On May 18, Richard Ashley will be giving a presentation titled “Talking 9-5: Women and Men in the Workplace.” This presentation will be about how men and women can improve their communication in business settings.
Ashley, a training coordinator in the office of Human Resources, has worked at ETSU for one and a half years. Though he says that it is important for people of different genders – and of the same gender, for that matter – to be able to communicate in any situation, he first became interested in the topic of gender communication in the workplace in the late ’70s while he was in the army. In the late ’70s, more women were entering the military than ever before, which was how the issue was brought to Ashley’s attention.
Ashley feels that what he intends to say in his presentation is important to further the values, which our university espouses. He quotes from ETSU’s mission statement, saying that at this university “People come first, are treated with dignity and respect, and are encouraged to achieve their full potential; relationships are built on honesty, integrity and trust,” and “diversity of people and thought is respected.” He believes an institution will run more smoothly if there are good relationships between the people who work there. The aspect of inter-gender communication he intends to focus on is the ways in which men and women typically differ in their verbal and non-verbal communication styles. In order for co-workers of the opposite gender to improve their relationships with one another, they should take into account women and men tend to communicate in different ways, and they should understand and respect these different modes of communicating.
Ashley cites Deborah Tannen’s view that these differing styles of communication among the genders have their roots in the different ways that boys and girls are brought up. Girls, when growing up, tend to have – or search for – a “best friend.” Boys, on the other hand, tend to play in groups and focus on who is the dominant one in the group and who is subordinate.
These differing approaches to relationships instilled in childhood often carry over into adulthood. Therefore, women tend to focus on forming a bond with other people, whereas men focus who has what status in the hierarchy. One way that these differing approaches to relationships manifest themselves in communication is that females tend to maintain eye contact more than males, even when they are small children. Another example of this is that men tend to give direct orders, such as “mail this letter,” whereas women tend to word their requests in a less direct way, more as a suggestion than an order – for example, “Why don’t you mail this letter?”
Because of these differing styles of communication, women and men often misunderstand each other. When women word their requests as suggestions, Ashley said, men perceive them as “wishy-washy,” but when men word their requests as orders, women perceive them as “bossy.”
Ashley points out that these “rules” of gender communication are by no means universal. Women are often encouraged to adopt a more “masculine” way of communicating if they work in a male-dominated field. Both men and women are often misinterpreted if they happen to communicate in ways not considered “appropriate” to their gender. Men who focus more on cooperation than maintaining their place in the hierarchy tend to be seen as wishy-washy, and women who are direct and aggressive are seen as “uncaring” and “unfeminine.”
Ashley recommends two books by Deborah Tannen for those who are interested in learning more about the differences in women and men’s communication: You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, and the book after which his presentation is named, Talking From 9 to 5: Women and Men in the Workplace.
The presentation will be on May 18 in Room E205 of the Mini-Dome, at 1:30 p.m.

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