Meiyang Liu

Gendered communication

Lately, as I’m faced with opportunities to speak to larger audiences who are often older and more senior than what I was used to in school, I’ve become intrigued with the observation that men and women express themselves differently, especially in a public speaking context. Unfortunately, finding role models for this task as a professional woman is more difficult than it should be, so I thought I’d throw this out there as a big question for the ether.

A basic college class on rhetoric taught that good communication has three basic elements - ethos, pathos, logos. Ethos refers to how you establish yourself as the speaker in relation to your audience. Pathos means engaging them through emotional means; logos appealing to their logic. For both men and women, the three elements are all there, but look somewhat different - different ways of establishing credibility, introducing and organizing their talks, types of stories told, humor, body language, etc.

So, the basic question is:

Do men and women, especially in business, use different communication techniques to engage their audience?

For the sake of the questions that follow, let’s assume they do. From my experience watching speakers that engage me - lecturers in college, managers and colleagues at work, speakers at panels and events like TED - I’ve noticed that men usually use more exaggerated body language and tones, more direct and sarcastic humor, and more surprising or shocking stories to prove a point. Women either don’t use these techniques, or are use them more subtle. I’ve also noticed the unfortunate side-effect that more male speakser engage me than females, just by the fact that they use these more entertaining techniques in their talks. I wonder:

• Do these differences correlate to accepted gender norms?
• Are we socialized to be more receptive to male forms of communication?
• On the other hand, is what we perceive as intellectuality and credibility constructed around male communication techniques?
• Are people somehow less receptive to women who employ male communication technique? Are they seen as having less “ethos”? Is there a gender difference in this perception?
• What techniques do successful women communicators use that are different from men?

Yes, it could get worse

As a person who staunchly believes that our health care system is in appalling shape, I’ve nevertheless come to the conclusion, especially after observing recent turns in the health care debate, that reform could lead to situations worse than the status-quo. For example,

• An individual mandate passes without ensuring low-cost insurance options exist for poor patients (subsidies might patch up the differences for a while, but costs that must be funded by taxpayers will quickly add up).

• Insurance companies use confusion tactics to take advantage of previously uninsured patients (who are disproportionately less educated, from foreign countries, and have more complex health conditions).

• Without premium caps, insurance companies pass along the increased cost of covering uninsured patients to other consumers.

• Insurance companies pocket increased revenues as a result of the individual mandate instead of being required to pass it along to consumers.

• MEDPAC gets packed with physicians and experts who represent specialist interests, further distorting the reimbursement ratio between primary and specialty care.

• Without a parallel initiative to incentivize physicians to go into primary care, the shortage of PCPs worsens as newly insured patients seek care.

• Nothing is done to bridge the gap between comparative effectiveness research and actual physician prescribing/ordering behavior.

These scenarios, and others even more undesirable, are likely to happen if the health care bills continue to get chipped away to appease various “stakeholders” on their way to the Senate and House floors. Weakened reform can be worse than no reform at all.

Do we devalue the poor?

Peter Singer, utilitarian philosopher and bioethicist, wrote in “Why We Must Ration Health Care” (New York Times, 7/15/09) -

“[I]f the stories of Bruce Hardy and Jack Rosser lead us to think badly of the British system of rationing health care, we should remind ourselves that the U.S. system also results in people going without life-saving treatment — it just does so less visibly…That’s rationing too, by ability to pay.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html

So instead of denying expensive care to people who are gravely ill and might only get a miserable few more months of life, our system denies care to those who cannot pay. If we are willing to allocate more money for less added life for a rich person, doesn’t this mean that our system inherently devalues the life of a poor person?

i.e. Let’s say the amount of money spent on extending the life of a rich person (who is able to pay) by 3 months, while that same amount of money would extend the life of a poor person by a year. (The real ratio is probably more exaggerated, as the amount spent on an expensive, life-extending treatment often lead to decades of added life for a healthy but poor person.) Therefore, it takes 4 times as much to pay for a year in the rich person’s life as it does for a poor person. As you see, we’ve just indirectly concluded that the life of the rich is 4 times more valuable than the poor.

Entreprenuership university?

Seth Godin once offered a program for a few individuals to forego the MBA and instead learn everything they need by working intensively on innovative projects.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/if-you-could-ch.html

What if we did this with undergraduate education?

What if universities picked students based not on SAT scores or high school transcripts, but on evidence of focused passion, past leadership, and a really, really great idea? Introductory classes on writing and rhetoric would no longer elicit eye-rolling or resigned sighs, but urgency because students must create business plans and presentations that argue and convince. Technical courses will not ask students to design fake Carol environments, but offered practicum-based courses such as web design, app creation, and data structure. The sciences will cease to be debates over methodology and statistical significance, but pieces of evidence to bolster or shift the direction of potential projects. Social sciences and economics will help students understand the social and cultural context that they’ll be introducing their products and services into, not to mention help them with the business aspects of their ideas.

After all, isn’t this what a university education is supposed to provide - the ability to find, understand, and utilize resources in the service of a meaningful task?