Genderlect

Max Browning
April 8, 2015
Observation 9

I was meeting with the Dance Marathon vice presidents this week to discuss plans for our upcoming (well, not upcoming by the time you read this...) retreat with the rest of the executive board.  Two of the vice presidents are female and then myself and the other vice president are both males.  Before this final discussion of the retreat, we asked the rest of the executive board what they wanted to gain from this retreat.  They said that they wanted to get to know each other and do minimal work.  During our discussion, one of the female vice presidents continued to bring up the idea that we should break off into our focus groups and work on goal settings; however, the other three of us reminded her that the rest of the executive board wanted more ice breakers.  In the end, she backed down and our retreat is about 75 percent ice breakers with only the required business to attend to.

According to the theory of Genderlect, men and women communicate in drastically different ways.  While men talk to report, women talk with rapport.  Focusing on the differences between my male vice president and the female vice president who backed down, she asked a multitude of clarifying questions in regards to his suggestions; however, she never offered anything that conflicted with his points and when she did, she would add tag questions, you know?  One thing that did somewhat contradict the Genderlect theory, however, was that she told a lot of stories to show her viewpoint, but the stories would have her as the focus.  Genderlect suggests that women often tell stories with other people as the focus.

The theory also suggests that women prefer private talking to public talking.  This makes me wonder how she would have backed up her opinions had it only been the two of us talking about the retreat rather than the four of us (technically there were also our graduate assistants, but they were preoccupied looking for information about another question we had).