Who cares about women’s talk? A field experiment

Early studies of gender differences in discourse (e.g., Johnson, 1994; Jones, 1980) have drawn attention to the depreciation of women’s discourse, which has often been associated with gossip, i.e., casual, idle chat about intimate or domestic topics. Recent efforts have been made, however, to overcome this normative approach and to investigate the goals and functions that gossip may serve among men and women, such as status and achievement with males or relationship maintenance with females (Watson, 2012). This focus on motivations for gossiping has also led some research to leave aside the question of possible gender differences (e.g., Beersma & Van Kleef, 2012; Feinberg, Willer, Stellar, & Keltner, 2012; Wert & Salovey, 2004) and, even more, the question of how men and women regard the other sex’s discourse. If women’s gossip is discounted, attacked, and derogated by men (Jones, 1980), empirical data is still to be found to support this assertion. To our knowledge, in the past decades no research has attempted to investigate empirically men’s and women’s reactions to women’s gossip. One reaWho cares about women’s talk? A field experiment