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The latest think piece on how women don’t know how to write in the workplace has arrived. This week’s culprit? The word “just.”
It hit me that there was something about the word I didn’t like. It was a “permission” word, in a way — a warm-up to a request, an apology for interrupting, a shy knock on a door before asking “Can I get something I need from you?”
“Man up, ladies,” is the article’s takeaway.
There is a long history of this kind of vocabulary shaming. Women are told not to apologize, not to “I’m sorry” their way into a conversation. Women speak from the first person singular too often, betraying inadequacy or subordination — except when taking credit for their own work, in which case they use the plural “we” instead of the “I” preferred by men. In that case, their infelicities lead to getting overlooked or underestimated in the workplace. They “undermine” themselves with punctuation, weakly throwing around exclamation points when a robust, manly period will do the job.
The unstated assumption in this grammatical policing is that women are always in the wrong and the status quo is right. Women, the monolithic group, should write like men.
I have a secret. I use the word “just” a lot. I often talk in the first person. I use hedge phrases like “I think” and “I’m not sure that” all the time. I also work in an almost all-women (virtual) workplace where several of my co-workers never, ever expose their weaknesses with these craven locutions.
When I consider the way I write emails to people I have never met in person, when I am asking for a favour, or when I am simply asking a colleague to do work they are expected to do and expecting me to ask them to do it, I don’t consider myself weak. I consider myself conscious of the way my place in the world relates to theirs. I try to empathize with the person I am demanding something of. I try to find common ground where our exchange can find traction. This is not a passive rhetorical pose — it is an active strategy I pursue in all the ways I communicate and share with others.
Language psychologist James Pennebaker’s The Secret Life of Pronouns reveals, among countless other things, that people tend to use the first person voice when speaking from a position of perceived subordination — and that the people most likely to do this are women. A woman will use 85,000 more pronouns per year than a man. But notably, Pennebaker did not attribute this observation to weakness (although many of the hot takes his book inspired did); rather, he attributed it to the tendency of women to be more self-aware and open to self-reflection.
Rarely do we open this sort of discursive analysis to include existing gender oppressions. Instead, it is the individual who takes the blame and must police or manage her language choices. We don’t ask why men, particularly men in positions of power, speak in imperatives, as if their word is already made flesh. We don’t question why considering and valuing the subjectivities and lived experience of each stakeholder when making decisions is not the status quo.
A key exception is Soraya Chemaly’s wonderful “10 simple words every girl should know.” In it, she calls out masculine rhetorical practices like chronic interruption, talking over women speakers and the modern classic “mansplaining.” Her suggestions call patriarchal power to account and directly challenge those who participate within it. She does not counsel that women interrupt more often or talk over peers who appear to have less experience. Even so, it is still women who must police this space to make room for their own agency. When will the duty fall to men to self-regulate their own marginalizing language?
I love the way small, nearly imperceptible language habits expose deepseated cultural and social phenomena — and the hard work the word “just” undertakes on a daily basis in our workplaces is no exception. Let’s just make sure the criteria under which those evaluations take place earns equal scrutiny, shall we?
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Nick Seebruch, editor
Image: Flickr/Katie Tegtmeyer
