Last week, I read two provocative articles about women and speech. One concerned how women talk, the other how women are talked about.
The first article, by Rachel Thompson, on Mashable, noted the stream of criticism for women’s use of so-called uptalk, vocal fry, and filler words. Various linguists consulted by Thompson pointed out that men exhibit these same tendencies but receive far less criticism for them. The most surprising statistic, for me, was the the “generation specific” finding that, in women’s voices from the 1990s compared with those from 1945, the “fundamental frequency” of women’s voices “dropped by 23 Hz” over 50 years. To my ear, older women’s voices are now higher and lighter than they were in my mother’s generation, simply because so few of us smoke. But the criticisms -- of “shrillness,” “Valley Girl” talk, and the like -- are too familiar. I can attest that in professional meetings where I am the only woman, I sometimes catch myself speaking more slowly and at a lower pitch than I do when in a meeting with other women.
I will also, if the meeting is informal, use the expression you guys to refer to the (male) others in the room. As Allan Metcalf observed just a few weeks ago, you guys is replacing y’all in some regions of the country. But last week, Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic wrote of efforts to replace you guys with y’all as a less gender-specific way to refer to a group of people. As Pinsker writes, “Guys is an easy-going way to address a group of people, but to many, it’s a symbol of exclusion — a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves ‘guys.’” Women use the phrase among themselves almost as much as men use it, so it’s fair to claim, as some of Pinsker’s contacts do, that the term has evolved to be gender-neutral. Certainly, in my regular tennis matches with other women, I’ll hear “You guys!” fairly frequently. Other previously male terms have evolved to include women -- actor, for example, or fellow. In 1980, when I was the Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, I was frequently teased for being a “fellowess.” I doubt that would happen today.
Others, though, still find guys exclusionary, especially in male-heavy professions and customer-facing industries. Without having formed a firm opinion, I do find that I avoid the term with mixed or women-only groups. I would never use it with my students, for instance. Lacking a plural second person, English doesn’t have a ready gender-neutral equivalent, but I find myself using folks, people, andall (that’s in you all, not y’all, which to me still sounds distinctively Southern). When I have an exclusively female group of students, as I did last spring, I tend to say you ladies, for which I apparently developed something of a reputation. Here again, the alternatives are less than satisfactory: you gals sounds a bit 1950s or Western; you girls seems condescending; you women, while the choice of one of my tennis partners, to me carries a ring equivalent to you men, drawing more attention to womanliness or manliness than the situation warrants.
When it comes to gender, we live in an imperfect world, armed with an incomplete vocabulary and prone to prejudicial judgments. For feminists, the instinct is to correct the blinkered views of the other. When people remark of female candidates for office that they’re shouting or peppering their speech with “like,” we want them to consider how critical they would be if the candidate were a male with a baritone. When they jocularly call out you guys to a mixed or female group, we want to remind them that we are not, strictly speaking, guys. But if we do so, we open ourselves to a charge of policing speech, of which women have been the victims for centuries. Let’s go a little easier on ourselves by proposing alternatives, imperfect though they may also be. When he says that Candidate X talks like a Valley Girl, let’s point out her refreshing candor or the practicality of her policy position. And when they say, “Hey, you guys, let’s get going,” let’s propose that the ladies -- or gals, or women, or double-X chromosomes -- get going, too.
