Candace West’s scientific contributions

... Tannen argues that these differences are not a result of power imbalances but how individuals socialize into gendered language use from childhood. Before Deborah Tannen introduced DT in 1990, research on gender and language was largely shaped by two major perspectives: The Deficit Model (Jesperson, 1922), which suggested that women's language was inferior to men's, portraying women as less capable speakers, and The Dominance Model (Lakoff, 1975;Zimmerman & West, 1975), which also argued that men dominate conversations, reinforcing male authority and female subordination. However, in the 1980s, researchers began challenging the dominance perspective, suggesting that gendered language differences stem from socialization rather than power struggles. ...

Reference:

A Corpus Study of Gender Identity Representation in Selected Nigerian Newspapers