Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

Part of the reason images of women in positions of authority are marked by their gender is that the very notion of authority is associated with maleness.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.

any criticism heard secondhand sounds worse than it would face to face. Words spoken out of our presence strike us as more powerful, just as people we know only by reputation seem larger than life.

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female - all result in different ways of talking.