Silence Is Golden but Too Often a Requirement for Women

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The requirement that women should keep quiet has made the news lately. And so have popular untrue beliefs that women are the gabbers in almost any setting. The truth is that men get the floor more often than women and keep it longer. In communication studies, we call it turn-taking, and it is seldom equally shared from the boardroom to social occasions and the political arena. Social media refers to men's excessive speaking as "mansplaining." Since the beginning of Western culture, women have been ridiculed for their tone and quality of voice, bullied into staying quiet, and silenced. The average frequency of young women's voices has dropped 23 hertz in 48 years, writes sociologist Anne Karpf, author of The Human Voice, in part because media coaches have trained female clients to deepen their registers. Linguist Nic Subtirelu estimates that media outlets are more than twice as likely to describe women (as opposed to men) as "screeching" or "shrill," and more than three times as likely to say a woman was "shrieking." An integral part of growing up as a man is learning to control public utterance and silence the species' female. For men, it is "I speak," and for women, "You listen." According to an article in Mother Jones, men have been telling women to shut up for at Least 3,000 years. In 800 BC, in Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus' son Telemachus tells his mother, Penelope, "Go back up into your quarters. Speech will be the business of men."

More recently, we heard from Tokyo Olympics Organizing Committee President Yoshiro Mori, who said at an extraordinary meeting of the Japan Olympic Committee Council that "competitive'" women prolong meetings. Mori made a demeaning comment about the committee's goal of increasing the female representation on its board. "On boards with a lot of women, the board meetings take so much time," said Mori, a former Japanese prime minister, according to a translation of his remarks by The New York Times. He claimed, "Women have a strong sense of competition. If one person raises their hand, others probably think, I need to say something too. That's why everyone speaks."

According to The Asahi Shimbun, the meeting was open to the media members, and the 83-year-old's comments were met with laughter. He also said that a board with more female members would have to "regulate speaking time to some extent, or else we'll never be able to finish."

Gretchen Carlson, in writing that the media is missing the point about Meghan Markle, suggests that a woman speaking out against abuse and bullying is often told she should suffer in silence. She asks, rhetorically, why?, and answers that many Americans (and Brits) believe there is nothing scarier than a woman who refuses to suffer in silence and vocalizes unfair and punishing treatment. Markle, this argument goes, should remain calm and carry on. She should not question or push back on the treatment she received from the royal family.

These deeply embedded stereotypes conspire to make the prospect of taking on big institutions seldom winning propositions for a woman. But, to paraphrase Elizabeth Warren, she must persist.