With campaigns like I Don’t Need Feminism, #notallmen and the now famous Hobby Lobby decision, where the Supreme Court removed the Affordable Care Act’s employer contraceptive mandate in a 5-4 vote, the national conversation around issues of gender has come to the front line to address inequality under the law and in government, media, and corporate leadership.
The timing is appropriate. Across media platforms men still hold 63.4 percent of the corporate positions. In Tinsel-town’s top 100 films in 2012 only 28.4 percent of the speaking roles went to women. Women only hold 18.5 percent of the seats in Congress and just one-third of the seats on the U.S. Supreme Court bench. These numbers indicate that various levels of social, economic and political inequality still exist between men and women.
As a student at Washington State University, my professor explained how words are powerful tools in their own right. Words can build speeches that start revolutions, or stories to bring down walls and regimes. As women, we’re told to leave some of our tools at home and out of the workplace. We drop the hammer to soften our image and our tone, and we’re often rewarded for it.
Remember Hillary Clinton’s first run for the White House? As a hard charging candidate, she suffered an embarrassing defeat in Iowa, but rallied a primary win in New Hampshire after a televised spat of tears humanized her to the nation. In other words, she softened up, and the country rewarded her for her vulnerability.
In the same way, women in media are expected to adjust their language for the sake of their audiences. Sentences are made to sound softer, appear to ask a question and designed to reduce the level of authority in them.
Seeing these hammer-less tools on television, in movies and across the news has an effect on the world around us. Those practices are internalized and our own language is affected when our favorite characters and personalities use them.
This is what a sentence built without the hammer sounds like:
This is a hedge phrase. Hedge phrases are a group of words that makes the statement less forceful or assertive. These phrases can easily slip into our everyday language, examples include; somewhat, maybe, kind of, I suppose.
Here, a miniature Alice is using a comment clause. Typically in the form of short sentence segments, they are recognized as fillers that weaken the speaker’s argument. Common examples are “you see,” “I think,” “I dare,” and “you know.”
A discourse marker appears when sentences have additional words placed into the sentence to change the flow of conversation. Examples include words such as “oh,” “like,” or “you know.” Shoshanna, played by Zosia Mamet in HBO’s Girls, uses discourse markers all the time.
In most cases, discourse markers can be removed from the sentence without changing the structure. Remove the marker and Shoshanna’s point remains, but your feelings towards her change. She’s stronger, doubt-free and more confident.
As communication professionals, it is our job to provide everyone with the right set of communications tools so they can deliver the strongest message possible. As women, we ought to use the full range of tools—hammer included—to strengthen our collective voice. Whether we’re advocating for pay equality, access to contraceptives, women in television, or to welcome more women into the C-Suite, we can use our tools to build a better world.
