Women and Inefficient Conversation

Warning: Rant Ahead!

A professor of linguistics at Georgetown published a book about 20 years ago on the subject of gender differences in communication. Here is an excerpt from a synopsis of that book:

For women, as for girls, intimacy is the fabric of relationships, and talk is the thread from which it is woven. Little girls create and maintain friendships by exchanging secrets; similarly, women regard conversation as the cornerstone of friendship. So a woman expects her husband to be a new and improved version of a best friend. What is important is not the individual subjects that are discussed but the sense of closeness, of a life shared, that emerges when people tell their thoughts, feelings, and impressions.

Bonds between boys can be as intense as girls', but they are based less on talking, more on doing things together. Since they don't assume talk is the cement that binds a relationship, men don't know what kind of talk women want, and they don't miss it when it isn't there. Boys' groups are larger, more inclusive, and more hierarchical, so boys must struggle to avoid the subordinate position in the group. This may play a role in women's complaints that men don't listen to them. Some men really don't like to listen, because being the listener makes them feel one-down, like a child listening to adults or an employee to a boss.

But often when women tell men, "You aren't listening," and the men protest, "I am," the men are right. The impression of not listening results from misalignments in the mechanics of conversation. The misalignment begins as soon as a man and a woman take physical positions. This became clear when I studied videotapes made by psychologist Bruce Dorval of children and adults talking to their same-sex best friends. I found that at every age, the girls and women faced each other directly, their eyes anchored on each other's faces. At every age, the boys and men sat at angles to each other and looked elsewhere in the room, periodically glancing at each other. They were obviously attuned to each other, often mirroring each other's movements. But the tendency of men to face away can give women the impression they aren't listening even when they are.

You can glean from this that women are not usually the least bit concerned about conversational efficiency, whereas men are (since conversation for them is a means to an end, and not the lifeblood of their relationships). This, at least in part, explains why women at my workplace (and at the store, at the mall, in any public space) tend to stand in clusters and talk - right in the middle of the traffic pattern! It drives me crazy!

When men converse in groups, they are often either moving toward a destination, or seated and engaged in some activity. They have no need to look at each other except very occasionally and for fleeting moments at a time. They converse around some other purpose. For women, often the conversation IS the purpose. So, conversing women can be oblivious to their surroundings, like blocking the path to the coffee, or causing a backup at the salad bar. Traffic patterns are not a constraint on communication - they're irrelevant. There's no such thing as an inappropriate place for a conversation.

Once female conversation begins, other matters fade to the background. This is why screaming children pulling on a sleeve yelling "MOM! MOM!" don't deter them in the least from finishing their discussion of their sister-in-law's awful taste in decorating, or how much they like their new day care arrangements. Efficiency in conversation and awareness of their surroundings are not what's valued; focused attention on their conversational partner(s) is everything. Women can focus on a conversation the way men can focus on a single task: to the exclusion of all else around them.

As an educated and sensitive guy, I can just softly say "pardon me" and squeeze around the pathway blockage, realizing that I'm invisible to the conversing females. But, like someone at the zoo observing animal behavior, in a rudely superior fashion under my breath I can also mutter: "how very peculiar.. but what amazing concentration. What caused them to evolve in that direction, I wonder."