What Are You Talking About?
The Difference in How We Talk
We’ve just learned that women hear and process what they hear better than men do. But the ease with which women understand language extends to producing it as well. Women find verbal communication easier and have richer vocabularies than men. The vast majority of studies show that women outperform men in language tasks and produce speech more easily and fluently. To put it simply, we’re better talkers.
This love of conversation and our ability to use it to strengthen relationships, is one of the great joys of female friendship. My friends don’t make points; they tell stories and the ease with which we share conversation makes dinner or a drink together very enjoyable indeed. In the hands of women, a simple piece of parenting advice can turn into an extended and hilarious riff, while a report on office politics can make a corporate boardroom seem as shadowy intrigue-filled as the court at Versailles.
Men, on the other hand, stick to the facts and often groan or roll their eyes when their wives launch into a long anecdote. One husband I know actually mutters. “Here we go with another story!” as his wife begins one of her tales — no matter how amazing it seems to me.
Men classify the sort of talk that women are so good at as gossip, which connotes frivolity at best and malice at worst. This trivialization may comfort men when they are the targets of our communicate. In fact, the stories women tell are an important way for vantage, because it helps us to plot safe and successful course through our lives—including the male-dominated workplace—just as it did when we were protecting our offspring from predators roaming the plains.
As much as I love the way my female friends talk, I’m also a fan of the way men handle spoken information. Unlike most women, they speak with terrific efficiency. I like my questions answered succinctly and directly, and when it’s appropriate, I enjoy using that economy of expression myself. My poor secretary, who loves to repeat every detail of a message, finds this distressing and worries that I’ve missed something if I don’t listen to every detail of what she has to tell me. When I’m really rushed, I interrupt her, which she ignores, simply increasing the volume until she’s finished. I’ve learned to simply hear her out!
Of course, there are men who love a good gossip and women who don’t, and I have certainly known men whose verbal facility was extraordinary. But either way, there is room for improvement in the way men and women talk to one another. Both parties have a great deal to gain form examining the differences in the way the two sexes talk, and in adapting the best that both have to offer. We can learn from one another, and in this particular area, we must.