ONE SERVER ASKS: "AS A FEMALE WORKER, IS IT MORE IMPORTANT TO BE LIKED OR TO BE HEARD?"
By Della Hethcox
It was a rampageous Friday evening full of late reservations and a multitude of walk-ins. Diners were ordering time-sensitive dishes, and it was a challenge delivering the food to their tables on schedule. I was stressed out and so was the rest of the staff at the Asian fusion restaurant in downtown Fredericksburg, where I am a part-time weekend hostess. Tempers erupted over slight misunderstandings. The servers were bickering.
During a typical five-hour shift, I usually felt shut down a number of times by male servers. There were times I told a coworker that a table he was covering needed more water. Or perhaps another had a VIP guest who was waiting for his food. Typically, my male colleagues stared at me blankly and brushed off my suggestions. On this particular night, I had run out of tables for hungry, impatient patrons. I asked one of the servers whose workload seemed slightly lighter to take care of a table on the patio, outside of his assigned zone in an upstairs room. Even though I knew it wasn’t the best solution, I felt it was my only option.
A few minutes later my boss found me and began what I fondly call a “mansplanation.” He told me that I shouldn’t place that server outside of his section. Of course, it wasn’t something that I would normally do, but I had my reasons. When I started to explain them, my boss said “you had better take it down a notch. It sounds like you’re challenging me.”
“No,” I said, “I’m trying to explain.”
“You don’t get to explain, you only get to say ‘okay,’” he said. As a young woman who works as a hostess (one of the lesser roles in a “fine dining” restaurant), I quickly learned that the male servers and my male boss expected me to never question them, or in this case, to even explain myself. Being refused the right to share my voice was infuriating. I was fuming for hours afterward.
In a linguistics class at the University of Mary Washington in 2013, I’d learned about what Robin Tolmach Lakoff, an American linguist, called “linguistic sexism.” I realized I was experiencing it. “[Women’s language] submerges a woman’s personal identity, by denying her the means of expressing herself strongly, on the one hand, and encouraging expressions that suggest triviality in subject matter and uncertainty about it,” Lakoff wrote in a 1975 research paper. So I set out to discover how my voice was being silenced at work and how I could use linguistic choices to make sure I was heard in the future.
* * *
I’ve held several jobs in retail, a largely female-run industry. By working at a restaurant, I had entered a boys’ club. Swedish researchers at Öbrebo University came out with a 2005 study describing how male owners try to employ “nice, gentle, respectful young women” as service employees. So male owners might not expect a female employee to disrupt that image of femininity.
In her research, Lakoff describes a “politics of nice.” Essentially, women talk different from men. According to Lakoff’s essay “Language and Woman’s Place,” that’s how we’re taught it should be from a young age, since “Women are the preservers of morality and civility; and we speak around women in an especially polite way in return, eschewing the coarseness of men’s language: no slang, no swear words…”
I thought about how conversations with my boss were often structured, usually with him sitting down or leaning over me. The male servers, cooks and my boss use imperatives almost exclusively, whereas my female compatriots will tack on a “please” or “thank-you.” When talking to my male boss, rarely am I able to complete a thought or sentence before he interrupts me. However, if I did the same, the results would be vastly different. This double standard exists not only in conversations between equals, but even more so in a boss-to-employee relationship. I realized that if I’d used more polite and ladylike language, his response would have been very different. If I’d used verbal hedging (such as “I believe” or “I think”) or so-called tag questions that imply I was asking for his approval (“Don’t you agree?”), he may not have felt like I was attacking or threatening him.
Since the 1990s, the language standard between men and women has shifted, Lakoff wrote in a 2005 study. Luckily, no longer are women and men using completely separate types of the same language. Instead, they are heading toward a more unisex language. Lakoff concludes that the state of language for women is in flux. However, she adds, in order for women to advance professionally, they still have to appear “nice,” and that means abiding by the old-fashioned linguistic standards. Having read Lokoff’s research, I came to understand that these days, we do have the power to use any type of language we choose. But among my older coworkers who hadn’t yet caught up to the times, was it worth it for me to speak up?
* * *
Lakoff contrasts the linguistic examples of Martha Stewart and Nancy Pelosi. Stewart’s highly publicized trials hinged on her non-niceness, such as her brusque personality, in her personal life as well as her career. For Lakoff, Stewart’s court trials were based on the fact that she was a woman who had disrupted the traditional idea of linguistic femininity and was consequently “not nice.” However, Pelosi was frequently described in terms of her niceness, such as how much time she spent with her grandkids and her love for chocolate.
Lakoff writes “For women, the move to non-niceness is always risky and often fatal. Women in power often experience jokes about their place in the world. For example, they might hear taunts about whom in their family has the balls. Their husbands might be known, for example, as “Mr. Margaret Thatcher,” a demeaning phrase. “This discrepancy makes it very difficult for women to rise to the top, and stay there, whether in politics or business, or even in academia,” she writes.
I decided to speak with women who grew up in a generation that expected women to hold up feminine ideals of language, women who were contemporaries of Stewart and Pelosi to see if it was true. I told my mother about my altercation with my boss. While my mother supports my efforts to stand up for myself, she cannot help but remind me that I would “catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” I maintained to her that I should not be expected to use different language from men.
As Lakoff’s research shows, my mom holds the view that men and women are different, and that women should try to be the ones to preserve civility and morality. Funnily enough, she picked up Lakoff’s research while in my room and remarked that she would be interested in reading about women’s language, since she has noticed a distinct difference in the language that her five daughters use, versus the language that she and her sisters use. She explained that her generation didn’t use words, like “crap,” which I use rather bluntly. Clearly, I’ve grown up in a different environment than my mom. My mother, I had to remember, hasn’t worked outside the home in over 30 years, so she hasn’t dealt with frustrations like the ones I had at work.
So, I decided to speak to another woman at work, my female boss. She lamented the fact that the restaurant was a boy’s club. But she also said there was nothing she could do to change that fact, at least until our male boss leaves his current position. My female boss has also struggled with linguistic sexism. She described many of the same things I have noticed or experienced during my shifts. “I am spoken to differently than my male counterpart, even if we're saying the exact same sentence,” she said. “I am seen as emotional, but loyal and caring, and he is seen as direct, precise, efficient. I have been tirelessly berated to change my wording, my delivery, my tone, to be more like my counterpart.”
But those changes haven’t come, perhaps because she still answers to our male boss and also struggles to be taken seriously in this boy’s club. And maybe they’re asking from her something they don’t truly want. Though she explained to me that she would help out if a server was ever rude to me, I’ve been reluctant to ask for her help. I’ve seen other coworkers who have, and the male employees’ good behavior doesn’t last that long. Besides, there’s also the overarching message: This is a boys’ club, and we have to learn to work within that environment.
* * *
What intrigued me even more after this altercation was how people responded to my use of language, not the fact that my male boss had told me I wasn’t allowed to explain myself and that my only role was to say “yes.” Even more surprising were the reactions from the women in my life. For me, the issue of not using those linguistic elements and not being “nice” while conversing with men gives my voice value. Employing verbal hedging or other feminine linguistic devices cheapens what I’m trying to say. If I’m stating a fact, why should I try to soften it or bury it under and “I think” or “Well, I believe…”
My self worth and the privilege of expressing myself is something I value infinitely more than a weekend job as a hostess. So, I’ve decided that I’m going to forget about what’s proper and fight linguistic sexism. My voice is worth more than $7.50 an hour.