Gender & Communication

The question of how gender affects communication has been a hot topic for a long time, and it’s one that comes up fairly often in our workshops. After a recent presentation we gave, one woman came up to us and asked whether certain communication patterns commonly break down along gender lines. In particular, she was curious about the complaint-proposal pattern (see our earlier posts on this topic, starting here). It seemed to her that at least in heterosexual couples, it was often the female who complained and the male who made proposals.

Our first, superficial answer is: That may be true. We haven’t done any formal research, but from our own experience, we have observed a variety of gender differences in communication patterns. If such differences do exist, we could speculate about possible reasons why. An individual’s communication might be influenced by any or all of the following gender-related factors:

• Imitation and social influences. Whether consciously or unconsciously, girls may model their communication styles after those of their female relatives and female peer groups, and boys may do the same with other males. We could imagine, for example, that females might observe and imitate a tendency to ask more personal questions, while males might be exposed to less personal, topic-focused questions.

• Neurophysiological differences. Women and men differ significantly in the relative size and activity of various regions of the brain, as well as in the flow of hormones that influence brain activity. If, as some have speculated, women have a larger proportion of mirror neurons (brain cells involved in empathy, feeling what another person is feeling), this might lead them to use more mirroring communication than men. (See our last post for an explanation of mirroring.) As another example, men’s larger amygdala (which triggers aggression, among other things) and smaller prefrontal cortex (which helps keep the amygdala in check) could potentially lead to a greater tendency to verbally attack and blame others.

• Larger social structures. The woman at our presentation raised the possibility that a relatively lower status in a particular organization, or in the society as a whole, may make females more likely to complain. There might very well be some truth in this. Complaints are associated with a sense of helplessness. In a situation where men have significantly more power and influence, women may experience more of that helplessness and therefore tend to complain more. (In a situation where women had greater power, the communication patterns may be reversed.)

Any of these speculations could be tested by research, using SAVI coding and other tools. (In coding, we record the SAVI behaviors being used every 3 seconds to get a comprehensive view of a communication pattern.) For instance, we could code conversations in largely male-led vs. female-led companies to test for gender differences in the frequency of complaints.

Certainly, looking at the impact of gender can give us a new perspective on what causes communication to succeed or fail. How useful is this perspective? We’d argue that it brings both benefits and risks. Potential benefits include:

• Greater patience and tolerance. Say we find solid evidence that men have an inherent neurophysiological disadvantage in mirroring. The men among us who don’t mirror feelings very well could take heart that this is not an isolated, personal failing. Meanwhile, the women in their lives might be somewhat more patient and forgiving as they struggle to develop that capacity. In general, seeing all of our unproductive communication habits in a larger context — influenced by powerful biological and social forces — might help us to take them less personally.

• Increased social awareness. If we can isolate factors that contribute to communication problems, we can take steps to mitigate their effects. For instance, if we learn that boys don’t get much exposure to a particular type of useful communication, we can make a special effort to teach it to them. We could even use communication patterns as a warning sign of deeper structural problems. If a link does exist between power imbalances and complaints, frequent complaining by female (or male) employees in a particular department or organization could suggest that women (or men) are disempowered within that group.

Now for the risks. These are not arguments for ignoring gender issues, just cautions about the types of conclusions we draw and the way we apply them to individual cases. Potential dangers include:

• Overestimating the role of gender-related factors. Gender is only one factor among many that may influence how a person communicates. Whatever we can say about how men and women differ in general, those findings will never apply to all individuals or all situations.

• Viewing gender-influenced tendencies as fixed. When we start to analyze communication in terms of what women do and what men do, there’s a danger of seeing these as fixed — simply determined by evolution or our hormones or our culture. In fact, no matter what caused us to communicate the way we do now, we can always learn to do things differently in the future,

• Focusing on people rather than behavior. This brings us back to a key principle in SAVI: what causes a conversation to succeed or fail is not who the people are (their gender, personality traits, motivation, etc.), but rather what the people do. Certain ways of communicating (complaining, Yes-butting, asking leading questions, etc.) will tend to cause trouble no matter who uses them. If a couple gets stuck in a complaint-proposal cycle, it doesn’t matter who’s complaining and who’s proposing. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see people switch roles in these sorts of patterns — one day Carol complains and Jim responds with proposals, and the next day Jim starts complaining and Carol makes proposals.

It may turn out that considerations of gender are most useful to us when we’re trying to understand why people have developed particular patterns of communicating. When it comes to trying to change patterns that are already established, we can take a more unisex approach. Our basic underlying strategy for changing communication behavior — supported by research in neuroscience (see our earlier post) — is perfectly egalitarian. No matter who you are and what factors shaped your ways of communicating, the key is to address whatever you’re doing right now that’s not working: build an awareness of what you’re doing; find a new, more constructive alternative; and practice that new alternative again and again, until it becomes the new norm. In this way, you can work to improve your conversations not just with the opposite sex, but with every person in your life.