Pamela Fishman’s Theory, Experiment and Results

Pamela Fishman conducted an experiment and involved listening to fifty-two hours of pre-recorded conversations between young American couples. Five out of the six subjects were attending graduate school; all subjects were either feminists or sympathetic to the women’s movement, were white, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Fishman listened to recordings and concentrated on two characteristics common in women’s dialect, including tag questions for example ”you know?”

Fishman begins by examining the use of tag questions being asked and states that women frequently use tag questions ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘couldn’t we?’ following a thought or suggestion. For females questions are an effective method of beginning and maintaining conversations with males. Fishman argues that women use questions to gain conversational power rather than from lack of conversational awareness. She claims that questioning is required for females when speaking with males; men often do not respond to a declarative statement or will only respond minimally.

Fishman also analyses the frequent use of the phrase ”you know” used by women. ”You know” is an attention-getting device to discover if the conversational partner is listening. When ”you know” is combined with a pause, she realized that the woman is inviting the listener to respond. When little or no response is heard from the male the pause is internalized by the speaker and she will continue the conversation. With her study she found that women in her study used four times as many yes/no and tag questions as the men. But she was adamant that this was not because women were more uncertain and tentative as Lakoff suggested but because women are the ones generally trying to keep the conversation going. Fishman therefore concludes again that women’s style of communicating is not from lack of social training, but to the inferior social position of women.

Pamela's theory states that women use more questions than men in mix sex conversations. In her study of 3 couples, women asked 2.5 times as many questions as the men. She states that lack of communication is one of the most frequent given reasons for the breakdown of marriage. In her study women asked 260 out of a total of 370 questions.