Gender and Intergroup Communication
Nicholas A Palomares
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Abstract
Understanding how males and females communicate is a meaningful endeavor that has been a concern of much research. Most of this scholarship can be characterized in two ways. First, this work has focused predominantly on discovering and accounting for the occurrence of gender differences in communication, which is understandable given the tedious nature and somewhat boring properties of data that primarily focus on and demonstrate gender similarities. However, research on gender and communication is most usefully undertaken with a relatively equal focus on understanding the circumstances that lead to both gender differences and similarities in communication. Second, much research deems any difference between male and female communication as a gender difference regardless of the social and psychological precursors of such communication. Yet from an intergroup perspective, a clear distinction emerges between the gender-based and non-gender-based communication of males and females. In light of these two attributes, the chapter reviews research concerning gender and communication to argue that not all male-female communication is necessarily gender-based communication. Rather, the psychosocial manifestation of gender in the cognitive production and processing of messages determines whether male-female communication should be considered gender-based communication. Further, gender-based communication does not require a difference between males and female; to the contrary, gender-based communication can exhibit similarities as well as differences.
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