Sex and Power in Interaction: Conversational Privileges and Duties
A study designed to separate sex from power in conversation, which earlier research on its sexual division of labour had generally confounded. Kollock, Blumstein and Schwartz took 35 couples living together, five per cell, from Blumstein and Schwartz's larger study, crossing male, female and cross-sex couples with power balanced or imbalanced, including cross-sex couples where the woman held more power. Power was an eight-item questionnaire scale of influence over everyday decisions, and in imbalanced couples both partners had to agree on who held more. Each couple was taped alone, deciding together who was more justified in conflict stories, with talk coded as rates adjusted for each speaker's talking time.
In cross-sex couples there was no sex difference in interruptions when power was balanced, while partners greater in power, male or female, interrupted a great deal more; in male and in female couples the more powerful partner made more successful interruptions. In cross-sex couples the less powerful partner, regardless of sex, used more back channels and tag questions, though neither reached significance (p below .16 and .08) and tag questions were rare; in male couples the less powerful partner showed lower rates of both. Talking time and questions seemed linked to both sex and power, though not in any simple way. Less powerful men in role-reversed couples talked more than anyone else, which the paper concedes favours a sex argument unless, as it suggests, role reversal explains it: interrupting is a high-risk device whose sanctions speakers with little power are much more likely to incur, and talk a safer route to presence. Minimal responses and overlaps were inconclusive. They conclude that power dynamics by themselves can create the division of labour usually attributed to sex, adding that this does not reduce the realities of sexual inequality.
Limits they name include the small number of cases, power measured only through influence items and a task-focused conversation; intimate couples, they say, should be compared with more distant relationships. The bridge to psychological safety is ours: we read interruption, their clearest power result, as a marker of a power gradient within a pair, worth checking before gender is taken as the explanation.
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