Pamela Fishman researched women's language by listening to prerecorded conversations. She found that women used a lot of tag questions such as "you know?" and "couldn't we?" and "you know?" following thoughts or suggestions. She argued that women use these questions to gain power and control of a conversation, rather than a lack of confidence and need for validation. She also says that these types of questions are needed when females are speaking to males as men often do not respond to declarative statements or reply very minimally.
She stated that the phrase "you know" was a conversational device used to discover whether the person they are speaking to is listening and is inviting the listener to respond.
Women used four times more tag questions than men did.
Pamela Fishman disagrees with Lakoff and says that women use these tag questions to try to continue the conversations. She suggests that women do all of the work in the conversation and sometimes interactions fail not because of the inferior position of women, but because of the lack of cooperativeness from the men.
Because men are more dominant they are less concerned with the "conversational shitwork" because society expects them to be more laid back.
