Article: Biases in Interpersonal Communication: How Engineering Students Perceive Gender Typical Speech Acts in Teamwork
Our study was inspired by a large body of research finding that women, despite relatively high GPAs, leave engineering programs at higher rates than men. Although collaborative projects are often proposed as solutions to this attrition problem on the assumption, our own prior research suggests that team projects may often do more harm than good (Wolfe and Alexander, 2005).
While previous research has looked at some of the major problems women encounter on teams, we chose to look at perceptions of small, everyday exchanges in order to understand how basic assumptions about what is considered “normal” discourse influence women’s team experiences. We chose to focus on everyday exchanges because we believe that individuals may have more opportunity and ability to influence small-scale interactions than they do with larger and more visible expressions of prejudice.
Research Questions
Our study asks two basic questions:
(1) Are there social penalties for using female-typical speech patterns in engineering settings?
(2) Which is more influential in determining how a speaker is perceived: the type of speech (i.e., how a statement is phrased) or the gender of the speaker?
The answers to these questions clearly have implications for those who might advise female students trying to adapt to the highly masculine culture of an engineering department.
Methodology
We surveyed 522 undergraduates, both in engineering and other disciplines, about their perceptions of six short transcripts showing student team interactions. Each transcript showed a member of a team complaining about some minor aspect of the project or class. We focused on complaints because these are common interactions, open to interpretation, and often associated with women in our culture. Half of the transcripts showed complaints that exhibit masculine communication styles (e.g., self-promotion, direct criticism) and half showed more feminine styles (e.g., self-belittlement, indirect criticism). In addition, we created two versions of the survey in which the genders in the transcripts were flipped: thus, half of the surveys associated the name “John” with the first transcript while the other half used “Jessica.” This manipulation allowed us to see if the gender of the speaker rather the actual words spoken influenced respondents’ perceptions.
Major Findings
Male engineering undergraduates were more likely than other groups (including engineering women and non-engineering men) to draw negative conclusions about speakers who engaged in self-belittling behavior like admitting to having difficulty with an assignment. Engineering men were more likely than others to perceive self-belittling speakers as incapable, whiners, and insecure. This trend was particularly pronounced when the topic was on technological issues.
Engineering men’s impatience with speakers who admitted vulnerabilities extended to cases where the self-belittlement appeared to be strategic—such as conceding one’s own weaknesses in order to help a teammate “save face” or using an “I-statement” to soften criticism. This trend was most pronounced among students majoring in Mechanical and Computer Engineering and least present in Bioengineering and Industrial Engineering, both disciplines with comparatively high levels of female enrollment.
The good news in our findings is that while male engineering students were less tolerant than others of female-typical speech styles, they were just as intolerant when the speaker was male as when it was female. In other words, changing the gender of a name associated with a particular speech act did not influence how it was perceived. Thus, this study suggests that women have some control over perceptions—something as simple as curbing tendencies to admit weaknesses can benefit them.
We also found that while engineering men stood out in their perceptions of certain female-typical complaints, other groups found the more male-typical complaints troublesome. Across the board, survey respondents seemed most bothered by speech acts that showed aggressive self-promotion.
Recommendations:
Based on this research, engineering educators might coach female students to avoid self-belittling discourse and teach all students to avoid aggressive displays of self-promotion. Such coaching might not only help women and other “at risk” groups fit into an engineering community, but could also improve the interpersonal skills of all engineering students.
Future research might look at whether faculty exhibit similar prejudices to the male engineering undergraduates we studied here or the effect of speech styles on high stakes discourse, such as grade complaints or allegations of harassment. In our own research, we plan to examine the double-bind that many women face in engineering settings: there are many environmental factors in engineering departments that compel women to complain; yet there may be negative consequences for expressing these complaints. We are interested in how successful female engineers negotiate this complicated terrain.
Acknowledgment:
This research is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. HRD-0225186.
Citation:
Wolfe, Joanna, and Kara Alexander. 2005. The computer expert in a mixed-gendered collaborative writing group. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 19 (2):135-170.
Author 1: Joanna Wolfe; [email protected]
Author 2: Elizabeth Powell; [email protected]
Article Link: http://www.asee.org/jee