Gender Bias in Social Marking

 Women and Men both notice lots of small differences amongst themselves, but humans naturally see more differences in groups they belong to  than those they don’t. I feel like the claim Deborah Tannen makes in “There is No Unmarked Woman” doesn’t accurately capture this nuance.

Although I disagree with Tannen’s claim, I agree with several of her points. For example her argument on honorifics does raise a valid concern. The word preceding a women’s last name does reveal far more information than that of a man’s, and resultantly can lead to unwarranted judgement. It’s a good example of how linguistics can mark Women similar to endings like “-ette” and “-ess”. These endings portray women’s roles as more trivial than that of Men and demonstrates how misogyny slips into our everyday language without many of us realizing.

However, claiming that there is “no unmarked woman” while simultaneously suggesting that men are unmarked seems hypocritical and oversimplifies how social marking works. It ignores all the subtle ways men mark each other constantly. Men judge one another for each other’s clothes, shoes, hair, jobs and even the way they speak/body language. What may seem to an outsider like a sea of navy and gray suits, offers to those within the group a multitude of signals to judge one another through. The cut of the suits, whether or not it was tailored, the number of buttons, the brand, the material, the pattern of the shirt underneath it, the way the shoulders sit, the length of the cuffs, and even the type of shoe all offer information. Beyond just clothes, hair, even within the same hairstyle, signals how much attention a man pays to his appearance through product use, hair length and even the quality of the haircut. Additionally, the design of a watch, the brand of a briefcase, and creases in a shirt all indicate differences in taste,wealth and professionalism.

To an outsider who isn’t familiar with all these conventions such as someone new to the corporate/academic setting or someone who’s simply focused more on women’s fashion their entire lives it can seem identical. But in reality, it reflects a lack of familiarity rather than a lack of marking. Men might not see all the marks that women notice, and women might not see all the marks men notice but that doesn’t mean that either group is unmarked.

In conclusion, instead of claiming that women are always marked and men are not, it’s more accurate to say that each gender has their own code. Psychology backs this up. Social psychologists describe the idea of “outgroup homogeneity” or the idea that we see all people in other groups as the same. This idea has often been used to explain racist stereotypes like “all people of xyz race look the same” but it can be applied here as well. Explaining why people are more likely to notice differences in their own gender than across it. A study by Laurie A. Rudman and Stephanie A. Goodwin. suggests that women tend to have a stronger unconscious preference for their own gender than men do, implying that women may also pay more attention to differences amongst themselves as a group. This contributes to the conception that women are more marked than men but is perception rather than fact. Tannen is right in highlighting the linguistic differences that reinforce misogyny, but claiming that women are uniquely marked while men do not ignore the complexities of the topic and human bias. We are all marked just not in ways immediately visible to outsiders