Interruptus: A Paper Reshowing Young and Fishman’s Analyses Regarding Men’s Tendency to Interrupt Women in Verbal Discussions

To further strengthen Iris Marion Young and Pamela Fishman’s ideas regarding the tendency of most men to interrupt women during verbal discussions, I conducted a week-long study (from December 9 to December 14, 2013) in my six other classes (namely Theology 121, Leadership and Strategies 10, Economics 102, Accounting 30, Filipino 14, and Law 22), which consist of mixed male and female pupils. Before starting the experiment, I considered a few questions that I wanted to answer: Would males recite more often than females? Would males interrupt females during the latter’s recitation? Would males recite more often if their teacher is also a male?
During the experiment proper itself, I used participant observation—I was still reciting whilst observing and tallying my classmates’ recitation points. For one week, without raising any suspicion from my classmates in six different subjects, I did what I normally do inside the classroom: I took down notes, listened to the discussion, and recited when appropriate. To answer my abovementioned questions, I have gathered data about the class size, the recitation frequency of males and females, the sex of the teacher per subject, and other significant observations. The data are tabulated at the back of the page. Below the table are the formulas that I used to obtain such values.
In recording the total recitations, I considered only the individual recitations or contributions—the choral answers of a group were not tallied. Most of the time, there were pupils who consistently recited; thus increasing the total recitation points tallied for their represented group. On the other hand, during my first day of experimentation, I tallied the total recitation opportunities by considering the instances ...

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... it is worth noting that though males dominated females during class discussions, there were instances when I witnessed women cut off men’s statements, uprightly expressing their disagreement. There were also cases when women explained more thoroughly the concepts recited by men. A few female students have also interrupted our male teacher in Accounting just to clarify points and ask questions.
As what I have seen inside the classroom, deviance is not only limited to those who have disregarded the rules to break the norm—it is also possessed and exercised by those individuals and groups that found strength to break away from labels and limitations. In this simple quotidian case of classroom discussions, women’s act of interruptus shows an attempt to break away from the social dictations that try to limit their right of expression—indeed a true power of deviance.