Well, in this instance, if you watch the video, males were treated differently.
Yes, hypothetically, if women acted the same (or interrupted only males), she would be as bad as he was. Yes, hypothetically, if he treated males and females the same, he would be just equal opportunity asshole.
Nevertheless, in this specific case, the only women was treated differently.
Do you believe that it is as common? Do you believe that the person you are replying to doesn't believe that it ever happens? Does excluding a full disclaimer invalidate his thoughts about trying not to talk over women or dominating conversations?
I don't believe it is always necessary to counter-exemplify what you experience as a general trend.
My personal experience, especially through family and to a lesser extent through other acquaintances, is of women dominating conversations and talking over men. I (a man) can't tell you how many times I've had a woman ask me a question and then talk over my answer, or repeatedly interrupt me when I try to participate in a conversation. And I see the same thing happening to other men I know. The men just kind of give up and fade into the background as they realize they are simply not going to be allowed to speak.
Now I'm perfectly willing to believe that other people find the opposite experience more common. But I have to admit my initial reaction to statements like "this is a painfully frustrating reminder that women get talked over by men" is not positive, and I really do wish the conversation could be about people dominating conversations rather than men dominating conversations.
And what you are writing here is a nuanced comment about differing experiences. Perfectly reasonable.
I'll grant that I've seen both in casual social circumstances. But in this kind of situation, fairly serious and focused around competence/status, I'd say I see women get less space.
This is an interesting study but it has at least one incredulous assumption:
> Extraordinarily, we do not know how listeners actually assess how much is
spoken. Common sense tells us that someone who drawls a sentence slowly
is not considered to have said more than another person who gabbles the
same sentence twice in less time than the first person took to say it once.
That is, we normally make allowance for speaking rate in judging who says
most; amount of linguistic material produced is what really counts.
They do not analyze this issue at all in their paper and I don't see how they can just handwave it away with "common sense tells us". My common sense understanding is that our assessment of speech vs talking speed would be some kind of curve, with the extreme ends ending up with underestimation(spoke too fast, could not remember all the words said; spoke too slow, lost track of conversation) and the rest trending as slower -> overestimated and faster -> underestimated. But we both only have our "common sense" to put forward for this conjecture. Either way, it would have helped if they measured the talking speed of the speakers, so we could at least see if there was any statistical difference.
Eisler brings up that frame in "The Chalice and the Blade" -- it was often assumed in historical scholarship that non-patriarchial societies were matriarchial. Instead, she reframes it as "dominator" vs. "cooperator" societies. In other words, wrestling over which gender has dominance is not as helpful as shifting over towards cooperation in general.
