Talk Ain’t Always Cheap, Especially When Women Speak
When I returned from sabbatical in Singapore in 2014, the Dean asked me to lead a reorganization of the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s (GSB) then-existing four centers. The request made sense because I was serving at the time as Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
I accepted the task. I immediately set out planning how we would reorganize, including closing two established centers and redeploying staff to a new set of much-needed activities. One of my key initial tasks was finding a person to lead the effort, which was bound to be challenging given the attachment many people had to their jobs and to the centers. After some effort, I found my person — -a woman who held a senior position in another part of the school but who was looking to move up. She had corporate experience in running things as well.
My leader turned out to be a great choice, she helped conceive the new design, sketched out many of the details and did a great job of dealing with all the pushback while calmly explaining repeatedly to everyone what we were trying to do and why. She got the new unit up and running in short order and it still serves the school in ways that matter a lot.
At one point early in the reorganization process, my leader began tossing around names for the new organizational unit we were creating. I remember she kept running one name after another by me. I didn’t pay much attention, just kind of said “whatever” to her proposals and tried to move on to the next topic. It’s not that I found her fixation on the unit’s name annoying, or even misguided, but rather that I just did not assign it much importance. (I was wrong.) By ignorance, I was fortunately happy to let her and the staff choose the name they preferred.
Eventually, she and her female-dominated team came up with a quite clever acronym that spelled out a commonly used word. The faculty and staff all around the school quickly picked up on it and started using it. In retrospect, the new name was a powerful device that helped us move the transformation along — -it assisted in making the change successful and gave a positive framing and identity to the new unit.
I mention this anecdote because it seems to exemplify the potential importance of a research finding from sociolinguistics for change management, especially cultural change. The finding is that women typically lead the way when it comes to linguistic change — -they are the pioneers who often presage where language is going.
The findings originate from research by sociolinguist William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania from the 1970s.[1] The findings are well established now and accepted widely. In summarizing a vast array of findings, Labov writes: “In the majority of linguistic changes, women use a higher frequency of the incoming forms than men.” (Labov 1990: 206). The figure below (from his paper) shows the pattern discovered, about women leading with a specific language change in two Canadian cities.
Labov goes on to cite many other examples. Among others, he notes (in technical language) the following changes on languages:
“In the southern and western United States, some of the most active sound changes involve the laxing of vowels before /I/, yielding homonymy of steel and still, sail and sell, fool and full. Nicholas (n.d.) traced the laxing of /ey/ in the Appalachian dialect of Jackson County, North Carolina, and found that women were clearly in the lead. Di Paolo (1988) found similar results or all three vowels in her Intermountain Language Survey of Salt Lake City, Utah. Adolescents were the chief exponents of the change in pronunciation, and girls led boys: 53% to 0% for (iyl), 60% to 7% for (eyl), 47% to 20% for (uw).
The research group headed by Guy Bailey at Texas A&M has traced the relation of sex of speaker to a number of innovations in Texas speech through the Texas Poll data of 1989. The unrounding of long open o to [a] leading to the merger of / o / and /oh/ was shown by 25% of the female respondents to the poll, but by only 16% of the males. For walk, the percentages were 23% and 16%. The merger of /iy/ and / i / before /I/ was indicated by the laxing of the nucleus infield: 33% of the female respondents showed this pattern as opposed to 28% of the males. The comparable laxing of /uw/ in school was shown by 48% of the females compared to 40% of the males (Bailey, Bernstein, & Tillery, in preparation).
The most recent sound changes to be found in the United States involve the rapid and extreme fronting of /uw/ and /ow/ on the West Coast. Luthin (1987) showed that women lead men by a considerable margin in the newfronting of (ow) in the Berkeley area. Similar observations have been made in other coastal areas, from Seattle to Los Angeles.” (Labov 1990: 216–7).
Columbia University linguist John McWhorter explains the pattern in straightforward terms: “When language changes, it’s often women who start doing the new thing first.” As a modern example, he cites “uptalk,” the practice of expressing a statement as a question. Others estimate that women may lead as much as 90% of linguistic change and that women could be as much as a generation ahead of men when it comes to linguistic change.
What does this research potentially have to do with change management? Start by thinking about organization culture, which is typically among the more difficult things to change. Much of culture is expressed and enacted through language, official and unofficial. Dialogue and conversation with others inform members of an organization about its culture. For instance, employees at Aetna used to call its culture “Mother Aetna” because of the company’s tendency to take care of its members for life.
The unique language that develops within an organization to describe its culture become key aspects of the culture. Novel words and expressions can change the ways people think and act, the ways they interpret behavior.[2] Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh endeavored to make the core values of the company unique expressions only used there — -phrases like “Deliver WOW Through Service.” Likewise, the leaders of Hewlett Packard spinoff Agilent Technologies labelled their transformation programs “Stratos,” “Excella” and “Vantage” because they were not regular words.
Leaders of cultural change initiatives know the potential value of enlisting respected members of the organization as informal leaders who support the change. For instance, influential consultant Jon Katzenbach says, “When organizations are undergoing major challenges…engaging authentic informal leaders can help the organization accomplish what would otherwise be considered impossible.” Informal leaders are people who take on leadership roles in an organization despite no formal authority to do so. Katzenbach and many others advise executives to identify these informal leaders and to enlist them actively in the change process.
Seems straightforward enough. But, a major difficulty in following the advice is that identifying influential informal leaders at the outset of a change initiative can be very challenging. However, this is where women’s role in linguistic change potentially offers a great opportunity. Women might be intentionally used by executives and other leaders to drive cultural change. In other words, why not enlist women as informal cultural change leaders?
All things equal, the impact and effectiveness of the change may be greater if women rather than men assist as informal leaders. Not only will the visible and active behaviors of female informal leaders impel cultural change. But women’s central role in linguistic innovation should produce a less visible, yet perhaps more profound, impact on the language infrastructure supporting the organization’s culture.[3] Women are more likely to come up with novel words and expressions about what is going on culturally, and they exert influence in spreading these words and expressions.
Glenn R. Carroll
January 26, 2023
[1] Labov, William. “The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change.” Language variation and change 2, no. 2 (1990): 205–254.
[2] The specific mechanism(s) which drive the relationship between language and culture have long been speculated but there is not yet any scientific consensus on the issue.
[3] The argument assumes organizational culture operates somewhat similarly to societal culture with respect to language, an assumption that appears reasonable but is unexplored. [1] At the same time, given the smaller scale of organizational culture, the authority structure in place, and the known identities and roles of organizational members, there is also some reason to wonder whether language operates the same way.