Men and Woman. Language. Do they talk the same!!??



 





It is a truism that men and women do not communicate in the same way. But is there really any evidence to support this Mars-and-Venus theory? Oxford language professor Deborah Cameron investigates in the first of three extracts from her new book



Monday October 1, 2007

The Guardian



Do men and women speak the same language? Can they ever really communicate? These questions are not new, but since the early 1990s there has been a new surge of interest in them. Countless self-help and popular psychology books have been written portraying men and women as alien beings, and conversation between them as a catalogue of misunderstandings. The most successful exponents of this formula, such as Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand, and John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, have topped the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Advice on how to bridge the communication gulf between the sexes has grown into a flourishing multimedia industry. Gray's official website, for instance, promotes not only his various Mars and Venus books, but also seminars, residential retreats, a telephone helpline and a dating service.



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Readers who prefer something a little harder-edged can turn to a genre of popular science books with titles such as Brain Sex, Sex on the Brain, The Essential Difference, and Why Men Don't Iron. These explain that the gulf between men and women is a product of nature, not nurture. The sexes communicate differently (and women do it better) because of the way their brains are wired. The female brain excels in verbal tasks whereas the male brain is better adapted to visual-spatial and mathematical tasks. Women like to talk; men prefer action to words.



Writers in this vein are fond of presenting themselves as latter-day Galileos, braving the wrath of the political correctness lobby by daring to challenge the feminist orthodoxy that denies that men and women are by nature profoundly different. Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of The Essential Difference, explains in his introduction that he put the book aside for several years because "the topic was just too politically sensitive". In the chapter on male-female differences in his book about human nature, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker congratulates himself on having the courage to say what has long been "unsayable in polite company". Both writers stress that they have no political axe to grind: they are simply following the evidence where it leads, and trying to put scientific facts in place of politically correct dogma.



Yet before we applaud, we should perhaps pause to ask ourselves: since when has silence reigned about the differences between men and women? Certainly not since the early 1990s, when the previous steady trickle of books began to develop into a raging torrent. By now, a writer who announces that sex-differences are natural is not "saying the unsayable": he or she is stating the obvious. The proposition that men and women communicate differently is particularly uncontroversial, with cliches such as "men never listen" and "women find it easier to talk about their feelings" referenced constantly in everything from women's magazines to humorous greeting cards.



The idea that men and women "speak different languages" has itself become a dogma, treated not as a hypothesis to be investigated or as a claim to be adjudicated, but as an unquestioned article of faith. Our faith in it is misplaced. Like the scientists I have mentioned, I believe in following the evidence where it leads. But in this case, the evidence does not lead where most people think it does. If we examine the findings of more than 30 years of research on language, communication and the sexes, we will discover that they tell a different, and more complicated, story.



The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense: a widespread but false belief. But it is also a myth in the sense of being a story people tell in order to explain who they are, where they have come from, and why they live as they do. Whether or not they are "true" in any historical or scientific sense, such stories have consequences in the real world. They shape our beliefs, and so influence our actions. The myth of Mars and Venus is no exception to that rule.



For example, the workplace is a domain in which myths about language and the sexes can have detrimental effects. A few years ago, the manager of a call centre in north-east England was asked by an interviewer why women made up such a high proportion of the agents he employed. Did men not apply for jobs in his centre? The manager replied that any vacancies attracted numerous applicants of both sexes, but, he explained: "We are looking for people who can chat to people, interact, build rapport. What we find is that women can do this more ... women are naturally good at that sort of thing." Moments later, he admitted: "I suppose we do, if we're honest, select women sometimes because they are women rather than because of something they've particularly shown in the interview."



The growth of call centres is part of a larger trend in economically advanced societies. More jobs are now in the service than the manufacturing sector, and service jobs, particularly those that involve direct contact with customers, put a higher premium on language and communication skills. Many employers share the call-centre manager's belief that women are by nature better qualified than men for jobs of this kind, and one result is a form of discrimination. Male job applicants have to prove that they possess the necessary skills, whereas women are just assumed to possess them. In today's increasingly service-based economy, this may not be good news for men.



But it is not only men who stand to lose because of the widespread conviction that women have superior verbal skills. Someone else who thinks men and women are naturally suited to different kinds of work is Baron-Cohen. In The Essential Difference he offers the following "scientific" careers advice: "People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff ... People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers."



The difference between the two lists reflects what Baron-Cohen takes to be the "essential difference" between male and female brains. The female-brain jobs make use of a capacity for empathy and communication, whereas the male ones exploit the ability to analyse complex systems. Baron-Cohen is careful to talk about -"people with the female/male brain" rather than "men and women". He stresses that there are men with female brains, women with male brains, and individuals of both sexes with "balanced" brains. He refers to the major brain types as "male" and "female", however, because the tendency is for males to have male brains and females to have female brains. And at many points it becomes clear that in spite of his caveats about not confusing gender with brain sex, he himself is doing exactly that.



The passage reproduced above is a good example. Baron-Cohen classifies nursing as a female-brain, empathy-based job (though if a caring and empathetic nurse cannot measure dosages accurately and make systematic clinical observations she or he risks doing serious harm) and law as a male-brain, system-analysing job (though a lawyer, however well versed in the law, will not get far without communication and people-reading skills). These categorisations are not based on a dispassionate analysis of the demands made by the two jobs. They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men.



If you read the two lists in their entirety, it is hard not to be struck by another "essential difference": the male jobs are more varied, more creative, and better rewarded than their female counterparts. Baron-Cohen's job-lists take me back to my schooldays 35 years ago, when the aptitude tests we had to complete before being interviewed by a careers adviser were printed on pink or blue paper. In those days we called this sexism, not science.



At its most basic, what I am calling "the myth of Mars and Venus" is simply the proposition that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate. All versions of the myth share this basic premise; most versions, in addition, make some or all of the following claims:



1 Language and communication matter more to women than to men; women talk more than men.



2 Women are more verbally skilled than men.



3 Men's goals in using language tend to be about getting things done, whereas women's tend to be about making connections to other people. Men talk more about things and facts, whereas women talk more about people, relationships and feelings.



