Assess the Impact of Gender on Intercultural Communication

When women discuss their problems with another woman, the women is likely to offer support and relate a problem of their own to the problem they are being told about. However, if a woman told the same problem to a man "he is either likely to offer a reprimand and explanation of what she did wrong" (Scollon and Scollon 2001 p249). When women discuss their troubles a man is likely to interpret it as a request for assistance and also as a sign of weakness. When a man is told someone's problems he is likely to accept it as a "challenge to his ability, his competence, his expertise" (Scollon and Scollon 2001 p249). A man is only too happy to jump in and offer a solution.

Because the woman is looking for some reassurance and an exchange of problems and she receives a solution, she places further emphasis on her problem. The man then understands this as a failure to accept his solution, which questions his sense of knowledge and expertise. Both parties continue their conversation using their very different interpretative frameworks until the misinterpretation gets increasingly worse and one person or another becomes irritable and disregards the conversation.

Another example of the differences of communication between the genders regards information. Men consider information to be current affairs topics whereas women view information as personal details about themselves and their daily lives. A man would call a good talk one in which he had discussed a wide variety of subjects such as politics and sport. A woman would regard a good Talk as one in which individual lives and feelings had been discussed. A man would dismiss the women's conversation as pure gossip.

Another issue is that men and women approach different situations with different expectations. In some conversations between men and women one person may be expecting a highly explicit statement to be made and at the same time the other person may be expecting an indirect expression. When this occurs "misinterpretations of the partners messages often occur" (Gudykunst 1991 p 58). An example of this is women's most common complaint that their partners or husbands don't ever tell them that they love them. The women expect a direct statement from the man but what the men are actually doing is making an inexplicit statement through their actions such as working hard in their jobs and being faithful to their partners.

It is not a case of whether the man or woman speaks more directly or indirectly but actually how they interpret what is said to them. Because men and women have such different interpretative frameworks it often leads them to draw different meaning from language, which under different circumstances would be extremely explicit.

A clear difference has been noted between the behaviour of men and women in organisational communication. Research has shown that in a meeting of mixed gender, men have a tendency to dominate the conversation taking the most turns to talk and talking for a long period of time when they do. However, a business meeting, in which all of the participants are female one notices extremely quick turn taking, and the conversation topics are introduced polychromatically.

Another example is in a university classroom where the lecturer is leading a discussion. In this situation males are again dominant and the females are taking fewer and shorter turns. However, when working in smaller groups' women tend to have a lot more to say.

Both of these situations contradict women's most common discontent with their partners because they are normally "sullen, silent and withdrawn from them" (Scollon and Scollon 2001 p 245).

The differentiation of the roles and statuses of men and women also have an impact on intercultural communication and are very different between the different cultures. In Muslim culture women enjoy a high status as the child bearers and as the keeper of the home. Unmarried Muslim women are able to work outside of their fathers' home until they are married. The Muslim religion states that women can only leave the house in modest dress, which normally includes wearing a veil. A Muslim businessman whose colleague is a Muslim female who wears a veil would not normally introduce her at a meeting. This shows obedience to Islam and shows that the female deserves the protection of her co-worker and social distance on the part of men outside of the family. This example also "represents a cultural priority that assigns decision making roles to men" (Varner and Beamer 1995 p95). This shows that cultures view women very differently, and women's status in society "is not always linked to their roles in the same way from culture to culture" (Varner and Beamer 1995 p97). In many cultures women do not have any status or power within society. In cultures where gender is equal like the USA, this is viewed as morally wrong and professional American women find it unacceptable. However, this is a culturally based attitude, which is viewed as acceptable in many cultures. A Japanese businessman who has dealings with an American businesswoman may encounter communication difficulties as women have low status in his culture.

Another factor is that in many cultures women do not achieve top positions in business. This is not necessarily because they are inferior or not worthy of power. In Japanese culture women work in low status positions in business but enjoy high status within society as mothers. In Japan the most important bond in life is the one between mother and child. Even though their status is lower than men's their power is often greater as women are usually the makers of key decisions and are often in control of the family finances. This is also true of West African, Ethiopian, and Thai and Philippine cultures.

A very good example of gender impacting on intercultural communication is in the Saudi Arabian culture. In this culture men believe that it is their role to act as a go between, between the world and their wives. The Saudi male will speak on his wives behalf even if she is able to speak English. This can often cause misunderstanding. In this situation a health practitioner for example can expect the female to be consulting with her husband with regard to medical questions, which he will then answer on her behalf. If the medical practitioner chooses to ignore the husband and seeks answers from the wife he could "run the risk of raising feelings of personal humiliation and disrespect of the husband in the eyes of the family" (Samovar 2001 p 250). Misunderstandings such as this could have dangerous consequences because the life of a patient could be endangered.

To a certain degree gender does have an impact on intercultural communication but some of the other factors that make up our social identities such as age or social status have a bigger impact.

There are a great many differences between the communication of men and women and it is well known that the speech of men and women has been proven to be extremely different within many of the worlds languages. Everyone is born into a culture, gender, generation and family, however, in almost every culture "the experience of women is markedly different to the experience of men" (Scollon and Scollon 2001 p 258). These experiences would become noticeable within the different discourse systems.

The impact that gender has on communication is thought to be universal as the "discourse systems of gender cut across culture and generations" (Scollon and Scollon 2001 p242). However, most of the research carried out in this area is limited to the United States and Europe and therefore cannot be applied to all cultures. It can only be interesting to discover whether the men or women of a particular cultural group share a discourse system with another cultural group. Another interesting study would be to find out whether men or women's discourse forms a system, which "cuts across major cultural lines" (Scollon and Scollon 2001 p258).

The different interpretative frameworks that we have are simply part of being men and women. Both men and women find their miscommunications difficult to correct as "their sense of identity and their sense of place in culture and society are tied up in the ideological history of relationships between men and women" (Scollon and Scollon 2001 p250). Men and women's different ways of seeing the world are in professional communication a "major source of miscommunication" (Scollon and Scollon 2001 p242).