The Impact of Gender on Interpersonal Communications - Essay Example

Barret and Davidson (2006, p.38) have also observed that gendered thinking has to replace male paradigms of interpersonal communication. Suggesting that language is also a tool for the oppression of women in almost all native cultures, Longmire and Merrill (2001,p.1 ) has said that “our native language depicts the normative, the generic, as ‘male,’ women are necessarily defined as ‘other.” For example, when one uses the word, ‘mankind’, “man is to mean all people, both male, and female” (Longmire and Merrill, 2001, p.1). And also, it has been concluded that non-verbal communication constitutes almost seventy percent of any interpersonal communication (Hartley, 1993, p.164). And it is often found that in interpersonal communication between two people of different gender, the possibility of sexually loaded non-verbal communication to happen even in contradiction with the verbal message that is imparted, is far more ( Fulham, 1995).

This leads to misunderstandings. Barret and Davidson (2006, p.38) have quoted other researchers opining that women disclose more personal information than men do in interpersonal communication. Another interesting aspect of the impact of gender in interpersonal communication is that men “tend to interrupt, take long, sole-speaker turns, and use direct forms while women tend to use indirect or moralizing strategies, use inclusive communication techniques and encourage collaborative turns and floors (Barret and Davidson, 2006, p.38). All these findings and observations make it clear that there is a need for further in-depth research regarding the impact of gender differences in interpersonal communication.