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Essay / Reaction to gender and communication in social work...
The differences in communication between the male and female sexes affect social work training when all 3 areas are concerned: the training of social work students, interaction between staff members and interaction between students. and faculty members. Communication is a very important tool in social work when it comes to teaching and developing relationships. This article explains the gender difference from the perspective of cross-cultural culture. Men listen to act accordingly and women listen so they can fill in a missing scenario and ask more questions than men. The topics of conversation are started by women but ultimately concluded by men. According to research, women interrupt more and men generally talk more. There are many biological and psychological theories explaining these differences. These differences could be better understood during intercultural communication. According to Borker and Maltz (1982), American women and men come from varied sociolinguistic cultures and have learned the rules of conversation differently. The rules of language are taught to children from a very young age. Little girls work and interact in small homogeneous boy-girl groups and make encouraging comments while boys move to larger groups and make stimulating comments. When they come together, these patterns persist and misunderstandings sometimes arise because of these differences. Women nod to encourage the speaker while men consider this a gesture of agreement. Men don't nod and women consider themselves not listening. Women tend to use questions to continue or start a conversation and men think this is due to less knowledge of women. Even though women give a more affective response, still regarding nonverbal communication... middle of paper ...... towards conversations regarding feelings and emotions. From what I have observed, men are more open than women when it comes to expressing themselves. It is rightly said that women learn better interview skills than men because of their self-disclosure, empathy, etc., but men can also easily learn them if they do some effort by involving appropriate facial expressions and appropriate general behavior and this is where social work training plays its role. I also felt that this was mainly due to the different contexts in which men and women are analyzed which creates more difference. If we consider an informal situation and compare the language and communication style of men and women, there would be only some minor differences and more similarities when it comes to language and communication..