Entry 7 : Cross-Gender

Last session's topic was on cross gender interaction, and I personally felt that it was one of the more interesting sessions as we delved into the inherent differences between the way a man and a woman communicate.


There are a couple of stereotypes which do hold true, whilst some on the other hand have been debunked. Stereotypes like the perception that women speak more than men have been debunked. Studies have shown that men indeed do speak more than women. This is especially the case during public speaking or speaking up in class as was mentioned during the previous lecture. After attending last week's lecture, I have become more aware that these studies do indeed hold some truth. As a finance major, I realise that predominantly, the probability of male students speaking up in finance classes especially is higher than that of female students. This might be due to the impression that Finance is more of a masculine field, as a result, masculine traits like assertiveness as mentioned in the lecture on Cultural Components and Representation might prevail.

Another facet of last week's lecture which I would like to comment on, is the degree of back chanel support which women provide in comparison to men. Back channel support refers to the verbal and non verbal feedback provided by the listeners. Women tend to be ready givers of listener responses. When engaged in conversation with another person, they tend to provide feedback by uttering conversation prompters or fillers like "hmmm", "mmm", "yeahh" and through their body language like nodding, smiling or other facial expressions. This shows that the woman is actively involved in the conversation and her full attention is being devoted to the conversation.

I believe that a certain degree of listener responses must be present in order for the speaker to feel that the listener is being actively engaged in the conversation. Otherwise, the speaker would tend to feel a tad bit un-appreciated and that he might even be boring the socks off the listener. Which hopefully, is not the desired intention! On the other hand, it is important to be sincere in interactions and to be firmly aware of the various impacts of both verbal and non verbal communication.