Being a father of a daughter, I am very aware of this. I forget who, but recently a prominent CEO mentioned that as young kids girls are called "bossy" while boys are "assertive." -screw that. This said, there are concrete differences in the genders. Studies show that on average women are more verbose than men. Could it be that sometimes women are interrupted as a result of this? -I'm playing with fire here and, yes I'm sort of playing DA lil. Without interruption sometimes business/work meetings can go nowhere. Someone needs to "steer a conversation" -which is a nice way of saying "strategically interrupt." Often, people talk about things tangential to the project at hand while never getting to the work at hand. I have less and less time in my life and therefore, less patience for such things.I routinely find myself in mixed-gender environments (life) where men interrupt me. Now that I’ve decided to try and keep track, just out of curiosity, it’s quite amazing how often it happens. It’s particularly pronounced when other men are around.
-I tend to interrupt people when in a business setting. This is not gender specific though and I'd guess that mk, b_b, forwardslash and insomniasexx can attest to this. -I'm working on it :) that said, if you were to do a word count of our Hubski meetings based on gender, my guess is it would hold true to the "women = more verbose" theory ;)
I heard a study telling the opposite: on average men talk more than women. Even if I too experienced the opposite. But it's not a stretch to believe. If I remember well, the point was that they are lesser verbose men than female, but they talk so much it raise the average. But what strike me in the article is the "I just said that": My SO, in public, is good with witty one liner, snarky reply etc... Nobody (even her female friends) listen to what she say. But when I just repeat the sentence I'm the "comedian" and the funny guy. Pretty weird. I guess she will now assert "I just said that" , next time I stole one of her joke.
Perhaps this is the study. Maybe it's not how much the sexes talk that causes the communication differences but rather what they talk about: No surprise there.In general, they found that women tend to talk more about relationships. Their everyday conversation is more studded with pronouns. Men tend to talk more about sports and gadgets, and their utterances include more numbers.
These situations aren't those in which someone is able to point out directly what was said, because it's never what, it's how, it's the body language, the volume, there are so many subtle variables that make up human communication that phrases like these are "lost in translation" very easily when explaining this topic to someone who hasn't experienced it. "No explanation needed" is a real thing where the other person seems to preemptively guess certain areas where I might not understand what they're communicating, so they deviate to explain something, instead of letting me just ask for clarification when they've finished. Where being interrupted is something that just seems to happen, especially when outnumbered by a group of men.