He Says She Says: Closing the Communication Gap Between the Sexes

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When I returned, I couldn’t believe he was still going. Something about what notto do in an avalanche. As if he were the only one at the party who’d ever had any adventures. The Speak Sharper Book Club is open to anyone who wants to improve communication skills in a casual and fun atmosphere. Join today, and share the Book Club with a friend! Do men and women have different conversational styles? The opening salvo in the battle was fired by Robin Lakoff, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who in 1975 published a book called Language and Woman’s Place. Unlike You Just Don’t Understand, it was intended for a scholarly—not a popular—audience, and its appearance caused a great a stir among scholars in a wide variety of fields. I'll host three Zoom calls, one each month, for rip-roaring conversations about the book. We'll chat, share ideas, learn from each other, laugh a lot, and improve our communication skills. However, you have a million irons in the fire already and no time to figure out the best ways to reach your audience, position yourself to shine, and make the impact you dream of. You want to communicate effectively, confidently, and with ease. You want your message to get results, but you're overwhelmed, and you don't know where to start.

Meadow is Professor Sir Roy Meadow, whose notorious pronouncement, known as Meadow's Law - "One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, unless proven otherwise" - was instrumental in securing Angela's wrongful conviction. Peggy and Bob in some ways mirror the debate in academia. On one side are researchers who believe that men and women use language differently; on the other are those who call such claims overgeneralization, or who would explain the differences cited as the result of something other than gender.When the disagreement turned into a classic He-Said, She-Said situation, I invited them both to hop in the car and sort out their differences. Yet, Schwartz would not characterize the “ball toss” as a necessarily masculine style of speaking. “One of the problems with this research,” she says, “is that it generally views gender as fixed-trait and fails to look for mediating variables, such as power or status.” For Schwartz, the ball toss was an activity of people accustomed to striving for success in a hierarchical world. That those people happened to be men simply reflected the culture at the time. Nor does she feel she was punished when she learned to play the men’s game. “Which would you rather be, powerless or bitchy?” she shrugs. In the He-Said, She-Said dispute, it's hard to determine the truth, but from here on out, we'll focus on finding a fair resolution. He was giving a speech in America about Meadow's Law and how there's a witch-hunt against him in Britain..." begins Angela. It all seemed very odd. Why had they done this? Was it to further sanitise an already faintly sycophantic article, make the couple seem more endearing to the Mirror's readers, or did they just think that - as journalists - they could do a better job? Even though Richard phoned the Mirror's editor Piers Morgan the next day to apologise ("I won't pretend that Judy and I weren't bloody furious and upset," he told Morgan, "but having thought about it a bit we think you were right and we were wrong,"), the apparent control-freakery fuelled speculation that the public marriage was a craftily constructed facade to hide... what?

I do," says Richard. "I said it tonight. 'Oh, sorry, Judy, you carry on.' You just don't register it. 'Go on, Judy,' I say."

It depends on the situation. In some cases, additional evidence or third-party testimonies can help clarify the situation. In others, resolution may be more difficult due to the inherently subjective nature of these disputes.

We're delving into Thomas Erikson's hot communication book, Surrounded By Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life). The book has sold over two million copies and is as fun as it is helpful. They say this has dogged them throughout their careers. "The Sunday tabloids," says Richard, "used to come round on a Saturday at 4.30pm, 5pm, which is when they play their cards. They'd say, 'We're running it tomorrow. We've seen the divorce papers. There's no point in denying it - we can run it nice or we can run it nasty. Play along, and we'll play it nice.' We'd say, 'Nice try. It's a bluff.' That happened regularly."

Final Thoughts About "He-Said, She-Said"

Do gender theorists, then, hurt women by emphasizing the differences as gender differences? Schwartz thinks so. “The thing that really makes me nuts about Tannen and her ilk,” she says, “is that she implies all of these differences are reality, when in fact they are constructed. All of this could change; it is changing.” In business, men use more direct statements, while women tend to beat around the bush and are less likely to be heard by their male colleagues. On a more personal level, both men and women tend to be generally unsatisfied with what they hear from their partners during intimate moments. These are just a few facts revealed in this best – selling book as Dr. Glass gives the definitive answer as to why men and women differ so greatly in the area of communication. Because we were responsible for the success of This Morning, we became a problem," says Richard. "ITV were basically saying, 'What if they get poached? We've got this brand, this thing called This Morning, but unofficially the brand is Richard and Judy.' The viewers didn't call it This Morning. They called it Richard & Judy. So we became far too identified with the show. I'm not being bigheaded. It's true. They thought, 'This is too important. This makes too much money. If they leave, we might lose this product.' So they got very nervous and precipitated a crisis. This woman called Maureen Duffy - Duffy the Vampire Slayer - came in with a brief to secure the future of This Morning without us. She was charged by David Liddiment at Network Centre, who now..." I've read countless books about personality types and communication styles, and this one is a breath of fresh air as it provides real-life ways to implement what we're learning. It's not the same old information you've heard before.