4 Men's way of using language is competitive, reflecting their general interest in acquiring and maintaining status; women's use of language is cooperative, reflecting their preference for equality and harmony.



5 These differences routinely lead to "miscommunication" between the sexes, with each sex misinterpreting the other's intentions. This causes problems in contexts where men and women regularly interact, and especially in heterosexual relationships.



The literature of Mars and Venus, in both the self-help and popular science genres, is remarkably patronising towards men. They come off as bullies, petulant toddlers; or Neanderthals sulking in their caves. One (male) contributor to this catalogue of stereotypes goes so far as to call his book If Men Could Talk. A book called If Women Could Think would be instantly denounced; why do men put up with books that put them on a par with Lassie or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo ("Hey, wait a minute - I think he's trying to tell us something!")?



Perhaps men have realised that a reputation for incompetence can sometimes work to your advantage. Like the idea that they are no good at housework, the idea that men are no good at talking serves to exempt them from doing something that many would rather leave to women anyway. (Though it is only some kinds of talking that men would rather leave to women: in many contexts men have no difficulty expressing themselves - indeed, they tend to dominate the conversation.)



This should remind us that the relationship between the sexes is not only about difference, but also about power. The long-standing expectation that women will serve and care for others is not unrelated to their position as the "second sex". But in the universe of Mars and Venus, the fact that we (still) live in a male-dominated society is like an elephant in the room that everyone pretends not to notice.



My father, like many men of his generation, held the belief that women were incompetent drivers. During my teenage years, family car journeys were invariably accompanied by an endless running commentary on how badly the women around us were driving. Eventually I became so irritated by this, I took to scouring passing traffic for counter-examples: women who were driving perfectly well, and men who were driving like idiots.



My father usually conceded that the men were idiots, but not because they were men. Whereas female idiocy was axiomatically caused by femaleness, substandard male drivers were either "yobbos" - people with no consideration for others on the road or anywhere else - or "Sunday drivers": older men whose driving skills were poor because they used their cars only at weekends. As for the women who drove unremarkably, my father seemed surprised when I pointed them out. It was as if he had literally not noticed them until that moment.



At the time I thought my father was exceptional in his ability to make reality fit his preconceptions, but now I know he was not. Psychologists have found in experimental studies that when interpreting situations people typically pay most attention to things that match their expectations, and often fail to register counter-examples.



It is not hard to see how these tendencies might lead readers of Mars and Venus books to "recognise" generalisations about the way men and women use language, provided those generalisations fit with already familiar stereotypes. An anecdote illustrating the point that, say, men are competitive and women cooperative conversationalists will prompt readers to recall the many occasions on which they have observed men competing and women cooperating - while not recalling the occasions, perhaps equally numerous, on which they have observed the opposite. If counter-examples do come to mind ("What about Janet? She's the most competitive person I know"), it is open to readers to apply the classic strategy of putting them in a separate category of exceptions ("of course, she grew up with three brothers / is the only woman in her department / works in a particularly competitive business").



In relation to men and women, our most basic stereotypical expectation is simply that they will be different rather than the same. We actively look for differences, and seek out sources that discuss them. Most research studies investigating the behaviour of men and women are designed around the question: is there a difference? And the presumption is usually that there will be. If a study finds a significant difference between male and female subjects, that is considered to be a "positive" finding, and has a good chance of being published. A study that finds no significant differences is less likely to be published.



Most people, of course, do not read academic journals: they get their information about scientific research findings from the reports that appear in newspapers, or from TV science documentaries. These sources often feature research on male-female differences, since media producers know that there is interest in the subject. But the criteria producers use when deciding which studies to report and how to present them introduce another layer of distortion. And sometimes headlines trumpet so-called facts that turn out, on investigation, to have no basis in evidence at all.



In 2006, for instance, a popular science book called The Female Brain claimed that women on average utter 20,000 words a day, while men on average utter only 7,000. This was perfect material for soundbite science - it confirmed the popular belief that women are not only the more talkative sex but three times as much - and was reported in newspapers around the world.



One person who found it impossible to believe was Mark Liberman, a professor of phonetics who has worked extensively with recorded speech. His scepticism prompted him to delve into the footnotes of The Female Brain to find out where the author had got her figures. What he found was not an academic citation but a reference to a self-help book. Following the trail into the thickets of popular literature, Liberman came across several competing statistical claims. The figures varied wildly: different authors (and sometimes even the same author in different books) gave average female daily word-counts ranging from 4,000 to 25,000 words. As far as Liberman could tell, all these numbers were plucked from thin air: in no case did anyone cite any actual research to back them up. He concluded that no one had ever done a study counting the words produced by a sample of men and women in the course of a single day. The claims were so variable because they were pure guesswork.



After Liberman pointed this out in a newspaper article, the author of The Female Brain conceded that her claim was not supported by evidence and said it would be deleted from future editions. But the damage was already done: the much-publicised soundbite that women talk three times as much as men will linger in people's memories and get recycled in their conversations, whereas the little-publicised retraction will make no such impression. This is how myths acquire the status of facts.



Do women and men really speak so differently?



In 2005, an article appeared in the journal American Psychologist with the title The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. This title stood out as unusual, because, as we have seen, the aim of most research studies is to find differences rather than similarities between men and women. Yet, as the article's author Janet S Hyde pointed out, on closer inspection, the results of these studies very often show more similarity than difference.



Hyde is a psychologist who specialises in "meta-analysis", a statistical technique that allows the analyst to collate many different research findings and draw overall conclusions from them. Scientists believe that one study on its own does not show anything: results are only considered reliable if a number of different studies have replicated them. Suppose that the question is: who interrupts more, men or women? Some studies will have found that men interrupt more, others that women do, and others may have found no significant difference. In some studies the reported gender difference will be large, while in others it will be much smaller. The number of people whose behaviour was investigated will also vary from study to study. Meta-analysis enables you to aggregate the various results, controlling for things that make them difficult to compare directly, and calculate the overall effect of gender on interruption.



Hyde used this technique to review a large number of studies concerned with all kinds of putative male-female differences. In Table 1, I have extracted the results for just those studies that dealt with gender differences in linguistic and communicative behaviour.



