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“Let her speak please”

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Re: “Let her speak please”

#541

Post by abelhabel »

logfromblammo wrote: post #382
jasonshen wrote: post #11

Edit: I watched the video. The moderator goes on and on and the "let her speak please" sounds very polite. This is a painfully frustrating reminder that women get talked over by men. It's one thing to have one panelist talk over another, but to have the moderator, who is explicitly in charge of facilitating a panel discussion, be the one to drown out a panelist is just unacceptable. Yes, "not all men" do this, but th…

I get talked over all the time. I usually chalk it up to being an American living in America, but with a more Scandinavian/Minnesotan conversational style. That is, I will pause while speaking, spooling my next thought out to the phonological loop, to review and filter it, before streaming it out through the voice apparatus, but then some jackass will use that break to assume conversational priority when I haven't yi…

This is my experience as well. I am from Scandinavia and now living in Canada and I have only met a handful of individuals who do not interrupt others while speaking. Unlike you I tell them to shut up, which is the way it is where I come from but doesn't translate well.

Furthermore, I have never seen any american interviewer not interrupting their subjects.

This is my bias, so I never see sexism nor racism in this context. I only see idiots who think more of themselves than they should.

In this particular case and in regards to sexism, however, the voice that should be listened to most, in my opinion, is the voice of the subject. If we don't consider her voice the most important voice we put her in the subaltern and that is the worst position you can have. The subaltern being women in the context of patriarchal history.

The person who said 'Let her speak please.', should also be heard, regardless of her motives. The interviewers should shut up and let their subjects speak at all times, so we need more of this social courage.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#542

Post by jacobolus »

logfromblammo wrote: post #382
jasonshen wrote: post #11

Edit: I watched the video. The moderator goes on and on and the "let her speak please" sounds very polite. This is a painfully frustrating reminder that women get talked over by men. It's one thing to have one panelist talk over another, but to have the moderator, who is explicitly in charge of facilitating a panel discussion, be the one to drown out a panelist is just unacceptable. Yes, "not all men" do this, but th…

I get talked over all the time. I usually chalk it up to being an American living in America, but with a more Scandinavian/Minnesotan conversational style. That is, I will pause while speaking, spooling my next thought out to the phonological loop, to review and filter it, before streaming it out through the voice apparatus, but then some jackass will use that break to assume conversational priority when I haven't yi…

This is just a cultural difference, and depends on what kind of family a person grew up in. It’s not intentional, and not a sign of disrespect or incompetence.

If you want to get the most out of those conversations, you need to meet the other person halfway: be more assertive about your time to speak, while also letting them know that they’re trampling you and need to back off a bit. If you don’t tell them they’ll just think you’re a shy person with nothing to say.

Other cultural differences cause similar problems. If someone I don’t know is mad at me and just silently stews with a vaguely grumpy neutral expression on their face, I’m not going to have any idea they’re mad, because in my culture we just come out and tell people what we’re thinking. By contrast I know people who are deeply humiliated by (what seems to me like) light criticism, because it is huge faux pas and therefore never happened in their culture. Similarly, I know people who simply don’t understand the concept of teasing, at all, and others who are almost cruelly biting in their teasing: when those two collide it’s not pretty.

Or if I’m listening while someone tells one thing to one person, and something contradictory to someone else, I will consider them to be dishonest/untrustworthy and start discounting everything they say. But in some cultures, it’s normal and expected to say what you think the listener wants to hear, and listeners just have to learn to read between the lines and interpret subtle distinctions in presentation style.

