You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation is a 1990 non-fiction book on language and gender by Deborah Tannen, a professor of sociolinguistics at Georgetown University.

The book remained on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years (eight months at #1) and was subsequently translated into 30 other languages.

[2] However, linguist Alice Freed has criticized Tannen's representation of the research she cites as limited and misleading, faulting her for making generalizations and contradictory claims.

Tannen's chapters, which are broken up into short titled sections of two or three pages, start by distinguishing what men and women seek from conversations: independence and intimacy respectively.

[3]This leads to conversations at cross-purposes, since both parties may miss the other's metamessages, with attendant misunderstandings—for example, a woman complaining about the lingering effects of a medical procedure, who may merely be seeking empathy from female friends by doing so, becomes angry at her husband when he suggests a solution involving further surgery.

The latter is frequently derided as gossip by both genders, and Tannen devotes an entire chapter to exploring its social functions as a way of connecting speaker and listener to a larger group.

[2] At a 1992 conference on women and language, Montclair State University linguistics professor Alice Freed gave an extended critique of You Just Don't Understand.

"[7] Tannen's book, Freed says, "simultaneously perpetuates negative stereotypes of women, excuses men their interactive failings, and distorts by omission the accumulated knowledge of our discipline."