Gender-specific use of the domestic telephone

Research on social uses of the telephone has systematically shown clear gender differences: women use the telephone at home more often than men (Chabrol and Périn 1993; Claisse and Rowe 1993; Dordick and LaRose 1992; Ling 1998; Moyal 1992). Women’s inclination to use the telephone at home has generally been explained by the gender distribution of family roles and by women’s investment in private life and intimate relationships. Using Bakan’s (1966) “agency” versus “communion” distinction (and treating this distinction as describing masculine versus feminine identity orientations) and/or drawing on work collected by Parsons and Bales (1955) on the social division of gender family roles, various authors have centered their explanations on the social positions occupied by the sexes and on their social psychological characteristics. Women’s family role and identity, focusing on close relationships and expressiveness, originally was considered to be more suited to telephone communication. In this sense, research on intimacy and interpersonal process has shown gender differences in patterns of self-disclosure. During interactions, women disclose more than men, particularly about intimate topics (Dindia and Allen 1992; Dolgin and Minowa 1997).47 This fact also may intensify women’s use of interpersonal communication media, especially a widely available and essentially dyadic medium such as the telephone. Moreover, as social network studies have revealed, women and men differ considerably in network composition though not in network size. In particular, women’s personal networks–even when variables related to work, family, and age are controlled–contain more and larger proportions of kin as well as more types of kin (Moore 1990). Maintaining family solidarity and continuity of contact also seems to be a woman’s task:

as Di Leonardo (1987) has reported, women in couples often have greater knowledge about kin, even including the husband’s kin. Researchers also generally agree that women give and receive more emotional support from other close women in their network (kin, friends, or neighbors), as demonstrated by for example, Wellman’s (1979) Toronto study. This implies that the gender composition of personal networks is different for women than for men. Men rarely have women friends, and in general their networks contain few women except relatives (Wellman and Wortley 1990). In contrast, women’s networks are composed mainly of other women (see Cochran et al. 1993). The residential telephone is used largely to contact family and friends; therefore a separation of household roles in which the woman is responsible for maintaining relationships (combined with women’s greater overall involvement in personal relationships) could explain women’s more frequent telephone communication. Wellman suggests an even more general hypothesis: that “community keeping has become an extension of kin keeping, both of which are the responsibility of the women” (1992: 81). Finally, with regard to telephone use in the home, the availability of the telephone is another factor.

A woman (even a working woman) tends to spend more time at home than a man; thus she is more likely to have telephone contact at home.48 All these factors–division of household labor, division of family roles, and differences in composition of social networks, gender identities, and interaction styles–contribute to the gender-specific use of the telephone. This relatively clear gender effect on the frequency of domestic telephone use has been observed in the classic surveys cited above. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to the effect of gender on the duration of telephone conversations. In the gender stereotypes about women’s telephone conversations, women are associated with « endless » chatting. These stereotypes are widespread and similar in various countries. As Fischer (1992) noted, they were forged in the early days of the private telephone in the United States and still seem to operate. As far as we know, however, this issue has never been investigated seriously in the social sciences. The methods used in standard research on telephone use (diaries and self-reports) contribute, in our opinion, to this focus on call frequency at the expense of duration. Our data enable us to raise broader issues of gender effects on telephone use. We propose an interaction-based hypothesis in our attempt to explain gender-related differences in the conduct of telephone conversations; in particular we relate the differences we observed in the duration of telephone conversations to the sex composition of communication dyads. By examining the construction of telephone conversation identities (masculine/feminine, caller/receiver) of the actors involved in the interaction, we obtain greater insight into this complex phenomenon.