Etc.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#543

Post by munchbunny »

lr4444lr wrote: post #375
dating_advice wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hubeny doesn't seem like a person who would tell someone to shut up though, and sexism or not, it's basic politeness to give shy people a bit more room. Certainly after announcing that you now finally want to hear their perspective :/ I doubt that moderator can watch that part and say "yeah, that's good moderation". Just reading the FB post, I was taken aback a little, to be perfectly honest I rolled my eyes at "why…

I didn't mean for her to tell Holt to literally "shut up", but that Hubeny handled it as she want to - which I conclude based on my confidence in her ability and stature to do so and from her follow-up comment - and she was in fact "White Knighted" as what's meant by the term to have jumped in, even if Talkington was female. Maybe I was raised in a different generation, but disrupting a staged event from the audience…

The topic of politeness (civility) and its role in power dynamics has been discussed extensively in the context of race and gender issues.

Politeness tends to reinforce existing subconscious norms, which in practice often includes women not "getting a seat at the table" despite being at the table. If you're a disadvantaged demographic in that setting, politeness is your ally only to the extent that the majority will enforce things for you. But the problem is that if you're a woman/minority, there's a class of issues where social enforcement happens far too infrequently. You can't trust the system to actually look out for you.

As the demographic who has to play from behind, politeness as a mechanism is insufficient to look after your own interests.

Hubeny is a part of a fortunate group of people who follow a certain pattern: some degree of "brick walls be damned" determination, some degree of willful self-exceptionalism, and a lot of luck. It's a powerful combination and she has earned her success, but that combination of traits to succeed despite tilted odds is​ very far from the norm, and it's the norm that needs to shift. I can guarantee you that among Hubeny's peers - other women at the tops of their fields - they view politeness as a fickle ally at best because they are consistently working at its edges out of necessity.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#544

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

gpawl wrote: post #522
ryanmarsh wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get talked over by people. I see this all the time and it's generally sexless. As a consultant I've helped at least 100 teams have crucial conversations across tens of businesses. I don't get the constant refrain that this is a male vs. female thing.

Your anecdote of your fuzzy memory is not research. When measurements are taken, there is a clear pattern: https://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2017/01/03/gal-inte... https://hbr.org/2017/04/female-supreme-court-justices-are-in... http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/03/19/google...

Your fuzzy memory is not research so I quote the three top scientific magazines: Forbes, HBR [1] & NYT.

(If you look in the articles, they quote studies with 20 participants. At university I would have been destroyed when making fundamental claims on a sample size of 20).

And yes my gut feeling tells me women get interrupted more often. And from this comment you may assume I'm guilty of this, though my bad social habits probably interrupt men as often.

[1] the magazine of business anecdotes.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#545

Post by DanBC »

_jcwu wrote: post #441
DanBC wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because normal human beings have a stress response that includes adrenaline being released. they are literally shaking, and they are accurately describing their stress response.

Yes, but it makes it sound ridiculous. If I am going to include all my emotional responses to an event every time I write about something it will become ridiculous and annoying at one point. Can you not be annoyed by something without starting to shake every time? Especially if you try to interpret rudeness as sexism...

The emotion is not anger, it is fear.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#546

Post by Sacho »

azernik wrote: post #387
oneoff_147 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal experience, especially through family and to a lesser extent through other acquaintances, is of women dominating conversations and talking over men. I (a man) can't tell you how many times I've had a woman ask me a question and then talk over my answer, or repeatedly interrupt me when I try to participate in a conversation. And I see the same thing happening to other men I know. The men just kind of give…

I would ask that you question your own perception: http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:68785:7/compon...

This is an interesting study but it has at least one incredulous assumption:

> Extraordinarily, we do not know how listeners actually assess how much is spoken. Common sense tells us that someone who drawls a sentence slowly is not considered to have said more than another person who gabbles the same sentence twice in less time than the first person took to say it once. That is, we normally make allowance for speaking rate in judging who says most; amount of linguistic material produced is what really counts.

