Getting Together and Talking about it

Our GenderGurus come to this project with a variety of experiences and personal strengths.  Some have struggled to maintain clear communication in the rarefied air of medical offices and power stations; while others have sometimes lost the plot when trying to communicate with troops in the army.

So while there is ample evidence  to suggest there are genuine differences between the ways in which we make ourselves understood; we also bring to this project our personal experiences of getting it so wrong.

We can argue all night about whether our differences are caused by biology or society – but what impacts on our ability to understand each other is the practical outcome of either biology or society.

If I said that men and women mean different things when they nod while listening, how many of you would immediately scoff? 

“What rubbish, we understand each perfectly – we nod to agree!”  Well, you might do so – but I do not.  Mind you, if anyone had asked me about ten years ago I would have agreed too; but experience has shown me that I can have an entirely different reason for listening to a speaker and nodding.

Let me explain.

As a Warrant Officer in the army I often mentored junior officers.  One day a very young and nervous Second Lieutenant was due to give an important presentation on his planned project to Senior Officers.  He sat in my office, a total wreck and of course I supported and encouraged him – and told him that I would be there urging him on.

And so we proceeded; during his presentation the young officer kept glancing at me, and I was encouraging him to keep going,  “Go on” I mentally urged him, nodding my head in support; “You’re doing fine, keep it up”  I thought; nodding my head encouragingly.

Finally he finished his presentation and sat down.  The Commander then asked for my input – and unfortunately while I supported his presentation, I did not support his ideas or his plan.  I subsequently stood up and spoke out against it.  He was devastated and later accused me of deliberately making him look a fool.

“Why” he exclaimed in anger “did you sit there nodding and agreeing with me, if you were going to shoot me down in flames.”

It was made clear to me that my nodding to encourage him to continue had been taken to mean that I was in agreement with him.  One common, mutual piece of body language had been completely misunderstood by both of us.

I assumed that he would realise that my nodding meant I was encouraging him to continue; he assumed that by nodding I was agreeing with him.

Now the reason for the misunderstanding could be academic, cultural, social or whatever – but the outcome was specific, it was total misunderstanding which led to a severe breakdown in trust and credibility.

We had to talk this problem through before we could both come to an understanding of what went wrong.

Too often our own preconceived attitude can impact on the way we communicate; and we both, men and women, can buy into the stereotyping – ‘Oh men never listen’ -  or ‘why do women keep going round in circles?’

We do nothing to solve the problems when we help to perpetuate the assumptions; and we do this by complaining to those we know will agree with us.

Because men will complain about the impossibility ever of understanding women – to other men!

While women will share their amazement at the way that men completely miss the point – with other women.

In my example, the young officer could have gone back to the mess and found a willing male audience to agree and condemn me.  While I could have shared my confusion with my fellow female soldiers who, I know, would have understood it perfectly.

What actually sorted the problem out for us was our willingness to talk the situation through and to explain exactly what we had meant..  When that was clear to both of us, I knew that nodding would be taken as agreement; while he understood that he needed to clarify if I was really agreeing or merely encouraging.

In the GenderGurus project, what we are trying to do is exactly that.  We bring our own experiences to demonstrate that we cannot make assumptions about what we each mean.  That just because one gender means one thing, it does not follow that it is understood that way by the other!

We must get together and talk about whether Gender Communication is all that different, and we must do it together.  Only then can we get that light bulb moment that says “Oh NOW I get it!”

Do Men and Women really communicate differently?

In 1992 John Grey published his best seller ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’ which seemed to indicate that not only did men and women communicate very differently, but they were actually interplanetary aliens.

It seemed to make sense of the age old complaints that ‘women never get to the point’ and ‘men never listen!’ 

But even as the multitude of articles, books and workshops swept the globe, dissenting voices arose.

‘What nonsense!! In actual fact there is no difference in the way we communicate!’ was heard rumbling in the undergrowth, and in 2007 the defiant question ‘What Language Barrier’  was flung at an unsuspecting public by Deborah Cameron in an article in the UK newspaper, the Guardian.

Deborah was scathing about the Mars and Venus factor and deprecating about even the possibility that we have a gender difference in our communication styles. Of course she had a book to publicise [The Myth of Mars and Venus*] – but she is probably the most quoted of the ‘anti-gender-difference’ authors. 

Deborah is imminently qualified to speak on languages as she holds the Rupert Murdoch Professorship in Language and Communication at Worcester College, University of Oxford; but her expertise is in linguistics rather than behavioural sciences.

And by dismissing the analogy of Mars and Venus as a myth, she overlooks much of what myths mean to us.  In her book Women Who Run With The Wolves*, author Clarissa Estes claims that all ancient stories or myths began with someone’s experience and were an attempt to relate what occurred to them.  Our myths are our simple human attempt to put us into perspective and to make sense of the confusion around us.

And denying, as she does, that there are any difference in our communication she dismisses the very personal experiences that women and men have brought as evidence that there is indeed a difference, not only in our communication but also in our thinking process.

