engleski

Gender differences in communication patterns - do we find them only in the eye of a beholder?

The discussion about gender differences in language started almost 50 years ago (Lakoff, 1975) and has continued till today. The arguments for the discussion about gender differences in communication can be found in numerous interdisciplinary studies. Consequently, today a lot is known about gender differences in language, communication, and leadership, but each of the disciplines only tentatively supports the conclusion about their existence. Therefore, the aim of this presentation is to address the current findings on gender differences in order to set path for future studies that would be based on stronger conclusions and, hopefully have higher applicability in the educational context. Eagly and Johnson (1990) claim that differences in leadership style are found only in laboratory context i.e. experimental setting, and that, similarly to other social behaviors, the gender difference is only one of the variables of person’s behavioral patterns. Canary and Hause (1993) conclude that no more studies on gender differences in communication should be conducted if they are not thoroughly redesigned, since no firm and consistent results in communicative patterns were found. The change of research direction should include no use of scales and measures based on gender stereotypes, but rather focus on communication and sex/gender as a dependent variable.This means that humans do not show differences in communication due to their sex differences, but due to the communication need to convey gender. The results from a large study of 14 000 text samples (Newman et. al., 2008) have shown that language differences are rather small but systematic when function words are analyzed, which again doesn’t reveal much about communicative intentions, meaning and style. Meta- analyses reveal that conclusions from most of the studies on gender differences strongly depend on the research methods and study design, as well as on the theoretical framework which is often not based on communication but on other social behaviours. It seems that gender differences can be confirmed by experimental results only if the perspective on differences is changed from gender originating to gender communicating.

gender differences, communication, language, leadership

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