Gender Differences In Communication

The present thesis is an attempt to examine gender related differences in communication. It tries to analyze manifestations of gender differences from three aspects. It also attempts to explain the cause of gender differences in communications.Men and women pay attention to various things in their daily lives. They focus on different topics in communication. Their purposes of communications are not the same. Women focus on the affective meaning of an interaction more often than men do. Relationship between the speakers varies. Women approach the world as an individual in a network of connections. They are held to be more sensitive, warm, appreciative and helpful. Men live in a hierarchical world. They are believed to be more egocentric, dominant, competitive and aggressive.Women use more standard forms than men from the same social group in the same social context. Standard pronunciations are used by women. More intonation patterns involving a rising intonation are found in their language. Their vocabulary is different from that of men. They favor words, such as, imprecise intensifiers, expression of emotions, euphamisms for certain expressions. Men are more likely to use hostile words , profanity and strong expletives. Women prefer parataxis, while men prefer hypotaxis. Women's syntax is more standard than men's.Women are more cooperative in conversations. However, men are more forceful. Women and men perform different discourse strategies in communications. There is an age-old belief that women talk muchmore than men, but in fact study after study has shown that it is men who talk more - at meetings, in mixed-group discussions, and in classrooms. Hedges and tag questions were thought to be related with unassertiveness and were thought to be women's characteristic way of speaking. This is based on the assumption there is one-to-one relationship between linguistic form and extra-linguistic factor. Further investigations show that any strategy may serve several functions.Gender difference in language involves many factors. The first is social position. In the world of men, women are not accorded the same social status as men, in spite of laws designed to prevent sex-based discrimination. Men are seen to have more social power than women. The society expects women to be more standard and obedient. This is shown in women's language. The second subcultures, from the day of birth, boys and girls are expected to develop in different ways. Women and men carry over to their adulthood the conversational patterns they learned from interacting with their same-sex peers during childhood. Boys and girls grow up in different worlds, but we think we are in the same one, so we judge each other's behavior by the standards of our own. Miscommunications are bound to happen in conversation. Gender difference should be seen in all aspects.