To read this table you need to know that "d" is the formula indicating the size of the overall gender difference: minus values for "d" indicate that females are ahead of males, whereas plus values indicate that males are ahead of females.



Gender differences in verbal/communicative behaviour



Focus of research / No. of studies analysed / Value of d / Effect size



Reading comprehension: 23 / -0.06 / close to zero



Vocabulary: 44 / -0.02-+0.06 /close to zero



Spelling: 5* / -0.45 / moderate



Verbal reasoning: 5* / -0.02 / close to zero



Speech production: 12 / -0.33 / small



Conversational interruption: 70 / +0.15-+0.33 / small



Talkativeness: 73 / -0.11 / small



Assertive speech: 75 / +0.11 / small



Affiliative speech: 46 / -0.26 / small



Self disclosure: 205 / -0.18 / small



Smiling: 418 / -0.40 / moderate



· Note: asterisks indicate cases where the small number of studies analysed is compensated for by the fact that they were conducted with very large controlled samples. Source: adapted from Hyde, 'The Gender Similarities Hypothesis'.



So, for instance, the table tells us that when the findings of different studies are aggregated, the overall conclusion is that men interrupt more than women and women self-disclose more than men. However, the really interesting information is in the last column, which tells us whether the actual figure given for d indicates an effect that is very large, large, moderate, small, or close to zero. In almost every case, the overall difference made by gender is either small or close to zero. Two items, spelling accuracy and frequency of smiling, show a larger effect - but it is still only moderate.



There were a few areas in which Hyde did find that the effect of gender was large or very large. For instance, studies of aggression and of how far people can throw things have shown a considerable gap between the sexes (men are more aggressive and can throw further). But in studies of verbal abilities and behaviour, the differences were slight. This is not a new observation. In 1988 Hyde and her colleague Marcia Linn carried out a meta-analysis of research dealing specifically with gender differences in verbal ability. The conclusion they came to was that the difference between men and women amounted to "about one-tenth of one standard deviation" - statistician-speak for "negligible". Another scholar who has considered this question, the linguist Jack Chambers, suggests that the degree of non-overlap in the abilities of male and female speakers in any given population is "about 0.25%". That's an overlap of 99.75%. It follows that for any array of verbal abilities found in an individual woman, there will almost certainly be a man with exactly the same array.



Chambers' reference to individual men and women points to another problem with generalisations such as "men interrupt more than women" or "women are more talkative than men". As well as underplaying their similarities, statements of the form "women do this and men do that" disguise the extent of the variation that exists within each gender group. Explaining why he had reacted with instant scepticism to the claim that women talk three times as much as men, Liberman predicted: "Whatever the average female versus male difference turns out to be, it will be small compared with the variation among women and among men." Focusing on the differences between men and women while ignoring the differences within them is extremely misleading but, unfortunately, all too common.



Do women really talk more than men?



If we are going to try to generalise about which sex talks more, a reliable way to do it is to observe both sexes in a single interaction, and measure their respective contributions. This cuts out extraneous variables that are likely to affect the amount of talk (like whether someone is spending their day at a Buddhist retreat or a high school reunion), and allows for a comparison of male and female behaviour under the same contextual conditions.



Numerous studies have been done using this approach, and while the results have been mixed, the commonest finding is that men talk more than women. One review of 56 research studies categorises their findings as shown here:



Pattern of difference found / Number of studies



Men talk more than women / 34 (60.8%)



Women talk more than men / 2 (3.6%)



Men and women talk the same amount / 16 (28.6%)



No clear pattern / 4 (7.0%)



· Source: based on Deborah James and Janice Drakich, 'Understanding Gender Differences in Amount of Talk', in Deborah Tannen (ed.), Gender and Conversational



The reviewers are inclined to believe that this is a case of gender and amount of talk being linked indirectly rather than directly: the more direct link is with status, in combination with the formality of the setting (status tends to be more relevant in formal situations). The basic trend, especially in formal and public contexts, is for higher-status speakers to talk more than lower-status ones. The gender pattern is explained by the observation that in most contexts where status is relevant, men are more likely than women to occupy high-status positions; if all other things are equal, gender itself is a hierarchical system in which men are regarded as having higher status.



"Regarded" is an important word here, because conversational dominance is not just about the way dominant speakers behave; it is also about the willingness of others to defer to them. Some experimental studies have found that you can reverse the "men talk more" pattern, or at least reduce the gap, by instructing subjects to discuss a topic that both sexes consider a distinctively female area of expertise. Status, then, is not a completely fixed attribute, but can vary relative to the setting, subject and purpose of conversation.



That may be why some studies find that women talk more in domestic interactions with partners and family members: in the domestic sphere, women are often seen as being in charge. In other spheres, however, the default assumption is that men outrank women, and men are usually found to talk more. In informal contexts where status is not an issue, the commonest finding is not that women talk more than men, it is that the two sexes contribute about equally.



If it does not reflect reality, why is the folk-belief that women talk more than men so persistent? The feminist Dale Spender once suggested an explanation: she said that people overestimate how much women talk because they think that, ideally, women would not talk at all. While that may be rather sweeping, it is true that belief in female loquacity is generally combined with disapproval of it. The statement "women talk more than men" tends to imply the judgment "women talk too much". (As one old proverb charmingly puts it: "Many women, many words; many geese, many turds.")



The folk-belief that women talk more than men persists because it provides a justification for an ingrained social prejudice. Evolutionary psychology is open to a similar criticism: that it takes today's social prejudices and projects them back into prehistory, thus elevating them to the status of timeless truths about the human condition.



Champions of the evolutionary approach often say it is their opponents whose arguments are based on prejudice rather than facts or logic. They complain that feminists and other "PC" types are unwilling even to consider the idea that sex-differences might have biological rather than social causes. Instead of judging the arguments on their merits, these politically motivated critics just denounce them, and those who advance them, as reactionary and bigoted.



But their stories have a basic flaw: they are based not on facts, but on myths.



 Deborah Cameron on the supposed miscommunication between men and women



How do women fare in parliament?



Do men and women speak the same language?

