Quote from: Nero on May 07, 2008, 02:58:51 PM
Go for it, Lizzie.
You can't say I didn't warn you.
Men's and Women's Communications Styles
People tend to take it as a given that men and women communicate in different styles. I had a typical cross-gender exchange with a man I worked with several years ago. We both had to share a very small cubical which meant that phone conversations were seldom private. One day he seemed to be having a tense discussion with his wife over buying a present for his mother-in-law. After he hung up the phone he made a comment about being in trouble and "hearing about it" when he got home.
I took pity on him and said, "Why don't you defuse the situation by as soon as you walk through the door saying, 'Tell me how you feel about what you wanted to talk to me about.'"
He sat there blankly staring at me for several seconds then stated, "I haven't any idea what you just said."
Work has been done to try and analyze these gender differences in communication style and categorize them. In this paper I intend to describe some of these apparent differences and the effects they have on communication across genders. It is said that awareness is the first step in developing strategies to deal with these differences, but I shall also look at whether we have over emphasized differences at the expense of gender similarities.
The explicit purpose of communication is generally the transfer of information, ideas, or emotions. This could figuratively be referred to as the "denotative" purpose of communication. Secondarily there is also a figurative "connotative" purpose which appears to be different for masculine and feminine communication styles. For women, this secondary purpose is to establish and maintain relationships. For men, it is to establish and maintain dominance. Tannen (1990) notes that, "Leet-Pellegrini suggests that the men in [her] study were playing a game of 'Have I won?' while the women were playing a game of 'Have I been sufficiently helpful?'" (p. 129). There are many indicators of these two purposes in each style of communication.
In women, establishing and maintaining relationships is accomplished through behaviors that foster listening and conversational maintenance. Additional factors such as tentativeness, politeness, and non-verbal cues are used in maintaining relationships.
There is a tendency for women to engage in active listening that incorporates many methods of conversational maintenance. These include not only the non-verbal cues discussed later in this paper, but especially make use of listening noises, prompting questions, and verbal intensifiers.
Lips (2007) wrote, "Girls in North America tend to learn at an early age to pay attention to others and to indicate that attention in a variety of ways: nodding their heads, maintaining eye contact, using facial expressions that say 'I'm interested' and issuing an almost continuous stream of what Deborah Tannen calls 'listening noises' such as 'I know what you mean' and 'Mm-hmm'" (p. 188).
A problem with listening noises is that men sometimes don't recognize them as that. Instead they may interpret them as agreement with what they are saying. Tannen (1990) asserts, "Women use 'yeah' to mean 'I'm with you, I follow,' whereas men tend to say 'yeah' only when they agree. The opportunity for misunderstanding is clear. When a man is confronted with a woman who has been saying, 'yeah,' 'yeah,' 'yeah,' and then turns out not to agree, he may conclude that she has been insincere, or that she was agreeing without really listening" (p.142). An example of this kind of misunderstanding was in the news earlier this year. "Former astronaut Lisa Nowak nodded consent for police to search her car after she allegedly confronted a romantic rival... Her attorney argues that she didn't consent to the search and wasn't advised of her rights before questioning" (Yahoo News, 9/19/2007). By nodding, she was showing that she was listening. He interpreted it to mean she was agreeing. I experienced a similar situation once when having a disagreement with the principal of my children's school. He interpreted my listening noises as agreement and later castigated me for not following through as I had agreed.
Lips (2007) suggests that there is a distinction between asking prompting questions and interrupting in conversational maintenance. "Besides communicating their attention, women also work to keep conversations going by asking questions, responding to what others are saying, and probing for more information. Such behavior aimed at maintaining conversations is less frequently displayed by men" (p. 188). She notes that this is different from interrupting conversation which more often results in undermining communication.
Finally, intensifiers are words like very, really, and vastly. A number of studies have indicated that women use these adverbs more than men do in responding to things they hear (Hyde, 2007, p. 156).
On the reverse side of active listening, women tend to express themselves in a way that invites the same behaviors on the part of the listener. While language features like tag questions, disclaimers, and hedges are often viewed as tentativeness, they are often intended to prompt the listener into producing listening noises, questions, and intensifiers.
Tag questions are short phrases at the end of declarative sentences that turn them into questions. An example would be "This is an interesting topic for my paper, isn't it?" Hyde (2007) refers to a study done by McMillan et al. in 1977 that, "found that the women used about twice as many tag questions as the men" (p. 154). In communication the tag question is the sender's analogue of listening noises. The tag question is the sender's request for confirmation that the message was received. The listening noise is the receiver's response.
Hedges and disclaimers are sometimes taken as indicators of tentativeness (Hyde, 2007, p. 155). Disclaimers are phrases like, "I may be wrong, but...." Hedges are expressions like "kind of" and "sort of." Some research has suggested that more women use hedges and disclaimers than men do. I would contend that like tag questions these are part of the communication protocol that are intended to illicit questions and intensifiers from the receiver. In this way they form a strategy to determine if the people conversing are reaching agreement.
Politeness and non-verbal cues are additional methods that women are said to use in maintaining relationships. One study suggested that politeness is more common in women, but is not clear what the meaning of the results were (Lips, 2007, p. 189). Non-verbal cues include maintaining good eye contact, smiling and facial expressiveness, using non-threatening touch and posture, and maintaining a comfortable interpersonal distance (Hyde, 2007, pp. 159-162; Lips, 2007, pp, 196-199).
