What is Gender Communication?

It is evident today, that communication between women and men is a popular topic of conversation, and certainly something that occurs and impacts people on a daily basis. But when we talk about and learn to understand what gender communication is; its occurrence and how to recognize its impact in society could be tricky. It’s important to note that not all types of communication between members of the same sex or difference sex is gender communication. According to Ivy, gender communication is communication about and between men and women (Ivy, 2012).  Ivy describes the “about” aspect as the way in which the sexes are discussed, referred to, or depicted, both verbally and nonverbally (Ivy, 2012). The between aspect is the interpersonal dimension of gender communication (Ivy, 2012). The main point here is the awareness of one’s own sex, compared to those of the people of which you are communicating with. As Ivy says, “when you become conscious of your own or another person’s sex or gender, then gender communication is operating” (Ivy, 2012). We can gather from this definition that communication becomes gendered when sex or gender overtly begin to dominate and influence the conversation. This could affect your choices of what you say, how you feel, or how you act.

How do you communicate with the opposite sex?

The mere notion that gender communication affects the way people interact based on their sex and identified gender is the basis of what our research team tried to understand as we asked various college students the question: “Can men and women just be friends”. The following posts on this blog are reflections from our research team that sought to find an answer to this question. We did this by interviewing over 20 college students on their opinions, experience, and what they personally believe.

Source:

Ivy, D. (2012). Gender Speak: Personal Effectiveness in Gender Communication. Fifth Edition.    Boston,  MA: Pearson Press.

Do you believe that men and women can just be “friends”? Yes, but…

To get us ready to discuss this, let’s start out with a scene from a popular late 80s film “When Harry Met Sally” that first took the question can men and women ever just be friends mainstream.  

    Often the media and society portray that men and women cannot just be friends. There’s always something else at work behind a relationship. On the surface this appears to be an easy, no-brainer question that is basically asking us whether we can get along and associate with members of the opposite sex. It gets deeper though when you think about how men and women are wired, and how society and even culture influence their relationships. Whether the  relationship is based on sexual attraction, tension, a feeling of wanting more, or perhaps the need for attention; to say that men and women can have a relationship exist solely, absolutely and forever based on friendship is quite a statement. The sex part, as Harry mentions in the film, always seems to get in the way. It is the thing that always creates tension in a relationship. Yet, a male and a female can still be friends without the sex part or the attraction variable, right?

We asked at least 10 girls and 10 guys (actual number was over 20 interviewees) the question. We made it clear that we were talking strictly about heterosexual male and female relationships. It turned out that the responses were not so different despite receiving them from many different people. The overwhelming majority of interviewees answered “yes” that men and women can just be friends. However, there was always a subtle “but” or hypothetical situation that existed where they were hesitant to give a firm and absolute yes. It “can only work if the relationship is platonic, “a male said, citing the absence of romance was the only possible scenario. Or many cited from experience, saying things such as “I have a lot of guy friends now that I am not attracted to”. Similarly, guys said, “I have a lot of friends who are girls that I am not attracted to”. This has to make you think - is it all about attraction? Isn't it sort of written in our code to seek out people that are similar to us, or people we perceive to be attractive, whether they are physically or socially attractive?

There was one male (the only respondent who answered “no”) we interviewed that firmly stated that men and women cannot just be friends because they are biologically different. He noted that the sex difference is too strong and that we are not meant to be friends. I wouldn't go as far as to say something like that, yet I can see where he is coming from. I can see a situation developing where attraction or similar feelings might exist, but as a female interviewee claims: “both genders are capable of not acting on their feelings and maintaining that friendship role or boundary”.

This brings me to my next point: maybe it’s all psychological? If certain people have the mindset that they can’t just be friends with members of the opposite sex than it’s not possible. Contrarily  if you truly believe that you can just be friends with the opposite sex than it can work. However, the responses we received showed little indication that this is a reality. When asked if they treated both male and female friends the same, everyone noted that they treated their friends differently based on their sex and gender. The key difference here was the length of the relationship. Women indicated that they date guys they just recently met and there may be attraction or sexual tension present. However, the longer this relationship goes, it is more likely that the guy will fall into the “strictly friends category”. The major reasoning one female cited for this was the pressure or perceptions that people outside of the relationship show. A relationship can be misunderstood and appear different from an outsider’s perspective.

What can we gather from the semi-sure, yes, responses?  Most people believe that men and women can just be friends. Unfortunately it just not that simple. After the initial answer of “yes,” there’s more to the question than what you feel or what you've experienced at the moment. Then people start to think about other factors that include: attraction, sexual tension, motivation, personality, etc.  A male and female can just be friends if the relationship is built and sustained from personality reasons. However personality can lead to other things. Mostly for heterosexual relationships that begin as just friends, there still always exists the potential for romance and that is why it is very difficult to say with an absolute “yes” affirmation that men and woman can be just friends. 