They do not analyze this issue at all in their paper and I don't see how they can just handwave it away with "common sense tells us". My common sense understanding is that our assessment of speech vs talking speed would be some kind of curve, with the extreme ends ending up with underestimation(spoke too fast, could not remember all the words said; spoke too slow, lost track of conversation) and the rest trending as slower -> overestimated and faster -> underestimated. But we both only have our "common sense" to put forward for this conjecture. Either way, it would have helped if they measured the talking speed of the speakers, so we could at least see if there was any statistical difference.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#547

Post by odonnellryan »

jacobolus wrote: post #542
logfromblammo wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get talked over all the time. I usually chalk it up to being an American living in America, but with a more Scandinavian/Minnesotan conversational style. That is, I will pause while speaking, spooling my next thought out to the phonological loop, to review and filter it, before streaming it out through the voice apparatus, but then some jackass will use that break to assume conversational priority when I haven't yi…

This is just a cultural difference, and depends on what kind of family a person grew up in. It’s not intentional, and not a sign of disrespect or incompetence. If you want to get the most out of those conversations, you need to meet the other person halfway: be more assertive about your time to speak, while also letting them know that they’re trampling you and need to back off a bit. If you don’t tell them they’ll ju…

When I'm talking to someone, no matter who it is, I find it's more of a dance than a game with rules.

Good conversationalists will match each other's way of speaking and come to some common ground. It usually happens really quickly.

So you'll know when someone is done, or you'll be able to interject ideas into what they're saying.

It isn't rude, in my opinion, to interrupt someone in this way.

"So, I saw the craziest thing the other day when I was driving by the coffee shop..." "The one on main?" "Yes, that one!"

Etc...

It's called a conversation. It'd be really weird to save your questions until the end in a setting like that.

That said, let people speak. Listening is more important than talking.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#548

Post by odonnellryan »

abelhabel wrote: post #541
logfromblammo wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get talked over all the time. I usually chalk it up to being an American living in America, but with a more Scandinavian/Minnesotan conversational style. That is, I will pause while speaking, spooling my next thought out to the phonological loop, to review and filter it, before streaming it out through the voice apparatus, but then some jackass will use that break to assume conversational priority when I haven't yi…

This is my experience as well. I am from Scandinavia and now living in Canada and I have only met a handful of individuals who do not interrupt others while speaking. Unlike you I tell them to shut up, which is the way it is where I come from but doesn't translate well. Furthermore, I have never seen any american interviewer not interrupting their subjects. This is my bias, so I never see sexism nor racism in this co…

Why is it weird to have conversations this way?

I would find it very odd to save a string of questions until the end.

It's much more fun to engage in the conversation actively.

I'm not saying control the conversation. Good conversationalists listen more than they speak.

But having fun in a conversation is engaging in it. Not replying paragraph after paragraph, in my opinion.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#549

Post by odonnellryan »

Sacho wrote: post #536
azernik wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studies generally say "yes" - this is the way women are generally treated when they talk.

Can you please share such a study?

There are a million billion!

https://hbr.org/2017/04/female-supreme-court-justices-are-in...

All different settings.

Re: “Let her speak please”

#550

Post by camelite »

gpawl wrote: post #522
ryanmarsh wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get talked over by people. I see this all the time and it's generally sexless. As a consultant I've helped at least 100 teams have crucial conversations across tens of businesses. I don't get the constant refrain that this is a male vs. female thing.

Your anecdote of your fuzzy memory is not research. When measurements are taken, there is a clear pattern: https://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2017/01/03/gal-inte... https://hbr.org/2017/04/female-supreme-court-justices-are-in... http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/03/19/google...

Your links do not justify your confident tone. Two are about the 7 Supreme Court Justices and some Google guy. That's 8 people. The first is about a study involving 11 male-female interactions (19 now), and a study which noted that "...The men interrupted their female conversational partners 2.1 times during a three minute conversation. That number dropped to 1.8 when they spoke to other men." So men just interrupt more in general, not against women specifically, i.e. not sexist behaviour but a simple gender difference.

Ironically, the guy's "fuzzy memories" are more accurate than your "research-based" opinions.

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