It's seems that women cannot be funny. Well, not in the boardroom anyway. New research suggests that women use humour in the workplace in surprisingly different ways than men.
Research suggests that, while men are likely to get a chorus of laughs if they make a joke in
the boardroom, a woman doing the same has more chance of being met with
an awkward silence. This is because women’s attempts at humour are often seen as ‘contrived, defensive or just mean’, it claims.
Research shows women often struggle to
understand the 'tribal' humour of the boardroom. In hit TV show Mad Men
(pictured) Peggy Olson finds it difficult working with an all-male
advertising team.
Linguistics expert Judith Baxter
undertook an 18-month study into speech patterns at business meetings,
including at two companies in the FTSE 100. She
found that while 90 per cent of jokes made by businessmen triggered an
outburst of laughter, at least 80 per cent made by their female
counterparts resulted in silence.
It's probably not surprising then that Freud spent so much time
analysing the basis for what makes us laugh and how humour works in
everyday life as well as in power relationships as in the workplace.
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