Monday, June 22, 2009

Week 4: Post 2- Gender Differences at Work

According to the book: “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus” it is said that men and women communicate differently. On page 204 of our text book it mentions that men engage in: “report talk”, it is a style of speaking that: demonstrates knowledge, skill and ability, instrumentality, conversational command, direct and assertive expressions, abstract terms over personal experience. For women, they build relationships using “rapport talk”, which emphasizes: demonstrating equality through matching experiences, providing support and responsiveness, conversational maintenance, tentativeness, personal, concrete details. I highly agree with the text book on how men and women communicate differs. I also like how the author through in the book: “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus”, it was a highly talked about books in the 90s for major media outlets.

3 comments:

  1. Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus is a very popular book that has been around and very successful. I definitely agree as well when it says that men tend to speak with more of a "report talk" and women tend to speak with more of a "rapport talk". Men usually try and act very knowledgeable about a subject almost like they are competing with the other person in a conversation while women tend to be very good listeners and also very supportive when having a conversation. Women try and use similar experiences and do tend to use a lot of detail. It is said that women talk much more than men and much faster.

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  2. Hello, Miss Potato! I also think the book is interesting but partially agree with "genderizing" communication styles because I occasionally deploy both identities respectively to communicate better. For example, when I (a woman) am teaching in class at a college or doing academic activities at SJSU, my communication identity tends to turn masculine with "report talk," but when I chat with my friends or family members (especially my babies), I have "rapport talk." Recently, Japan has encountered a peculiar gender-confusion issue that young men who are said to be equivalent to grass-eating animalns (versus carnivores), called "grass-eating boys," appear pervasively. They are very psssive, quiet, and less motivated, and they prefer strong women like meat-eating animals, called "meat-eating girls," to lead and take care of them. The reason why such a phenomenon has occurred is that the men are tired of surviving in the tough unemployment context caused by the economic crisis. I'm wondering whether boys in the U.S. are turning "grass-eating boys" or not. I think these kind of issues, including communication difference between men and women, is rooted and controlled deeply in the backgrounds and contexts of the communicators.

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  3. While I think I can agree with the fact that most men and women communicate differently, I don't think that I could ever generalize the groups so heavily and agreeing with the book. I would say that the observations from the book are amusing at the least, and I would even say that these observations are true of many people.

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