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Gender Differences in Communication
All of us have different styles of communicating with other people. Our style depends on a lot of things. For instance, where we are from, how and where we were brought up, our educational background, our age, and it also depends 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 genders. When many people mistakenly think men and women are the same, our relationships are filled with unrealistic expectations because men and women are totally different. Although both men and women use language to make points and solve problems, women also use language to discover what they want to say, to talk out their feelings, and often to experience greater intimacy. The style that men and women use to communicate have been described as debate vs. relate 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.
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. They tend to assume that men could sit down and listen to them and understand their feelings. Unfortunately, it is not true. Men can love their wives but do not want to spend time with them. Actually, men rarely talked about their personal relationships and feelings but compete to prove themselves better informed about current affairs, travel, sports, etc.. The topics change often and men try to “over time, establish a reasonably stable hierarchy, with some men dominating conversation and others talking very little”.
Nowadays, internet is so popular, many people like to get online. Actually, men and women have different gender language style on the internet. According to a study, the larger the proportion of men in discussion groups, the more the members will use language that states facts without personal ownership, challenges group members, class for explicit action is argumentative, uses coarse and abusive language and indicates the members status. On the other hand, the larger the proportion of women and smaller proportion of men in discussion groups, the more the members will use language that self-discloses, state personal ownership of opinion, apologize, ask questions, use “we” pronouns, respond directly to others in the group, and seek to prevent or alleviate tension or arguments.
Answer for the Questions:
When the first time I browse this site, I also think that the context of it, is kind of gender stereotyping. Actually, the topic of this site is gender differences in communication but I can say that this site is mainly for humors. Some people would say that this site is too subjective. In some ways, I agree with them but not totally. Because I also believe that he just generalizes the ways of how male and female talks. Certainly, everyone has his or her characteristic or personality. I can't 100 percent sure that male would talk like that and female would talk like that. But generally speaking, he uses jokes to emphasize some extreme cases. I would say that he doesn't use a serious way to discuss the topic of his site. Actually, he also put some links in his site and those links talk about gender communication too. Most of them are reports of some researches about gender communication in our daily lives or on the internet. For instance, some researches prove that males tend to use more aggressive words and language than females on the internet. Personally, I don't feel that many people would change their behaviors much between the reality world and internet. In some cases, perhaps some people would become very active or talkative on the internet but they never did that in front of people. I would say that those are extreme cases. I tried to ask my several friends whether they would behave in different ways on the internet. Most of their answers were "no difference". Only two people said, Maybe a little bite different". Of course, I don't have any study or statistic to prove that. Hopefully, I will find out some information about this issue on the internet.