Welcome to the broad experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tite. This time on the show, you've heard it before, women aren't funny,

or at least not as hilarious as men. I talked to a linguist who has studied the way senior women

and men use humour in the workplace.

Men were using it more often and they were using it in a way that produced a laugh,

whereas when women used it, less often, they often didn't get a laugh.

In fact, 80% of their jokes fell flat.

Keep listening to find out why.

Judith Baxter is a professor of applied linguistics at Aston University in England.

I first read about her work on language and gender more than a year ago.

I was fascinated by it because use of language in the workplace is one of those things most of us don't think about, yet it can have a big effect on the way other people perceive us.

Judith and a colleague did their research for their latest study over an 18-month period

at seven multinational companies

based in the UK. They spent many hours recording and studying the language of senior men and

women while they were conducting high-level meetings. Judith and I spoke on Skype.

As I believe that language is one of the main ways in which we construct our identities in the workplace.

I just wanted to find out if there was something happening in a meeting.

People spend so long in meetings, some managers are in meetings all day,

so it's obviously a key experience for them. So I went in wanting to analyse the language they use.

And what she found was that men joked more than women and their use of humour was more successful.

In that they were using humour in a more crafted and professional way to manage people, whereas the women were perhaps less

easy with using humour, and often there were cases of humour going wrong when the women

...