In men, establishing and maintaining dominance is said to be accomplished through such behaviors as filled pauses and intrusive interruptions. Additionally eye contact and control of interpersonal distance help manage relationship dominance. In 1989 Dale Spender reported on an informal investigation she had done into the degree of conversational dominance maintained by her male colleagues. Lips (2003) quoted Spender as noting, "I]f [a woman] tries to talk for half the time[, it] feels unfair, rude, and objectionably overbearing." Lips continues, "Spender herself reported that, try as she might, she had never been able to keep the floor for half the interaction with a male academic colleague because when she employed the strategies necessary to keep the floor, no man stayed to talk with her for the 3 minutes she had set as the minimum interaction time" (p. 185).
Conversational dominance is often maintained through two methods. Filled pauses are non-semantic utterances like um and ah which fill up the spaces in conversation and prevent the floor from passing to a different speaker. Intrusive interruptions, in contrast, represent one of the main methods of taking the floor in a conversation.
Men especially tend to use eye contact to establish visual dominance. Hyde (2007) reflects that, "In North American cultures, higher-status people tend to look at the other person while they (the dominant people) are speaking. Lower-status people tend to look at the other person while listening" (p. 162). Similarly, touch is used in the same way. There is a tendency in American culture to "touch down," so that higher-status people touch lower-status people (patting a hand or shoulder or holding an arm), but not the reverse. Lips (2007) indicates that, "Researchers also report that men are more likely to touch women than women to are to touch men—an asymmetry that suggests touch can be an expression of male dominance as well as affection or intimacy" (p. 196). Men also use posture and personal space to express their dominance. Males tend to "spread out" (Lips, p. 197) and they tend to encroach on women's personal space (Hyde, p. 159; Lips, pp. 198f).
There is little support among psychologists for Tannen's hypothesis that these are intrinsic gender differences. Hyde (2007) summarizes, "Findings of gender differences in indicators of tentativeness such as tag questions are inconsistent across studies, and the gender differences are at most small" (p. 155). She further states, "Overall, then, to say that men interrupt more than women do, and that this indicates men's expression of dominance, is not accurate" (p. 157). Tannen (1990) herself acknowledges that these differences are not absolute. "It is not that speaking this way is
the male way of doing things, but that it is
a male way" (Tannen's emphasis, p. 126). As with most studies of gender differences, the most pronounced findings are that gender similarities are more common than differences.
Part of the problem with these theories is that they tend to involve questions of power and dominance which are stereotypically viewed as male as apposed to relating and emotions which are stereotypically seen as female. As such these theories transfer questions about power differential into stereotypical attributions to gender. Neither do they do much to directly address the issues of why men sometimes don't talk about feelings or don't build consensus in problem solving. Barnett and Rivers (2004) emphasize that, "Downplaying power while overemphasizing gender, as Tannen does, translates into practical problems for real women. Not surprisingly, Tannen gives women few useful strategies for addressing communication issues with their partners or at work" (p. 101). All this implies that the real issue is not gender but how our society has structured the power differential to favor men over women. Barnett and Rivers further point out that "Most significantly, of all these factors that influence speech between the sexes, power is the most important. Men and women with less power are more deferential and timid than those of either sex with more power" (p.104).
Perhaps a better way to characterize these two communication styles is to consider the protocols they incorporate. The protocol labeled as women's is a synchronous protocol. That means that the tag question-listening noise, hedge-question, disclaimer-intensifier pairs constitute synchronizing request-responses that ensure the messages sent are the same as the messages received. On the other hand the protocol that has been labeled as men's is an asynchronous protocol where there is no verification expected or given that what was received is the same as what was sent. Synchronous communication is good for accuracy with the cost that it is slower; asynchronous is good for speed but sacrifices accuracy. The significant thing about the asynchronous mode is that in order to get a reasonable level of accuracy, the receiver has to have a high level of attention to the message. This is accomplished through the power differential. The lower power person listens carefully because he or she is required to listen carefully.
In our textbook, Cox (2006) offers a set of suggestions for men and women in order to have a "better, intimate relationship" with each other (p. 140). These lists of ideas are remarkably similar to those put forward by John Gray's
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Barnett and Rivers (2004) criticize that, "Gray's prescriptions leave a woman with only one solution to problems of communication with a man. She has to be the caring, sacrificing, ethereal 'Venusian,' completely tuned in to the wants and needs of others while denying her own. A Venusian can't get angry. She can't criticize. She can't offer to help if he has a problem. She can't ask him to change his behavior. When he withdraws, she can't object. And if she isn't feeling 'loving,' she can't even talk to him" (p. 108). Further, they criticize, "As for men, retreating into 'caves' to avoid connection is plain old passive aggression, which any psychologist can tell you always creates tensions" (p. 109).
While some of Cox's suggestions are simply common sense, others are far from it. They are at the same time really only a surface treatment of behaviors that are symptomatic of an unhealthy power differential that lies behind them. Of far greater value to the relationship would be finding a way to equalize the power dynamic.
Studies that have looked at gendered differences in communication style have been mixed and, as in other areas, similarities outweigh differences. Most of the effects that have been described as gender differences are related to the power differentials in relationships. In many situations the gender difference model has undermined dealing with the power dynamics in relationships. As such, while many of these effects are seen in the everyday world, change can only come by recognizing that they are not the result of gender differences.
References
Barnett, R. C., & Rivers, C. (2004).
Same Difference, How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs. New York: Basic Books.
Cox, F. D. (2006).
Human Intimacy, Marriage, the Family, and Its Meaning. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth.
Hyde, J. S. (2007).
Half the Human Experience, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Lips, H. M. (2003).
A New Psychology of Women, Boston: McGraw Hill.
Tannon, D. (1990).
You Just Don't Understand! Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Harper.
Yahoo News (9/19/2007).
Ex-astronaut wants evidence tossed out. Retrieved from the Web September 19, 2007.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070919/ap_on_re_us/ astronaut_arrested;_ylt=AjEXQOTb.disvBVN_EmBz_RI2ocA