 



Speak up, I can't hear you





Can it really be true that men and women understand language in different ways? Nonsense, says Deborah Cameron in this second extract from her new book - the supposed miscommunication is a myth



 



John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus contains a chapter entitled Speaking Different Languages. In it, Gray says that the "original" Martians and Venusians communicated without difficulty, because they knew their languages were mutually incomprehensible. Modern men and women, by contrast, are under the illusion that they speak the same language. But though the words they use may be the same, their meanings for each sex are different. The result is that men and women often do not understand one another.



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The idea that men and women metaphorically "speak different languages" is not, of course, new, but the myth of Mars and Venus has given it new currency and legitimacy. What was once just a metaphor has acquired the status of literal, scientific truth. Today, it is widely believed that misunderstanding between men and women is a widespread and serious problem. But is our concern about it justified by the evidence, or is "male-female miscommunication" a myth?



Before the myth of Mars and Venus, the idea that women communicate less directly than men was associated with concerns about women's alleged lack of assertiveness and confidence. The importance of speaking directly was a staple topic in assertiveness training, and advice based on the same principle was common in self-help books and women's magazines, especially those addressed to professional women. For instance, a 1992 article in Options magazine on "10 classic career mistakes all women make" lists using "tentative language" as number nine.



"How many times have you heard someone say things like, 'I'm not really sure if I'm right, but perhaps ...'?" the article asked. "With that kind of talk, who is going to believe we are confident in what we are saying? ... Too often we make statements as if they were questions, such as, 'We'll bring the deadline forward, OK?'"



Options counsels women to avoid tentative language on the grounds that it makes them sound weak and indecisive - the argument put forward by Robin Lakoff in her influential 1970s text, Language and Woman's Place. But, over time, a different argument has become more popular. The following tip comes from Glamour magazine: "Speak directly to male subordinates. Women tend to shy away from giving a blatant order, but men find the indirect approach manipulative and confusing." Here women are told to speak directly to men, not because indirectness undermines their authority, but because men find it "manipulative and confusing". The substance of the advice has not changed, but the theory behind it has shifted from a "deficit model" of gender difference (women's ways of speaking are inferior to men's) to a "cross-cultural approach" (the two styles are equally valid, but the difference between them can lead to misunderstanding).



This raises two questions. First, if the male and female styles are equally valid, why does it always seem to be women who are told they must accommodate to men's preferences - even, apparently, when the men are their subordinates? Is avoiding male-female miscommunication an exclusively female responsibility? Second, though, why is it assumed that indirectness causes miscommunication in the first place? What is the evidence that men are confused by it?



Glamour is not the only source for this allegation. In a section of his book which explains how to ask men to do things, Gray says that women should avoid using indirect requests. For instance, they should not signal that they would like a man to bring in the shopping by saying, "The groceries are in the car": they should ask him directly, by saying, "Would you bring in the groceries?" Another mistake women make is to formulate requests using the word "could" rather than "would". "'Could you empty the trash?'," says Gray, "is merely a question gathering information. 'Would you empty the trash?' is a request."



Gray seems to be suggesting that men hear utterances such as "Could you empty the trash?" as purely hypothetical questions about their ability to perform the action mentioned. But that is a patently ridiculous claim. No competent user of English would take "Could you empty the trash?" as "merely a question gathering information", any more than they would take "Could you run a mile in four minutes?' as a polite request to start running. Gray is right to think that the "Could you do X?" formula has both functions, but wrong to suppose that this causes confusion. Human languages are not codes in which each word or expression has a single, predetermined meaning. Rather, human communication relies on the ability of humans to put the words someone utters together with other information about the world, and on that basis infer what the speaker intended to communicate to them.



Some individuals - for instance, people with autism - may indeed find indirectness confusing; they find a great deal of human communication confusing, because their condition impairs their ability to make inferences about what is going on in other people's minds. But this kind of problem is exceptional: we define it as a disability precisely because the ability to infer others' intentions plays such a crucial role in communication. Does Gray think that maleness is a disability? And if he really believes men cannot process indirect requests from women, how does he explain the fact that men quite frequently make indirect requests to women?



A friend once told me a story about the family dinners of her childhood. Each night as the family sat down to eat, her father would examine the food on his plate and then say to his wife something like, "Is there any ketchup, Vera?" His wife would then get up and fetch whatever condiment he had mentioned. According to Gray's theory, he should have reacted with surprise: "Oh, I didn't mean I wanted ketchup, I was just asking whether we had any." Needless to say, that was not his reaction. Both he and his wife understood "Is there any ketchup?" as an indirect request to get the ketchup, rather than "merely a question gathering information".



Yet if my friend made the same request, her mother's response was different: she treated it as an information question and said, "Yes, dear, it's in the cupboard." Presumably, that was not because she had suddenly become incapable of understanding indirectness. Rather, she pretended to hear her daughter's request as an information question because she wanted to send her a message along the lines of, "I may get ketchup for your father, but I don't feel obliged to do the same for you."



What this example illustrates is that some "misunderstandings" are tactical rather than real. Pretending not to understand what someone wants you to do is one way to avoid doing it. This may be what is really going on when a man claims not to have recognised a woman's "Could you empty the trash?" or "The groceries are in the car" as a request. The "real" conflict is not about what was meant, it is about who is entitled to expect what services from whom.



By recasting this type of domestic dispute as a problem of "male-female miscommunication", the myth of Mars and Venus just obscures the real issue. And while arguments about who empties the trash or unloads the groceries may be petty, there are other conflicts between men and women where far more is at stake.



At a Canadian university in the 1990s, two women students made complaints against the same male student after they discovered by chance that they had both, on separate occasions, gone out on a date with him and been sexually assaulted at the end of the evening. Their complaints were heard by a university tribunal whose proceedings were recorded for a linguistic research project.



Like many rape and sexual assault cases, this one turned on whether or not the defendant could reasonably have believed that the complainants consented to sex. Both incidents had begun consensually, with the women inviting the man into their room and engaging in activities such as kissing and touching; but they claimed he had gone on to force them into further sexual activity which they made clear they did not want. He maintained that they did want it - or at least, had said nothing to make him think they did not.



