Gender and language
You can't see people's faces on the net, so women are not able to use that particular ability. What you can see is their words, so the relationship between language use and gender is more important. People use words differently for many reasons, and each of us can quickly adapt our style of speaking - those registers I described in the first chapter - to the social context and the audience. To a friend, I might say, "How about lunch tomorrow?" To a professional colleague, I might say instead, "Are you available for a lunch meeting tomorrow?" thereby embedding a hint that I would like to discuss professional issues. To my daughter, "Let's grab some Chinese food," would be appropriate. Though the context is probably the main ingredient that determines the kind of language all of us use, gender may play some role. The research is not consistent, but a few small differences seem to reappear in many of the studies.
For example, in some contexts men generally talk longer than women do, and women tend to use more verbal fillers - relatively meaningless words or phrases to fill a silence, such as you know. Women tend to use more intensifies, as well, with words such as so, awfully, quite, or really. Hedges and qualifiers that soften the statement in some way are also somewhat more common in women's speech. Phrases like, "It seems to me that..." or, "Perhaps it is..." are more reluctant and less definitive compared to, "It is the case that..." or, "Obviously...".
Women ask more questions in conversation and show more agreement with the partner than men generally do. Women also tend to use more justifiers in their speech, in which they make a statement and then follow it up with a reason. Compare "We should do it this way," to "We should do it this way because I think it is the fairest approach." The overall impression from these differences is that in some circumstances women may be using speech in more submissive and hesitant ways, and also in styles that emphasize the relational aspects of the social environment rather than a task-oriented approach.
A study that involved face-to-face conversations between same-sex or mixed-sex pairs illustrates both that there appear to be slight differences in speech patterns, but also that people adapt, depending on who they are talking to. Each of the conversational pairs were given five minutes to discuss a burning issue about their university's financial crisis, while their conversations were videotaped. The tapes were transcribed and coded for various speech events, and the data were analyzed according to the genders of the subject and the conversational partner.
Regardless of who they were talking with, the women used more justifiers and intensifies than the men, and they also expressed more agreement with their partners. Men used more vocalized pauses such as ahhhh, errrr, or ummmm. Interruptions and conversational overlaps showed some interesting differences, depending on whether the pairs were same or mixed-sex. An interruption was defined as simultaneous speech in which a listener speaks at a point that was not a possible completion point in the speaker's utterance, while an overlap is simultaneous speech that occurs at a point that is more likely to be a transition or ending point. Both of these were higher in the mixed-sex pairs, perhaps because the partners were somewhat more involved in the discussion.