Gendered verbal behaviour in gatekeeping encounters : A comparative corpus study on men's and women's use of five linguistic features during job interviews

The job interview is a gatekeeping encounter and it is crucial that the recruitment process is conducted in a fair and just way. Potential gendered verbal behaviour might affect an interviewer's impression and judgement of the interviewee. Previous research has shown that men and women differ in several ways in verbal communication, both as regards formal and informal encounters. In the present paper, a corpus study on forty job interviews is conducted with the aim to find out whether there are any differences between men and women when it comes to turn-length and the use of boosters, hedges, fillers and pauses. The results show that in the majority of the features under scrutiny, there is no statistically significant difference. These results do not go in line with earlier research on gendered verbal behaviour. Proposed explanations for these results are that the female interviewer might have encouraged a less typically gendered verbal behaviour and that younger generations have developed a less gendered conversational style compared to older generations. However, due to the limitations of the present study, no empirical conclusion can be drawn regarding this and further research needs to be conducted in order to fully explain these research findings