Gender & Belonging, Part 1: Women & Belonging

Today I read a Slate article about the pervasive influence Great Lakes cities are having on American vowel sounds. As a Hoosier transplant in Chicago, I recognized the dialects referred to in the piece. I hear them every time I turn on the five o’clock news and hear the voice of a Chicago police officer, government official, or any lawyer involved in the Drew Peterson trial.  But one line at the end of the article piqued my curiosity about dialect adoption:

“While our skin color is often the first and most obvious indicator of our membership in a social group, our dialect is the first outward signal that we consciously influence.”

I started hearing the Chicago dialect regularly when I went to college at a school where 80% of the student body was from the suburbs of the city.  Mid-freshman year, a few of my friends from Indiana and downstate Illinois made an empirical observation: girls from the suburbs tended to be the ones with the strongest Northern accents, not the boys.  (Folks raised in the city most often had an accent.)  

More empirics: my father-in-law and my previous boss were born and raised in the same part of New York City during mid century.  But my boss, a woman, is the one who still calls coffee “cwoh-fee.”  And a dear girlfriend of mine who moved to Texas a few years ago now says “y’all” more than her native-born Texan husband.  It’s adorable.

It's not just me noticing this gender discrepancy.  According to this New York Times article, women do adapt to linguistic changes quickly:

“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people,” said Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, “and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.” Less clear is why. Some linguists suggest that women are more sensitive to social interactions and hence more likely to adopt subtle vocal cues.”

So, does A + B = C : If our dialects are our “first outward symbols” of belonging to a group, and if women adapt more quickly to dialects, then do women have a stronger need to “belong” than men?

From an evolutionary perspective, we all need to feel like we belong to a group.  Banding together and the comfortable feelings of kinship that accompany collective identity have helped ensure the survival of our species.  But maybe women value belonging differently than men.  University of Michigan professor, Bonnie Hagerty, studied college students’ feelings of belonging and concluded that, “being able to say ‘I belong’ is important to the healthy psychological functioning of men, but it is vital to women’s.” She further noted that

“Those who didn’t feel they belonged were more likely to experience depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicidal thoughts and psychiatric treatment. They also were less likely to be involved in community activities. Women, however, experienced the effects of belonging or non-belonging more acutely than men.”

Aside from my empirical dialect theory, plenty of evidence supports this idea that women value belonging to a group more than men:

• Women are more likely to be religious than men.  According to the US Religious Landscape Survey published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Women in several Christian traditions are more likely than men to attend religious services at least once a week...”
• Women spend more time on social networking sites like Facebook.  ComScore, a digital marketing company, reported that as of last year, “In North America and Europe, women spent an average of nearly two hours (30 percent) more than men on social networking sites in October.”
• Can I see a show of hands of women who often act as the social coordinators of their relationship, meaning you organize the get-togethers with friends, you throw and attend birthday parties, and you remind your partners to send appropriately-timed greeting cards?  Oh, is that almost all of you?  I thought so.  The handwriting on the outside of my birthday card envelopes is always from my mom, aunts, or grandma.  
• Women are held / women hold themselves to easily definable and highly visible standards of belonging. The cosmetics, weight loss, and fashion industries form a multi-billion dollar beauty industry that profits from our insecurities about not fitting in.  Men are subject to these pressures. But with push-up bras, bronzers, and diet pills, women undoubtedly bear a disproportionate burden of this industry’s influence.  

Dr. Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University summarized women’s need for belonging in an address he made in 2007.  Referencing a Psychology Bulletin article written by S.E. Cross and L. Madsen, he said,

“Men think of themselves based on their unusual traits that set them apart from others, while women’s self-concepts feature things that connect them to others.” (emphasis mine)

So, perhaps women do have a stronger need to belong than men. We plan parties and send birthday cards because we crave deep, meaningful relationships with our friends and loved ones.  In Baumeister’s words, “women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships [while] men specialize in the larger group.”  

He further notes that social orientation towards the larger group can foster competition for dominance within it: “In large groups, getting to the top can be crucial. The male preference for dominance hierarchies, and the ambitious striving to get to the top, likewise reflect an orientation toward the large group...”

History aside, these conclusions should have some important implications for women’s participation in halls of power, shouldn’t it?  Putting my international relations education to the side and ignoring the “Self” and “Other” concepts ringing loudly between my ears, I can’t help but wonder: If women really do have a stronger need for belonging to a group, whereas men tend to fight for dominance within it, could women perhaps be ideal world leaders?  If women value relational intimacy, might they be able to forge political relationships better than their male counterparts?  

Our current political paradigm has men at the helm.  Even with all our world troubles, I’m going to give men a solid B+  in running things over the past few millennia because I’m starting to feel kinda bad for them.  As I’ll explore in Parts 2 and 3, men’s large-group social orientation comes with big rewards, but even bigger costs.