In this extract from the hearing, one of the complainants, MB, has just told the tribunal that the defendant persisted in touching her even after she had repeatedly communicated to him that she did not want to have sex. A tribunal member, GK, then asks her the following question: "And did it occur to you through the persistent behaviour that maybe your signals were not coming across loud and clear, that 'I'm not getting through what I want and what I don't want?' . . . This is the whole thing about getting signals mixed up. We all socialise in one way or the other to read signals and to give signals. In that particular context, were you at all concerned your signals were not being read exactly and did you think, since signals were not being read correctly for you, 'Should I do something different with my signals?'"



GK evidently interprets the incident as a case of miscommunication ("getting signals mixed up"). She also appears to hold the complainant responsible for the breakdown in communication. She phrases her initial question using a formula ("Did it occur to you that . . . ?") which usually implies that the point should have occurred to the addressee. Her subsequent questions ("Were you at all concerned that . . . ?", "Did you think that . . . [you] should . . . ?") are phrased in a similarly loaded way. GK is not so much asking about MB's view of events as communicating her own: MB should have realised that her signals were not getting through, and she should have acted on that realisation by "doing something different with [her] signals".



Susan Ehrlich, the linguist who analysed the tribunal proceedings, notes that the defendant is never challenged in the same way about his response to the complainants' signals. At one point he is asked why he persisted in sexual activity with MB when she was either asleep or pretending to be asleep. He replies. "She said that she was tired, you know, she never said like 'No', 'Stop', 'Don't', you know, 'Don't do this', uhm, 'Get out of bed'." Nobody asks him why he did not consider the possibility that by saying she was tired and then apparently falling asleep, MB was communicating that she wanted him to stop. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that someone who feigns unconsciousness while in bed with you probably doesn't want to have sex. But nobody criticises the defendant for being so obtuse. In these proceedings, the assumption does seem to be that avoiding miscommunication is not a shared responsibility, but specifically a female one.



This assumption both reflects and reinforces the traditional tendency of rape trials - especially where the parties are acquainted - to focus more on the character and behaviour of the complainant than on that of the alleged perpetrator. Her clothing, her alcohol consumption, her previous sexual conduct and reputation, are all scrutinised minutely for any sign that she might have been willing all along. By suggesting that men have trouble understanding any refusal which is not maximally direct, the myth of Mars and Venus has added to the burden judicial proceedings place on women who claim to have been raped. They can now be challenged not only to prove that they did not consent to sex, but also that they refused in a manner sufficiently direct to preclude misunderstanding. The women in the Canadian case were unable to satisfy the tribunal on that point. The tribunal's written judgment criticised their behaviour: "There is little doubt that both complainants did not expressly object to some of the activity that took place that evening. It is also clear that their actions at times did not unequivocally indicate a lack of willing participation."



The defendant was found guilty, but the tribunal declined to impose the recommended punishment, expulsion from the university. Instead, they banned him from campus dormitory buildings. This decision reflected their view that the complainants were partly responsible for what had happened to them. Had they communicated differently, they could have prevented it.



That idea also features prominently in sex education and "rape prevention" programmes, which instruct women that if they do not want to have sex they should "Just say no". It is stressed that a woman's refusal should take the form of a firm, unvarnished "No" (spoken in a tone and accompanied by body language that make clear it is a real, rather than a token, refusal), and that it is not necessary - in fact, it is counter-productive - to give reasons for refusing. Only by keeping the message short and simple can you be sure that it will not be misunderstood. This advice may be well-intentioned, but linguistic research suggests it is highly questionable.



The researchers Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith conducted focus-group interviews with 58 women and asked them how, in practice, they communicated to men that they did not wish to have sex. Despite being familiar with the standard rape-prevention advice, all but a tiny handful of the women said they would never "Just say no". They judged this to be an unacceptable way of doing things, and likely to make matters worse by giving men an additional reason to feel aggrieved.



The strategies the women actually reported using were designed to "soften the blow", as one put it, in various ways. One popular tactic was to provide a reason for refusing which made reference to a woman's inability, as opposed to her unwillingness, to have sex. Examples included the time-honoured "I've got a headache", "I'm really tired" and "I've got my period". As one woman explained, such excuses would prevent the man from "getting really upset" or "blaming you". Another softening tactic was to preface the refusal with something like "I'm incredibly flattered, but . . ." Women also reported telling men that they were not yet ready for sex, when they knew in reality that they would never be interested.



All this might seem like depressing evidence that psychologists are right about women lacking assertiveness, confidence, or self-esteem - except for one crucial fact. All the strategies the women reported using in this situation are also used, by both sexes, in every other situation where it is necessary to verbalise a refusal. Research on conversational patterns shows that in everyday contexts, refusing is never done by "just saying no". Most refusals do not even contain the word "No". Yet, in non-sexual situations, no one seems to have trouble understanding them.



If this sounds counter-intuitive, let us consider a concrete example. Suppose a colleague says to me casually as I pass her in the corridor: "A few of us are going to the pub after work, do you want to come?" This is an invitation, which calls for me to respond with either an acceptance or a refusal. If I am going to accept, I can simply say "Yes, I'd love to" or "Sure, see you there." If I am going to refuse, by contrast, I am unlikely to communicate that by just saying "No, I can't" (let alone "No, I don't want to").



Why the difference? Because refusing an invitation - even one that is much less sensitive than a sexual proposal - is a more delicate matter than accepting one. The act of inviting someone implies that you hope they will say yes: if they say no, there is a risk that you will be offended, upset, or just disappointed. To show that they are aware of this, and do not want you to feel bad, people generally design refusals to convey reluctance and regret.



Because this pattern is so consistent, and because it contrasts with the pattern for the alternative response, acceptance, refusals are immediately recognisable as such. In fact, the evidence suggests that people can tell a refusal is coming as soon as they register the initial hesitation. And when I say "people", I mean people of both sexes. No one has found any difference between men's and women's use of the system I have just described.



As Kitzinger and Frith comment, this evidence undermines the claim that men do not understand any refusal less direct than a firm "No". If "ordinary", non-sexual refusals do not generally take the form of saying "No", but are performed using conventional strategies such as hesitating, hedging and offering excuses, then sexual refusals which use exactly the same strategies should not present any special problem. "For men to claim that they do not understand such refusals to be refusals," Kitzinger and Frith say, "is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance."



