Women & Rudeness

 

Extracts from Danny Wallace's F*** You Very Much: The Surprising Truth About Why People Are So Rude

Bitches & Bastards

"Be forthright! Assertive! Aggressive! Because it pays to be rude!

And we know it does. Remember, rude people do tend to earn more because they dare to ask for it. Buoyed by confidence and not bothered if they offend, they generally make bigger, bolder, ballsier demands during salary negotiations.

If you are a rude woman, however, and you're sitting there all proud of yourself, arrogantly flicking the Vs at everybody as they walk past, know this: it doesn't pay as well as it should.

Rude men? They're having a grand old time.

A trio of American universities looked at the earnings of 10,000 workers over a period of 20 years. They found that rude women earn 5 percent more than nice women.

Well done, rude women.
Hang on, though - because that still means that even if you are a rude woman, and you love being a rude woman, and you are the best rude woman at being a rude woman that any rude woman has ever been, being a rude woman will still earn you 13 percent less than being a rude man.

Rudeness works far better for bastards than bitches, but none of this means that men are actually deep down ruder than women. What this means is that women don't act as rudely. Why?
Because the rest of us find them 'unbecoming' When they do."

On Interrupting

"...people interrupt a lot. But men interrupt, cut off and take over approximately twice as much as women. Not just that, but men are almost three times more likely to interrupt a woman as they are a man.

Of the 102 interruptions from women that Snyder logged, an incredible 89 of them were women interrupting women. That's 87 percent of the time.
However, when the woman is the most senior person in the room, she will interrupt everyone, all the time.

...

What Snyder's interruption study seems to show is that 'women don't advance in their careers beyond a certain point without learning to interrupt'.
And yet our attitudes towards women who do is different from our attitudes towards men who do.

You'll hear it a million times about women who rise to senior levels in business.
She's rude, she's bossy, she's ruthless, she's a bitch.

But men are generally focused, determined, driven, aggressive.
An aggressive male boss is accepted and even considered positive, while an aggressive female boss may be scary and make others uncomfortable.

...

Women are screwed either way. Rude or polite. 'If she refuses to talk like a lady, she is ridiculed and subjected to criticism as unfeminine,' wrote Lakoff. 'If she does learn, she is ridiculed as unable to think clearly, unable to take part in a serious discussion.'"

Women are getting ruder

"But here's what the very latest research shows. Women are behaving more rudely. At least when it comes to language. They haven't just caught up with men; they're starting to outdo them.

Researchers took 376 people and asked them to record up to three hours of their normal, everyday conversations.

...

In the 1990s, data from studies on language showed that for every million words they spoke, men would use the F-word around 1,000 times. Women, so pure and sheltered, would use the F-word only 167 times.

The fresh data shows a dramatic shift.

A new generation of politer men now use the 540 of 'fuck' and it's variants in every one million words.

Women? Five hundred and forty-fucking-six."