Common Discrepancies Between Communication of Men and Women
- Facial Cues
- Different Forms of Touching
- Body Postures
- Emotion and Rationale
- Explicit Versus Implicit Feedback
As workplace environments continue to get more diverse and minimize issues of inequality, the communication styles experienced in these environments are also changing. For instance, the fact that women are just as likely to hold positions of leadership has brought awareness to many differences between male and female forms of expression. Read on to understand the communications differences you may see on a daily basis.
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1. Facial Cues
Whilst both men and women have to ability to demonstrate thousands of facial expressions, men are more likely to use just a few of them when talking. Women, on the other hand, tend to leverage hundreds of facial expressions that can depict their emotions and understanding perfectly. Their male counterparts often replace those facial expressions with other forms of non-verbal cues such as body language or stance. This is obviously not a positive or negative trait of either side. It is simply a common difference that may become apparent to someone who pays close attention.
2. Different Forms of Touching
The next difference is usually going to fall into the category of proximity and touching. With men, conversations tend to carry a lot of pats and a fair share of personal space. Women are much more open to giving their speaking counterparts a hug and staying closer. One of the key factors behind this is the idea of masculinity that gets instilled into males from an early age. Namely, they are often taught to express strength by avoiding formal expressions of emotions. This tends to affect a lot of aspects of their lives, including speaking.
3. Body Postures
Another very obvious non-verbal cue where these two groups will differ includes body postures. Men are much more likely to take a wide stance and make broad hand gestures. Women tend to keep their legs crossed and avoid over-gesturing as their hands stay close to their body. Doing so allows them to feel safer in any given situation. Nonetheless, female speakers who do rely on various forms of gestures tend to be much more fluent and smooth. Men often take advantage of very sharp movements that may not be as cohesive and effortless.
4. Emotion and Rationale
According to the Huffington Post, the trade-off between emotion and rationale between male and female speakers is quite noticeable. Males tend to be more analytical and pragmatic with their communication objectives. This puts them on the rationale side of the spectrum and they tend to fail to acknowledge important emotions. Women are the very opposite as they prioritize emotion and empathetic listening. Unfortunately, that sometimes interferes with their analytical approach and pragmatic goals. Regardless, both of these assumptions are broad generalizations that will clearly not apply to everyone.
5. Explicit Versus Implicit Feedback
Finally, women tend to be much more explicit and clear when it comes to giving feedback. While men may simply end entire conversations with a casual nod, female speakers are usually not comfortable with such a high level of non-verbal expression. Instead, they prefer to vocalize their conclusions and ideas in a way that is very explicit. Saying that males are at a disadvantage in this area would not be a far-reaching statement. After all, implicit agreements are one of the most common causes of misunderstandings or conversation ambiguities.
All of these discrepancies are massively oversimplified and do not apply to every single person from each group. Instead, they are just examples of how communication styles might be modified by each of the genders.