Even so, you might think that if a woman is worried about being assaulted she should err on the side of caution: forget the usual social niceties and "unequivocally indicate a lack of willing participation". The Canadian tribunal was clearly puzzled by MB's failure to do this. They pressed her about it until she finally offered an explanation. Like the women in Kitzinger and Frith's study, MB felt it was prudent to try to "soften the blow". She did not confront her assailant directly, she said, because she was afraid of him - and of what, beyond sexual assault, he might do to her if she provoked him: "You do whatever you have to to survive. [Crying] I mean, I was just thinking how to survive that second. I mean, I didn't care if that meant getting back into bed with him. If he didn't hurt me I didn't care at that second . . . I did whatever I could to get by."



This raises doubts about the wisdom of expert advice on rape prevention, which tells women to do the opposite of "softening the blow": in essence, it tells them to aggravate the offence of rejecting a man's advances by verbalising their refusals in a highly confrontational way. This advice presupposes that men who persist in making unwanted sexual advances are genuinely confused, and will be happy to have their confusion dispelled by a simple, firm "No". It does not allow for the possibility that men who behave in this way are not so much confused about women's wishes as indifferent to them. Confronting a violent and determined aggressor is not necessarily the safest option and, to a woman who is terrified, it may well seem like the most dangerous, putting her at risk of being beaten as well as raped.



Women are not wrong to fear the consequences of following advice to "just say no". But thanks to the myth of Mars and Venus, they are not only receiving bad advice on how to prevent rape, they are also being held responsible for preventing it and blamed if they do not succeed.



The 1967 prison film Cool Hand Luke is remembered, among other things, for a line spoken by the prison warden to Luke, an inmate who persistently rebels against authority. "What we have here," says the warden, "is failure to communicate." Both of them know that communication is not the issue. Luke understands the warden, but chooses to defy him. What the warden really means is "failure to do what I want you to do".



A similar (mis)use of the word "communication" has become increasingly common in our culture. Conflicts which are really caused by people wanting different things (he wants her to have sex and she does not want to; she wants him to do his share of the housework and he wants her to stop nagging about it) are persistently described as "misunderstandings" or "communication problems". If someone does not respond in the way we want them to, it means they cannot have understood us - the problem is "failure to communicate", and the solution is better communication.



This belief, or hope, is undoubtedly one of the things that make the idea of male-female miscommunication appealing to many people. In the words of Deborah Tannen: "Under- standing style differences for what they are takes the sting out of them. Believing that 'You're not interested in me', 'You don't care about me as much as I care about you' or 'You want to take away my freedom' feels awful. Believing that 'You have a different way of showing you're listening' or 'Showing you care' allows for no-fault negotiation: you can ask for or make adjustments without casting or taking blame."



It is comforting to be told that nobody needs to "feel awful": that there are no real conflicts, only misunderstandings, and no disagreements of substance, only differences of style. Acknowledging that many problems between men and women go deeper than "failure to communicate" would make for a much bleaker and less reassuring message.



But the research evidence does not support the claims made by Tannen and others about the nature, the causes, and the prevalence of male-female miscommunication. No doubt some conflicts between individual men and women are caused by misunderstanding: the potential for communication to go awry is latent in every exchange between humans, simply because language is not telepathy. But the idea that men and women have a particular problem because they differ systematically in their ways of using language, and that this is the major source of conflict between them, does not stand up to scrutiny.



 Why, when men and women are more equal than ever, is the myth about the sexes coming from different planets so popular? Deborah Cameron, in the third of three extracts from her new book, argues that the 'Martians' and 'Venusians' are more similar than they think



No group of men and women in history has ever been less different, or less at the mercy of their biology, than those living in western societies today. And yet 21st-century westerners are drawn to a mythology that says that differences between men and women are profound and unalterable. So what is it that attracts us to the concept of Mars versus Venus?



The idea that men and women metaphorically "speak different languages" - that they use language in different ways and for different reasons - is one of the great myths of our time. Research debunks the various smaller myths that contribute to it: for instance, that women talk more than men (research suggests the opposite); that women's talk is cooperative and men's competitive (research shows that both sexes engage in both kinds of talk); that men and women systematically misunderstand one another (research has produced no good evidence that they do).



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There is a great deal of similarity between men and women, and the differences within each gender group are typically as great as or greater than the difference between the two. Many differences are context-dependent: patterns that are clear in one context may be muted, nonexistent or reversed in another, suggesting that they are not direct reflections of invariant sex-specific traits.



If these points were acknowledged, the science soundbites would be headed "Men and women pretty similar, research finds", and popular psychology books would bear titles like There's No Great Mystery About the Opposite Sex or We Understand Each Other Well Enough Most of the Time. Of course, these titles do not have the makings of bestsellers, whereas the "men and women are from different planets" story is a tried and tested formula. What does the myth of Mars and Venus do for us, that we return to it again and again?



The importance of being normal



In 2003, a website called the Gender Genie, which claimed to be able to diagnose an author's sex from a 500-word sample of writing, became a favourite with web surfers. Their comments made clear that they had all given the Genie samples to analyse. Obviously, they didn't need the Genie to tell them if they were male or female (which is just as well, since its error rate is high). What they wanted to know was how their writing measured up against the Genie's criteria for male- or femaleness. One blogger, recommending the Genie to others, said: "Go play with it: find out if you write like you're supposed to write."



The Gender Genie in fact says nothing about how men and women are supposed to write. The Genie is a machine that has been programmed to look for certain features whose frequencies were found to differ in male- and female-authored texts in a controlled sample of written English. It counts the frequency of those features, then delivers a guess based on the numbers. All it tells the user is whether his or her writing supports the hypothesis that the frequency of particular features is diagnostic of a writer's sex.



Nevertheless, among the 100 bloggers whose responses I examined, all but a handful assumed that the Genie's judgment said something about them, rather than something about the Genie. Bloggers whose sex was guessed wrongly often sought reasons in their life experience. One woman suggested she had been classified as male because she had been educated at a boys' school, while several others recalled that as children they had been tomboys. Men joked - sometimes with obvious unease - about the possibility that they were gay. When the Genie guessed right, by contrast, no one looked for a reason.



