Male-Female Communication

Let’s face it: whoever you talk to, it’s going to be a man or a woman. And, since the chances are 50-50 that that other person will be a different gender than you are, you need to know that your way of communication may not be the same. Many experts attest to that difference, but even so, even if men and women have two different ways of communicating, shouldn’t we focus less on the difference and, instead, try to learn each other’s "language?"

Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation, uses the terms report and rapport to describe male-female communication. Men report, she says. They work with facts and figures in order to convey or obtain information, to strip away the details and get down to the bare bones of the problem. Women, on the other hand, want others to understand the complexity of the information and the situation, and in that effort toward understanding, work at establishing a rapport and building a relationship.

It benefits no one to emphasize the differences in male-female communication, but it does help to understand that there are those differences. Deborah Tannen says: "Male-female conversation is cross-cultural conversation." That may be true, but in an age when so many cultures in the world are striving to improve communication, shouldn’t we also be working on our daily communication — at home and in the workplace.

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