Communication is the way in which we convey our ideas and our thoughts; these are peculiar to us and are directed not only by our genes, but by our culture and our socialising. As a linguist Deborah Cameron would be fully aware that words have double meanings, there is the dictionary one which we can look up and holds generally true, [denotative] and there is the personal experiential meaning which is specific to us.[conative].

The way we interpret words is enormously affected by a number of personal and specific experiences and factors.  Those factors for boys and girls can be very different owing to cultural and social differences. 

In fact the differences can be so profound as to lead to serious questions about the way in which the sexes are treated in such important areas as law for instance.

In 2005 Katherine Baker  issued her paper Gender and Emotion in Criminal Law,  in which she argues that the law’s ignorance of gender differences is detrimental to women’s chances of receiving justice.

‘The doctrines that tend to excuse typically masculine emotional outbursts, the heat of passion excuse and self-defense, fail to provide a responsive framework for understanding women’s emotional experiences’

All our communication is an attempt to convey our thoughts, emotions and our experiences; and if those are different then our communication must by its nature reflect those differences.

Katherine also highlights a host of reasons why we experience such differing views of the world and our place in it. If our communication aims to reflect our emotional state, perhaps it might be affected by the way in which men and women process emotion

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‘For example’ she says ‘the larger proportion of the cerebral cortex devoted to emotional modulation observed in female brains may relate to differences in the ways men and women process emotions.’ ( See Ruben C. Gur et al., Sex Differences in Temporolimbic and Frontal Brain Volumes of Healthy Adults, 12 Cerebral Cortex 998, 998, 1001 (2002).

The very nature of the biological difference between men and women, mean that we may relate to things like stress in very different ways.

‘Numerous studies have shown that men and women respond differently to hormones during times of stress.’ (See infra text accompanying notes 61–63 (discussing effects of oxytocin and other hormones). See Shelley E. Taylor, The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing Is Essential for Who We Are and How We Live 20–34 (2002) (describing biological processes supporting the hypothesis that females, unlike males, “tend and befriend” in response to stress).

Although Deborah Cameron pours scorn on the Mars and Venus Myth she does admit that ‘the relationship between the sexes is not only about difference but also about power. The long standing expectation that women will serve and care for others is not unrelated to their position as the ‘second sex.’

She recognises that women have been culturally expected to behave differently.  Many organisations and companies still maintain the hierarchal masculine historical structure which many women find so difficult to break into.

As Katherine again highlights that there is evidence that we even think about ourselves differently:

“Beyond these studies, various researchers have suggested that, whereas men tend to think in terms of autonomy and separation, women are more likely to think in terms of connection”  and her footnote goes on to say ‘As Carrie Menkel-Meadow summarizes, “[t]he common theme that unites [the] body of work by psychologists such as Chodorow, Dinnerstein, Miller, Shaef and . . . Gilligan, is that women experience themselves through connections and relationships to others while men see themselves as separately identified individuals.” Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Portia in a Different Voice: Speculations on a Women’s Lawyering Process, 1 Berkeley Women’s L.J. 39, 43 (1985).

Of course the one difference between us that is never in doubt is the fact that women experience pregnancy and child-birth; and with that goes ‘women’s traditional assumption of disproportionate caretaking responsibilities,’

As you can see; there is very much scientific evidence to show that there are a host of difference between men and the women; and those differences can arise from a number of reasons.

The GenderGurus agree with Katherine Baker when she says

 ‘At this stage of our knowledge about the differences between men and women, it is probably irresponsible to attribute generalized differences to any one cause. However, it is equally irresponsible to assume no difference just because the differences are not automatic or we are not sure where they come from or because we just never bother to notice them.’

The problem is not whether there are differences; the problem is how do we cope with the fact that we share lives without the real understanding that we approach even the most personal of experiences from different angles. 

Misunderstanding of the way in which we each structure our communication can lead to stress and frustration in both our professional and our personal lives.

Many companies already understand the importance of good communication skills within the workplace and have ensured that their staff are trained in the concepts of public speaking and presentation skills.  They are all too well aware of the cost to the business of getting it wrong.

But what about the unspoken problem: the problem of misunderstanding the way in which men and women construct their communication and the styles which are associated with both? This too can have a profound effect on the way that business is conducted, and not only does it affect the efficiency of the company, it is also one of the main causes of stress – the main reason for absenteeism in Australia today.

The GenderGurus not only know how misunderstanding differences can wreck relationships, but also how it can impact on the effectiveness of an organisation due to its impact on morale as well as on profitability; and we want to share our experiences and our hard won knowledge on the subject of Mars and Venus – but we want to bring them back to earth, because that’s where we both really live.

And our message to you is that we cannot change our gender, but we certainly can learn to change our communication style.

Bibliography

Cameron, Deborah. ‘The Myth of Mars and Venus’ 2007 published, Oxford University Press
Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’, 1996, Random House Australia.