Differences in communication styles between women and men

Abstract

The article is an attempt to check whether the way language is communicated depends on gender. For this purpose an analysis of ten motivational speeches by men and women was carried out which showed that apart from the content communicated independently of the sender’s sex (e.g. paying attention to such values as courage, talent, dreams), there are threads touched mainly by women (e.g. life balance or self-awareness), and those that are characteristic only for men (e.g. determination in pursuit of goals, effectiveness of action and professionalism). Differences between men’s and women’s communication also apply to words being used – in women’s speech there are more uncertainty indicators, which include indefinite pronouns (e.g. some, somewhere), and metatextual expressions (in English: discourse markers) (e.g. so to speak, in fact, simply), in men’s speeches, semantically expressive names prevail as well as positive ones (e.g. success, sage, knowledge, and coach). The analysis also showed that the communication differences between women and men also concern grammar. Women speak more often in the first person singular and they mainly use past tense, and men prefer third person narrative and present or future tenses.