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Peter Honey

Peter Honey

28 Jun 2011 | 10:41

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I was fascinated to read about research, conducted by Dr Judith Baxter of Aston University, into the linguistic differences between male and female leaders. The research found that women were four times more likely than men to be self-deprecating and speak indirectly or apologetically when broaching tricky subjects in confrontational settings. Apparently, women more often than their male colleagues say things like, ‘I’m probably speaking out of turn, but...’, ‘Sorry to cut across you like that, but...’, ‘Sorry, I know I’m talking too much, but...’.

These examples remind me of an exasperated (male) director in a board meeting who once snapped, ‘Everything before ‘but’ is bullshit’.

All this is rather sad. Having monitored countless meetings of senior managers (admittedly with mostly male participants) I have always enjoyed the odd bit of self-deprecation. Indeed, in my experience, contributions that start apologetically, ‘I may have got the wrong end of the stick, but...’, ‘This may be a silly question, but...’, ‘I may not have all the background on this, but...’, invariably finish up being the really telling, insightful points. But I can quite see that women in a man’s world (only 12.2% of FTSE 100 directors in the UK are women) risk being perceived as weak and submissive when they use such language.

People behaving submissively tend to ramble, use qualifying phrases such as ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’, ‘only an opinion’, use fillers such as ‘you know’, ‘sort of’, and expressions that make it easy for people to ignore them, such as ‘it’s not really important’, or ‘it doesn’t really matter’. By contrast, people behaving assertively tend to make ‘I’ statements that are brief and to the point, distinguish clearly between fact and opinion, and look for ways to resolve problems, with questions such as ‘How can we sort that?’ or ‘What do you suggest?’

There is, however, a snag; behaviour is always open to interpretation and when women behave assertively, men are likely to perceive it as aggressive!
 
 

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