The bloggers' understanding of what the Gender Genie tells its users is typical of the way we approach sex differences. We have a tendency to treat any generalisation about men and women as a source of information about "normal" behaviour, which therefore has implications for how we ourselves should behave. Of course, there are some people who actively want to be different from the norm. But for most people, the desire to be normal is strong: "Am I normal?" is one of the hardy perennials of the problem page.



For the past 15 years, the myth of Mars and Venus has told us what is normal for men and women in the sphere of language and communication. Its generalisations about male and female language use have come to influence our expectations and our judgments of how men and women communicate. Unlike the Gender Genie, this is not just harmless fun. We see its less benign consequences when employers view women as better candidates than men for jobs that demand the ability to chat (and men as better candidates than women for jobs that demand verbal authority and directness). We see them when parents and educators expect girls to be better at languages, and boys to be better at maths. We see them when jurors at rape trials give men who claim to have "misread a woman's signals" the benefit of the doubt. And we see them in a small way every time someone makes a joke about how much women talk or how useless men are at expressing their feelings.



The importance of being different



Sex differences fascinate us to a degree that most biological differences don't. It is conceivable, for instance, that you could diagnose a writer's age from a sample of prose, but no one would design a Genie for that purpose. And to my knowledge, there has never been a bestselling popular science book about the differences between right- and left-handed people.



Handedness makes an instructive comparison with sex, because it too is associated with differences in the organisation of the brain. In December 2006, for instance, an article in the journal Neuropsychology reported that left-handed people were quicker and more efficient than right-handers at tasks such as computer gaming that required the simultaneous processing of multiple stimuli. If that had been a sex-difference finding, it would surely have got the same attention as the "men have trouble listening to women" study, the "men are better shoppers" study, and the "women talk three times as much as men" claim. But it wasn't, and it didn't.



If handedness generates fewer soundbites than sex, it is probably because findings about it cannot be slotted into any larger narrative about the difference between right-handed and left-handed people. We don't conceive of them as different species from different planets; we don't see them as locked in an eternal "battle of the hands". Except perhaps in sport, we rarely think about them at all. Handedness, in short, is not significant for the organisation of human social affairs: it does not determine a person's identity, role, or status in society. An account of how left-handers differ from right-handers would therefore lack one of the crucial ingredients that draw us to accounts of how women differ from men: it would not serve the purpose of justifying institutionalised social inequality by explaining it as the inevitable consequence of natural differences.



Is that what the myth of Mars and Venus is about? I'll let the back cover of Why Men Don't Iron have the first word: "Much of what is written and taught today presumes that most of the differences between women and men have been caused by society and can therefore be altered. Once this is done, men and women will become alike. And so men are challenged, pestered and lectured to change from the old dominant male to get in touch with their feminine side. But what if that feminine side does not exist? Men's brains are wired very differently from women's, so their reactions to stimuli cannot be the same. Thus, increasing feminisation of society, of food and of education is detrimental to men and eventually will be to women too."



This belongs to a time-honoured tradition of dire warnings about the dangers of altering the balance of nature by changing the relationship between men and women. Although it is contradictory (if the wiring of our brains renders all efforts to change men and women futile, how has the "increasing feminisation of society" been able to occur?), the political message is clear enough. We would all be better off if we reverted to the natural order in which the sexes were different and males were dominant.



But this seems an unlikely message to be sending here and now. In the societies where the Mars and Venus myth has flourished, it is obvious that gender differences have become less significant socially than they were in even the recent past. It is also clear that many aspects of sexual biology are becoming more susceptible to the intervention of technology. "Gender reassignment" is now done routinely; so are the procedures that enable the single, the gay and lesbian, the infertile, the post-menopausal, and sometimes even the dead to reproduce. Even our genes, where so many sex differences allegedly reside, are no longer beyond our power to alter.



The age-old certainties of gender, then, are visibly being challenged. Meanwhile, we have developed an insatiable appetite for material that recycles the traditional ideas about men's and women's "natures". Is that a contradiction? Or could our uncertainty about the future significance of sex and gender be precisely what is enabling the myth of Mars and Venus to flourish?



'A rupture in human history'



In January 2007, the New York Times reported one of the most significant findings of the 2005 US census: for the first time in history, a majority of American women were not living with a spouse. In Britain a month later, the Office of National Statistics revealed that the number of marriages taking place in the UK had fallen to an all-time low.



A number of factors are contributing to this trend, including women marrying later, widows surviving longer, and more unwed couples living together. But one major factor is the choice more and more women are making not to marry, or not to remarry after divorce. They prefer independence; and today it is within their grasp. Not long ago, most women's earnings were insufficient to maintain a household. The social price of independence was also high, since a "respectable" woman could not have sexual relationships or children outside marriage.



The public policy scholar Alison Wolf has argued that recent changes in the position of educated women in developed societies constitute nothing less than "a rupture in human history". In the past, Wolf notes, the lives of women in every class revolved around their domestic roles. But in the past 40 or 50 years, technological and social changes have given women more choice about how they live their lives. For an elite minority of women, the possibility now exists of leading lives that are more or less indistinguishable from the lives of their male equivalents.



That possibility has come about because of the opening up of previously restricted educational and career opportunities. Wolf notes that during the first 50 years of its existence, all but a handful of the students of Somerville College (one of Oxford University's first women's colleges) went on, if they took jobs, to work in either teaching or other "caring" professions. This was not because the work suited their female brains, but because other professions were closed to females. When that changed, so did women's career choices. By the 1980s, Somerville was producing more accountants than teachers. Today, a woman graduate who remains childless can expect to rise as high and earn as much in her lifetime as a man with the same qualifications.



Other social changes have been more difficult to measure precisely. Things my own parents treated as unbreakable rules - men and women socialising separately (even if they were in the same pub or room), not having opposite-sex friends, pursuing different leisure activities, playing distinct roles within the family - are no longer rigidly adhered to. Though inequalities remain, western women have far more freedom than they once did. The sexes even look less different than they did two generations ago.



