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And just hazarding a guess, I suspect women transfer out of the group at the first opportunity.
Why would you guess that?
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I've definitely witnessed this, but I think these are two separate phenomena of "interruption". The COI refers to a case where I interrupt because I understand and I don't require additional elaboration. The way I've often seen women interrupted is more like the interrupter wasn't really listening to the speaker at all and is just arbitrarily taking control of the conversation.
I'd read your point as splitting hairs. In either case, the interruption has happened because of the belief that the speaker is not contributing new, valuable information to the conversation.
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And just hazarding a guess, I suspect women transfer out of the group at the first opportunity.
Is there any reason to think women are less likely to be interrupters than men? I'm thinking of this in the context of my mother, who is let's say a well-established interrupter.
I try to be less aggressive about it in other social settings. I currently attend public meetings and my tendency to interject definitely stands out.
I work at finding good openings to make my point, reminding myself that I'm not the only one with something intelligent to say, reminding myself that there will be other opportunities to make a point, etc.
Not everything needs to be said right here, right now. That's not even effective communication in many cases.
It's possible family members get interrupted more by female members if that's the only safe outlet some women can find. Sexism is alive and well and significantly impacts communication in myriad ways.
Both are annoying, but people who complete others’ sentences are IMO worse: it’s a way of showing that you don’t care what the other person thinks, especially when the interrupter guesses wrong and the speaker has to out-talk them in order to get their actual words in.
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So when those people are supposed to express their position? Prepared statement is another way to say that some thinking was put into it vs. just blurting out the first thing that comes into mind. So, the former is rude while the latter is respectful?
A prepared statement may or may not be well thought out, but even if it is, ignoring the current context and not directly addressing the other party's arguments or concerns means you're hijacking the thread of conversation and implicitly dismissing the other party's statements.
I wonder whether/when we would see meeting software including "karma" feature so people could just "-1" and move forward without wasting time/effort, though "-1"ing say your manager, even if anonymously ... :)
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Is there any reason to think women are less likely to be interrupters than men? I'm thinking of this in the context of my mother, who is let's say a well-established interrupter.
The research on the subject goes back 50 years to the 1970s and is essentially considered open and shut. As a rule of thumb, men will interrupt women 3x as much as women will interrupt men. You can Google and read dozens of studies over decades all repeatedly confirming it in various cultures, countries, and jobs. It applies to women Supreme Court justices and to women janitors. FWIW, instead of the confrontational "…
To be clear, I'm talking about men-interrupting-men-and-women-because-they-are-interrupters vs women-interrupting-men-and-women-because-they-are-interrupters, and not men-interrupting-women-because-they-are-sexist. The context of the article is the former, clearly.
Also, I don't consider "is there any reason to think" to be confrontational.
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Why would you guess that?
Because license to interrupt often gets applied unequally WRT gender. Smart women go where their career isn’t impacted by boorish behavior.
But there’s obviously a big difference between interrupting someone in the middle of a large formal work meeting in front of an assortment of colleagues vs. interrupting someone in the middle of a small collaborative technical discussion in a closely-knit team. The former is often more about demonstrating perceived social superiority rather than guiding a conversation, and such behavior is boorish.
In theory, the best way to conduct a church-of-interruption exchange of ideas is big-endian: you begin by summarising your idea and only then flesh out the details. That way if your conclusion is understood you find out as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, if your conversational partner tends to interrupt incorrectly or in bad faith, the better strategy is little-endian: you craft your idea in such a way that it can't be understood until you've finished talking, and is thus uninterruptible. In extreme cases, you can even make the sentence not parse until the final word.
Big-endian: "I don't like sand. It's coarse, rough, irritating and it gets everywhere."
Little-endian: "You know what's coarse, rough, irritating and gets everywhere? Sand. I don't like it."
Little-endian (parser pipeline stall edition): "What I don't like, because it's coarse, rough, irritating, and gets everywhere, is sand."