Herrick Summary

In her 1999 article “’And Then She Said:’ Office Stories and What They Tell Us,” Jeanne Herrick refutes the widely held notion that there is a “universal communications gap” between men and women in the workplace. According to this gender-centric notion, men talk like men, and women talk like women, hence the unequal treatment of women and their lack of advancement in the workplace. And because of gender expectations and the belief that rhetorical faculties are gender-specific, women find themselves in a double bind: They are either liked or powerful in the workplace, but not both.

Herrick challenges this perspective as stereotypical. She argues that the relationship of language, gender, and power is rhetorical in nature, and women can control it. She argues that differences are not only in language, but also in ethnicity, race, education, class, sexual orientation, age, and professional background. The way women talk depends on their rhetorical approach to a situation rather than their biology. Generalizations about women need to be clarified by putting them in context because, depending on their standpoints and experiences, women perform gender in different ways.

To prove her point, Herrick tells a story she recorded as part of an ethnographic communication study she had conducted at a company called Phoenix Plastics. This was an Italian family-owned business that valued such things as participatory management, trustworthiness and loyalty, and personal connections. Herrick tells the story of Rose and Kathy, both Phoenix directors, to demonstrate how even within the same cultural social discourse women may act or speak differently.

Rose Morgan, the new director of shipping and distribution, was brought over to put the company’s shipping and distribution practices in shape. She is self-confident but rhetorically austere; given a man’s job, she gets right to it in a man-like manner. She does not engage in participatory management, preferring to manage through memos, and, by being a rather abrasive communicator, she fails to win the trust of her colleagues or make any personal connections, eventually failing in her managerial capacity.

Kathy Wingo-Johnson, on the other hand, the long-standing director of quality leadership, who initially was hired to make the company into a team-based business, is friendly, open, and rhetorically persuasive person. She knows that the company’s symbolic power is based on demonstrating trustworthiness and caring, so she wins trust by caring about people and by paying attention to their needs, as well as the needs of the business. Not only does she succeed in her managerial role, but she also acquires social power beyond her authority.

Herrick argues that this story about language, gender, and power in the workplace shows that power does not depend on gender alone but on many other cultural and social factors. According to Herrick, differences within a gender can be even stronger than across genders, and language is a way to navigate a particular discourse. The Phoenix experience made Herrick believe that gender is not biological but social construct that is created or transformed in everyday interactions, and the relationship between gender and power is locally constructed. Therefore, the way women talk is not gender-specific but is shaped in response to a rhetorical situation.