Gender Communication in the Workplace

This post is in response to this video.

The first issue that jumped out at me was the way in which the project manager, Terry, seemed to demand things from her employees. Regardless of the cultural and gender differences between her and her employees, it’s a generally bad idea to be demanding of the people you’re working with. It’s good to expect things from your employees, but to expect that the people you’re working with are responsible for everything that goes wrong is going to breed in your co-workers an inability to trust you. They won’t want to come to you for help because they’ll expect that you’re going to just blame them for the problems, instead of supporting and empowering them to find the solution themselves.

Terry also seemed uninterested in the actual reasons there were problems. She asked what the problems were, but didn’t allow her employees room to explain the issues. Had Carlos been allowed to explain the system of compadres that were in place, the problem with the equipment would have been avoided. Instead, Terry ignored the advice that Carlos gave--clearly not caring about his opinion or experience. There is nothing so demoralizing as thinking that the person you’re working for doesn’t respect your opinions--they don’t have to agree with you, but they should at least be interested and explore what issues come up.

In a gender communications context, women and men are often socialized to communicate differently; when Miguel spoke about how his culture uses a lot of body language and other nonverbal communication, I was reminded of the section in our text which went over how men and women often utilize different communication styles. Obviously, if two people are “speaking two different languages” (communicating differently), there will be roadblocks to effective communication. If one party is unable or unwilling to adapt to the communication style of the person they’re engaging in communication with, communication will break down, and problems like what we saw in the video will occur.

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I'm including my response to a student's response to the video here because it's so short:
I agree that the video focuses primarily on cultural differences, but I think if you think of men and women as coming from different cultures, this video becomes applicable to gender communications. Of course, the analogy isn't airtight, as men and women from the same culture tend to share more in common with each other than they do with men and women from other cultures. However, as we've read about in our textbook, men and women often approach problems in communication as though they have been raised in separate cultures--much like cross-cultural communication, cross-gender is possible. I would argue that cross-gender communication is easier than cross-cultural communication; as I said, men and women from the same culture tend to have shared experiences that they can build on. When we speak to someone else, we are very much aware of their gender (gender is one of the first things we notice about someone, in fact), and as such we adapt our communication style to match what we think they expect and what we expect they will best respond to. How you communicate with people changes depending on context, and context includes things like what gender you perceive the other party to be. Men and women from the same culture will know, if only intuitively, how to communicate in a gendered context. Problems arise when these communication patterns are based on stereotypes, rather than being responsive to the individual you're communicating with--much as we saw in the cross-cultural video.