Oh, this is serious. The Financial Times‘ Lucy Kellaway points out a truly distressing phenomenon: People don’t laugh at women’s jokes. In fact, she says, “nearly 80 percent of women’s jokes in board meetings fall entirely flat.”
That’s based on research by Judith Baxter, a linguistic specialist and head of the English department at the United Kingdom’s Aston University. For the study, Baxter patiently sat through untold hours of boring board meetings at seven big companies, Kellaway wrote, and discovered a huge gender gap in the way colleagues (male and female) respond to women’s attempts at humor: “She found that more than three-quarters of women’s jokes tended to be met by stony silence, while men’s were greeted with great hilarity. The men engaged in flippant quips and rough banter; the women went for jokes that were too self-deprecating, and often ended up sounding defensive or downright horrid.”
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