Gender Differences in Communication

All of us have different styles of communicating with other people. Our style depends on
a lot of things: where we're from, how and where we were brought up, our educational
background, our age, and it also can depend on our gender. Generally speaking, men
and women talk differently although there are varying degrees of masculine and
feminine speech characteristics in each of us. But men and women speak in particular
ways mostly because those ways are associated with their gender.

The styles that men and women use to communicate have been described as "debate
vs. relate", "report vs. rapport, or "competitive vs. cooperative". Men often seek
straightforward solutions to problems and useful advice whereas women tend to try and
establish intimacy by discussing problems and showing concern and empathy in order
to reinforce relationships.

Jennifer Coates, in her book Women, Men and Language (New York: Longman Inc.,
1986) studied men-only and women-only discussion groups and found that when
women talk to each other they reveal a lot about their private lives. They also stick to
one topic for a long time, let all speakers finish their sentences and try to have everyone
participate. Men, on the other hand, rarely talked about their personal relationships and
feelings but "competed to prove themselves better informed about current affairs, travel,
sport, etc.". The topics changed often and the men tried to "over time, establish a
reasonably stable hierarchy, with some men dominating conversation and others talking
very little".

Dr. Lillian Glass' book He Says, She Says: Closing the Communication Gap Between
the Sexes (The Putnam Berkeley Group) details her findings on the many differences in
the way men and women communicate, both verbally and non-verbally. You can have a
look at what she thinks are the differences in:

Online Communication
Since gender isn't readily apparent (unless specified) in online communication, can one
determine another person's gender just by reading their written words? Susan Herring
thinks so. In a 1994 talk at a panel called Making the Net *Work*, she said that men and
women have recognizably different styles in posting to the Internet. She backed up this
claim with research where she analyzed messages posted by men and women to
various newsgroups. Read a transcript of her talk for all the details.

To find out how women and men feel about communicating with each other online, have
a look at Gladys We's graduate research paper entitled Cross-Gender Communication
in Cyberspace where she discusses the results of a survey she sent to both men and
women who were online.

A study that "investigates whether the use of pseudonyms mitigates gender-based

differences of communication patterns in a computer-mediated communication (CMC)
context" was submitted for presentation to the 45th Annual Conference of the
International Communication Association, 1995. Gender, Pseudonyms, and CMC:
Masking Identities and Baring Souls by J. Michael Jaffe, Young-Eum Lee, Lining Huang,
& Hayg Oshagan is an interesting look at how the use of nicks and the lack of non-
verbal cues affect gender-based communication patterns.