males. Alternatively, there was not much significant difference between the two during mixed-gender conversations. Only one ritual, i.e., asking questions was the difference between genders found to be significant. Results of the study presented the females as asking more questions than the men during mixed-gender talk.Another conclusion drawn from this study is that qualitative differences also existed in some of the conversational rituals in focus. In particular, the author was able to categorize the conversational rituals of aggrandizing, apologizing and asking questions.Finally, the study concluded that communicative styles are not speech habits or styles associated with a particular gender. Rather, these speech patterns are products of the activities the people are engaged in and not inherent in the participants particularly in their gender.