Introduction
Gender related communication refers to issues that effect men or women and whether the differences in gender that are evident in face to face communication also extend to other media and research papers. The basic idea is that men and women tend to communicate differently. For the same set of sentences, men would see a totally different image than a woman and this causes needless friction and strained relations when communicating with a mixed gender group. This paper would analyse two journal articles that are related to gender related communication and find out the logic and if there are any flaws.
Main body
Rossetti (1997) argues that right from the childhood age, boys learn about aggression as a means to obtain domination over friends and peer groups while girls tend to be more cooperative and docile. When the children grow up and start working, unfortunately this tendency seems to remain. While men tend to be sharp, aggressive in their communication, and more intent on scoring points and gaining an upper hand, women tend to use communication as a means to heal and reach out to people and the language seems less aggressive. The author noted that women have a tendency to use qualifying words such as if, but, though, probably, I think, you, us, we and I.
Men tend to use intensifiers in their communication and use words such as always, very, only and every. When these words are taken in a sentence, the context can change and the miscommunication can result. However, there is one flow in this argument since the way a person speaks and communicates is moulded to a great extent by the family culture, values, education, social background and the work culture where one works. These influences are known to cause a deep rooted change and in fact, there are many courses on effective communication and public speaking where language and diction and the manner in which ideas should be put forth in a socially acceptable manner, are taught. The author has ignored these factors.
Allen (1991) has written about the extra efforts taken by organizations to ensure that the communications sent forth are checked for all possible factors that can injure feelings or ones that tend to cause miscommunication. However, the author contends that such sterilized communications are actually official communications that are sent and the situation is different in one to one communications that include emails and discussions. The author contends that men in general try to be assertive and when asked to give out ideas, actually give ‘commands’ even though they may not be in a position of authority. Women on the other hand try to give out suggestions by using we, probably, could be and so on. The intention of men is not to give commands but just that they feel if their ideas are taken more seriously when spoken forcefully. Women on the other hand use such communication tactics to subtly force their opinion. However, the author tends to ignore the context in which these communication take place. When something concrete has to be done, then a more direct communication approach would work. When a broad level strategy is to be set, then a suggestion approach would work.
Conclusion
The paper has analysed gender related communication from two journals to find how men communicate differently from women. The paper concludes that men often take a personal and aggressive form of communication approach while women tend to use suggestion to force the results in theirfavor.
References
Allen Jo, 1991. Gender Issues in Technical Communication Studies. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 5(4), pp. 371-392.
Rossetti Paolo, 1997. Gender issues on the information highway: An analysis of communication styles in electronic discussion groups. Business Communication Quarterly, 59(4), p.p: 36-46.