None of this is to say that gender has become irrelevant, or that men and women are now in all respects equal. Wolf stresses that outside the educated elite, economic inequalities remain marked. Others have noted that certain problems affecting women as a group, such as the prevalence of sexual violence, may be intensifying rather than diminishing. But the sharp differentiation of the sexes that was once all-pervasive in society has weakened significantly. In their aspirations, their opportunities, their lifestyles, and their outlooks on life, educated men and women are now more similar than different.



Changes of this kind are never painless. Our ideas, our feelings, our sense of who we are, and our beliefs about what is right do not always keep pace with technological and economic changes. This is not because our ways of thinking have been wired into our brains since the Stone Age. It is because culture is not, in fact, the superficial and ephemeral thing it is often taken for. (Conversely, biology is not the fixed and unalterable thing it is presented as in books like Why Men Don't Iron.) Culture change is hard: it causes anxiety, conflict and, in some quarters, resistance. That is why the myth of Mars and Venus has had such a warm reception from the educated western middle classes.



Change and the problem of couple communication



The target audience for Mars and Venus material is prototypically a middle-class one, and the main theme is the difficulty middle-class men and women have communicating with one another. That difficulty - presented, typically, as age-old and universal - is put down to the fact that men and women inhabit separate social worlds, which give them mutually incomprehensible ways of using and interpreting language. But that raises the question of why male-female (mis)communication does not seem to be such a problem in other societies and communities. More puzzling still, if its cause is indeed social segregation, the communities in which it is seen as a major issue appear to be those where there is least segregation.



In her classic 1962 study Blue Collar Marriage, the sociologist Mirra Komarovsky reported that the working-class American women she interviewed did not generally expect to have extended conversations with their husbands. In their community, sex segregation was extensive: for everyday companionship and emotional support, they relied on female friends and kin. Most did not regard this as settling for second best. To them it seemed not natural, but on the contrary, rather eccentric to want your spouse to be your best friend.



This attitude is typical of traditional societies and traditional working-class communities. The ideal of "companionate marriage", in which the partners do most things together, spend a lot of time interacting and regard each other as friends, is essentially a modern, middle-class one. It is made possible by the fact that middle-class men and women do not, in fact, inhabit separate social worlds, and it is made necessary by the fact that middle-class men and women generally do not have the close-knit, locally based networks of same-sex friends and kin that supported Komarovsky's subjects.



Today, far fewer westerners live in communities like the one described in Blue Collar Marriage. Economic and social changes - greater mobility, smaller families, increasing rates of divorce - have weakened the bonds that held traditional families and communities together. One result has been to reduce the size of most people's support networks, making them more reliant on a small number of "significant others". In these conditions people expect more from communication with their spouse or partner. When it falls short of their high expectations, the stage is set for communication between men and women to be perceived as a serious social problem.



There are other reasons for that perception. The more similar men and women become, the more they are in direct competition for jobs, status, money, leisure time and personal freedom. My parents, who married in the mid-50s, never argued about who should take out the trash, pick up groceries, wash dishes, drive the car, choose what to watch on TV, or make financial decisions. Nor were they ever in conflict about whose job came first or whose life had to be fitted around domestic commitments. These things were settled in advance by the basic fact of gender difference. For couples today, by contrast, everything is up for negotiation. That has the potential to lead to conflicts.



A recurring theme in Mars and Venus literature is men's allegedly underdeveloped capacity for empathy and caring. This testifies to what has not changed. When Why Men Don't Iron talks about an "increasing feminisation of society", that is presumably a reference to the greater visibility, status and influence of women in domains where they were previously excluded. But what has happened in the past 40 years might be better described as an increasing masculinisation of society, in the sense that the major shift has involved middle-class women's aspirations and attitudes becoming more like men's, focused on individual achievement and individual freedom. Alison Wolf points out that this has led to a massive exodus of middle-class women from the engagement in paid and unpaid caring that once occupied them for most of their lives.



This change has not been compensated for by any reciprocal shift in men's attitudes. Although we hear much about the so-called "new man" with his commitment to domesticity and active parenthood, surveys consistently find that men's contribution to both domestic work and routine forms of childcare is not much greater than before. Women are still doing most of the caring, but - unsurprisingly, given how much else they now do - they are more inclined to question why it should fall to them alone. That is another source of conflict in contemporary male-female relationships.



Elite women often resolve the problem by contracting out what is still regarded as "their" work to less privileged women: paid nannies, cleaners and carers. Something that cannot easily be contracted out, however, is the task of caring for a partner's emotional needs. It is not a coincidence that one of the key issues Mars and Venus books address is women's complaint that "I take care of his feelings, but he doesn't take care of mine".



The genius of the myth of Mars and Venus is to acknowledge the problems many people are now experiencing as a result of social change, while explaining those problems and conflicts in a way that implies they have nothing to do with social change. They are as old as humanity (quite literally, in some versions of the myth) and their root cause is the irreducible difference between the sexes. The solution, it follows, is to do nothing: we should accept what cannot be altered, and suppress any urge to apportion blame.



In practice this tends to result in women being made responsible for ensuring that communication flows smoothly. Once again, "personal stuff" is assumed to be women's business rather than the business of both sexes. But this isn't just personal stuff: these problems are symptomatic of deeper social dislocations. The belief that they are timeless, natural and inevitable stops us thinking about what social arrangements might work better than our present ones in a society that can no longer be run on the old assumptions about what men and women do.



When the myth of Mars and Venus emphasises that our modern problems are caused by age-old natural differences, it is by implication saying that nothing important has changed. However similar men and women appear on the surface - getting the same education, doing the same jobs, earning the same money, seeking out the same pleasures - at a deeper level, in their minds, they are still fundamentally different. That too is reassuring to many people, because most of us do not like change. And even if gender no longer determines our life experiences to the extent it once did, it remains an important part of our identities, our social lives, and our sexual lives. We may not want to return to the traditional arrangement between the sexes, but that does not mean we want to live in a world where the difference between men and women is no more significant than whether someone is right- or left-handed.



But if we want real understanding to take the place of mythology, we need to reject trite formulas and sweeping claims about male and female language use. The evidence is more in line with what it says on a postcard someone once sent me: "Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it." Clinging to myths about the way men and women communicate is no way to deal with it. To deal with the problems and opportunities facing men and women now, we must look beyond Mars and Venus.