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GENDER AND COMMUNICATION STYLES ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB
(C)Tami Sutcliffe, 1998Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Library Science in the Graduate School of Texas Woman's University, December 1998.
Access the original document at http://homepages.waymark.net/~bikechic/gender.html
How is gender a factor in communication?
One way human communication has been investigated is by examining failure. What literally happens when people are unable to decipher their messages to each other? Why are some people seemingly unable to communicate with others? Are there specific patterns that might explain why one human is not successful in exchanging ideas with another individual? After sifting through myriad factors including age, social position, speech traits and environmental aspects, researchers have isolated gender as one possible point of contention in the study of communication over the last ten years.
Deborah Tannen, a noted linguist, proposes that women and men speak differently in face-to-face conversation because human children are socially molded and trained to speak separate languages, based on their sex. She dissects the patterns of interruption, deferral, apology, and argument that make up ordinary adult conversation and supports the notion that socialization has created a clear difference in the way humans of different genders interact (Tannen 1993).
Theoretical offshoots of this socialization theory argue that existing power structures, whether economic, ideological or political, automatically value and support their own communication style, reducing the value of any "inferior" communication traits. Betty Friedan suggests that language itself, the everyday utterances of most human beings today, has been invented, controlled, and defined by a particular power structure. This would explain why women are trained to defer, apologize, hesitate, and smile while men are encouraged to interrupt, argue, command, and "speak up." (Friedan 1997).
Other gender-based theories imply that there are spiritual differences related to human gender: that women have intangible, emotional qualities that men lack and vice versa. These biologically-based theories are often interwoven with interpretations of the "value" of these differences and the expression of variations. "Good" men express themselves in certain patterns, just as "bad" women do and so on. This approach assumes that each individual is wholly one gender or the other, suggesting that "imposters" should be easy to recognize and that there are recognizable patterns shaped by the gender of the communicator which do not generally alter throughout a communicator's life (Gilligan 1982).
Susan Herring has taken this concept a step further, studying how men and women communicate with each other when they cannot directly determine the gender of their audience. Her study group was made up of adults posting to electronic discussion groups and her research supports the idea that even though these humans cannot see each other (and so miss many of the physical cues about gender and status), it is still possible to pinpoint specifically gendered forms of communication. "My basic claim has two parts: first, that women and men have recognizably different styles in posting to the Internet and second, that women and men have different communicative ethics-- that is, they value different kinds of online interactions as appropriate and desirable" (Herring 1994).
Herring concludes that male messages are generally longer, more aggressive, and more likely to contain argumentative or authoritarian language than the messages from the women within the same group. Men also made up more than 70 percent of the active respondents in the observed groups, even when equal numbers of both men and women subscribed-- and even when the topics where specifically women-oriented. The women in Herring's study tended to apologize frequently, ask for group input, and submit far shorter messages. Their focus was on forming and maintaining the community, even at the risk of reducing or eliminating their individual roles.
Another approach to explaining the effects of gender in communication relates to the perceived audience. Does your perception of the gender of the person you are communicating with shape your message even further? Cyberspace has historically been predominantly male, although to what degree depended on the specific location. CompuServe has estimated its female membership at twenty five percent for the last several years, AOL claims thirty eight to forty percent, and best estimates are that women make up about one-third of Internet users (CompuServe 1998).
A critical aspect of this approach suggests that the communicators' perception of her audience is at least as important as her own gender. "Just as when in Rome most people do as Romans do, the behavior of women and men depends as much on the gender they are interacting with than on anything intrinsic about the gender they are. In other words, the difference between men and women online may not be determined by their own gender but by the gender they believe their correspondents are" (Grossman 1997). This would mean that women attempting to communicate only with other women might use entirely contrasting techniques than men would use when communicating with other men. A final aspect of gender in communication is the possibility of its elimination in an electronic environment. Carol Tavris has challenged much of the scientific evidence purporting to show that women and men are intrinsically different:
Are women really kinder, gentler, and more interconnected with people and the environment than men are? Are the qualities of peacefulness and connection to others endemic to female nature, or are they a result of the nurturing, caretaking work that women do because of their social and family roles? For that matter, are these qualities truly more characteristic of women than men, or are they merely human archetypes--stereotypes of female and male--that blur when we look more closely at actual human beings? (1992, 50.) Might it be theoretically possible to eliminate all traces of gender specificity in electronic communication? Is this desirable? How much of each person's identity is intrinsically gender-based and how much of that identity can be "neutralized" in an electronic landscape? Traditional human communication stereotypes have evolved over long periods of time. Eliminating such deep-seated, often subconscious, human perceptions would seem to require a massive shift on the psychological scale. Donnelly proposes that new electronic environments may allow and even provoke such a widespread shift in perception:
The very technologies of communication cause social change, regardless of their content or intended use. Certainly one of the compelling facts of history is that major developments in communications technology create, or cause, new social structures to come into being. This was true of writing, printing and broadcasting, and it will be true of the new electronics. (1986, 112)
Is it possible that the social constructs which define gender-based communication styles might be disregarded in Cyberspace? Could people effectively communicate without the clues and cues of gender-based codes? This study proposes to examine how a small number of separate individuals manipulate the existing gender-defined communication styles in Cyberspace, specifically within the confines of gender-related topic sites, in the vastness of the World Wide Web.
Last Updated: December 2003
Copyright © 1999 Tami Sutcliffe
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