The Interruption Game... Who Gets Cut Off?

Gerald Storch, August 3, 1978, Edmonton Journal

She: "How's your project coming?"

He: "All right, I guess. We haven't done much in the past two weeks."

She: "Yeah, I know how that can be. I ..."

He: "Right -- too many other deadlines. And manufacturing is on our backs all the time."

She: "Oh, uh, sure. I was saying I know how easy it is to get busy sidetracked by ..."

He: "Sure is. By-the-way, we're installing our new computer system this month."

She: "Hmm. We've been thinking about ..."

He: "Yeah, good - well, if you need any information, let me know. Talk to you later."

She: "Uh, ... right."

That's a conversation straight from the workplace. As you'll note, this little chat displays two roles.

The man does the interrupting. The woman is the one who gets interrupted. It happens all the time, and its illustrates one of the subtle ways in which men dominate and stifle women, says social scientist Candace West.

Dr. West, who covertly tape-recorded the above talk and many others like it for her Ph.D. work at Santa Barbara, is an assistant sociology professor at Florida State University.

Using natural settings such as drug stores, coffee shops, and hallways, she listened to male-female conversations. Of the interruptions that took place, males initiated 96 percent.

Later, in a more controlled laboratory experiment involving couples, males accounted for 40 of 54 interruptions, or 74 percent.

By contrast, during 20 male-male or female-female chats she also monitored, the interruptions were distributed "nearly equally" among the parties.

Furthermore, the men acted much differently when they were interrupted by other men instead of women.

If another man butted in, the man who was speaking would break off his sentence. But the few times when a woman would interrupt, a man would "tend to complete the sentence, as if to deny the woman's intrusion," West says.

Her colleagues, she says, venture comments like "women tend to be more gabby - wouldn't that tend to explain men interrupting just to get a word in?"

Her comeback: "It's not true." Research has established that "men talk more than women by any measure you use" - number of words per turn, number of turns, amount of time taken.

West's study is one of a number that have been conducted in recent years to probe the subtle ways in which the sexes deal with each other.

In another study, West and Don Zimmerman, her partner in the speech research, found striking parallels between how men treat women in conversation and how parents treat children.

Listening to dialogues between five sets of parents and children at a doctor's office, they discovered that parents initiated 12 of the 14 interruptions.

Their devastating conclusion: A man treats a woman during casual conversation as if she were a child.

So, if you're always being interrupted, and you've had about enough, what can you do about it? West mentions three tactics.

Interrupt right back. This might work, but men usually ignore women's interruptions.

Keep right on going with what you're saying. That can work, but "it's likely to get you characterized as aggressive and bitchy," West warns.

After being interrupted, withdraw your support. As the man rattles on, don't say "uh huh" to sustain him. This is what West does when annoyed by an interruption. "Leave the person in a position of conducting a monologue," she says. "That's something most people are uncomfortable with."