ABSTRACT
Issues of gender, from both an academic and political standpoint, have concerned Sue Ervin-Tripp through much of her research career (Ervin-Tripp, O'Connor, & Rosenberg, 1984; Ervin-Tripp & Lampert, 1992). Both in her research and political life, Ervin-Tripp has been concerned with power differentials existing between females and males in U.S. society, how these are created in talk, and how they are socialized. As a tribute to Sue, we take on here an important and controversial claim that has been made in the literature on the socialization of gender differences — the "Separate Worlds Hypothesis." According to this hypothesis, girls and boys spend much of their time during the preschool and elementary school years in same-sex friendship groups, with boys playing mainly with other boys and girls playing mainly with other girls (Maccoby, 1990; Maltz & Borker, 1982). As a result, girls and boys evolve very separate and different "cultures," involving different interaction styles and goals for interactive exchanges (Maltz & Borker, 1982; Tannen, 1990). Girls' interactive style focuses on the goal of intimacy establishment and maintenance. When girls get together, they make suggestions and are concerned with group rather than self goals. They tend to avoid conflict and competition, at least in an explicit, unmitigated form (Sheldon, 1992). Boys' interactive style focuses on the goal of one-upsmanship and hierarchy-establishment. When boys get together, they give orders rather than make suggestions, are explicitly contentious, and are concerned with self rather than group goals (Goodwin, 1980; Kyratzis, 1992; Sheldon, 1990; Tannen, 1990). This view is a rather widely held and popular one in the literature on gender differences today, although many critiques of it have been raised. For example, Barrie Thorne (1993) has argued that "separate worlds" is not the reality for all children, that the concept characterizes only about half the children in many classrooms, and in fact does not at all characterize the make-up of friendship groups in many other classrooms. Class size, teachers' encouragement of spontaneous peer friendship groups, and the ethnic-gender-age make-up of the classroom student body all affect whether girl-girl and boy-boy friendship groups will emerge. Moreover, engagement in play with same-sex peers is not an across-the-board quality even of girls and boys who mainly play in same-sex friendship groups at school (Thorne, 1993). 2