Study findings and comparisons.

Going into this project, our team was expecting to mirror the findings in the YouTube video Why Men and Women Can’t be Friends (WMWCF), where college students are interviewed and asked if it is possible for men and women to be just friends. 

The humor in this video comes from a dichotomy of opinions: while women attest to the fact that it is possible to be friends, the men candidly say that it is not – that they will always have feelings for their female friends that go beyond mere friendship. The conclusion: despite what the women seem to believe, men and women cannot be friends.

In our own interviews, however, we found surprisingly different responses: out of twenty people, only one person (male) said that men and women cannot be friends. With each affirmative response, our suspicions about the journalistic integrity of WMWCF rose. Looking at our own nearly unanimous responses, we found it difficult to believe that the creators of WMWCF were being completely honest and objective with their findings.

After considering the interview practices used in WMWCF, it became clear that the creators of WMWCF were heavily biased. In one scene, a male being interviewed confesses, “I guess what I’m saying is no.” In the background, one can hear the cameraman cheer, “Yes!” as if they finally coaxed the correct answer out of him. In other scenes, the interviewer sets up the women being interviewed by asking them a series of loaded questions. In yet another scene, a woman clearly gets frustrated and ends up walking away from the interview (the camera crew counts this as a victory).

Although WMWCF is humorous, it is hardly objective, and we believe that this lack of objectivity resulted in findings that were different than ours. That being said, our team did acknowledge that the responses in WMWCF matched our own opinions (i.e. that men and women cannot be just friends) more closely than the responses that were given to us from the UIUC students in our interviews. One possibility is that the interviewer in WMWCF, although biased, pushed the people being interviewed towards honest answers. In contrast, our interviewing procedure was much less aggressive, which gave interviewees the freedom to answer without having their responses scrutinized. This important issue of interviewee honesty will be addressed in a future blog post. 

Potential Dishonesty

As we discussed before, when compared our interview results to some research results that have been done before, we get obviously a different answer pattern. In previous researches, they find out that men are tend to respond "no" to the question "do you believe that man and woman can just be friends" and women are tend to respond "yes". However, according to our observation, all our interviewees, except for one guy, responded as "yes".

During the interview, I noticed that most people had hesitations when responding to the question during the interviews. They will say things like "uh, this is a tough question", "Mm can you repeat it again", or just laugh when they first heard the question. They usually provided their answers after a second thought, which is "yes" and man and woman can just be friends. Also, when asked why they believe that way, the reason they provided for their answers are almost same, like "because I have a lot female/male friends myself and I don't feel anything between us."

Due to the unusual response pattern and similar reason got from the interviews, we, as interviewers, have explored some flaws in our interviews. We consider hesitation, prestige and dishonesty may play a role for this result. When interviewed in person, respondents worried about this reputation and face, and have the desire to receive respect from others. Answering "yes" seems to be a more "appropriate" answer because it shows that there are no sexual desire or potential romance between his/her cross-sex friendship, which makes him seem like more trustworthy with less agenda in friendships. In our interview, the only interviewee who answered "no" to our question said men and women are meant to be different biologically, and there are always sexual desire between them. Other people will consider the guy who provided this kind of answer less respectful and less trustworthy as a friend. So, as a potential flaw in this interview, respondents may be dishonest because of his prestige and desire to be thought as a good person.

Another potential problem in the interview would be universal generalization, which means that respondents may not consider his/her own answer as "Yes" but he/she thinks that universally speaking, man and woman are possible to be just friends. There are people out there can just have pure friendship with a cross-sex person. But, indeed he/she cannot manage it. That's another potential reason that can be used to explain the response pattern we got from our interview.

Personal Experiences and Perceptions

Why people think that males and females can just be friends? Do people treat them differently?

In our interviews, since most people answered that they believe males and females can just be friends, we continued asking why they think so. The answers that we got are still pretty similar: most of them stated that it is based on their personal experience, for example, “I personally have a lot of male and female friends.” According to them, it is “natural” for men and women to just be friends. Both our male and female participants stated that the duration of the relationship plays a big role, also how close the relationship is. Some mentioned that the first impression they have about another person is very important, if they do not feel that attraction at the beginning, it is less likely that they would develop a romantic relationship in the future. Few even said that the longer they know their friends(of the opposite sex), the less likely they would end up as a couple.

Moreover, when being asked whether they treat their male and female friends differently or not, although a few said yes since men and women are different in nature, most people answered that there is not much difference. The most important factor that affects the way they treat their friends is the duration and closeness of the relationship instead of gender. Not many interviewees said that there is sex tension that is hard to get past in cross-sex relationships.

From these results, we can see that how people’s reaction to this question differ from what we saw in the video, which is also the common perception of cross-sex friendship of the majority.


                                                                                                                                - Jiujiu Dai

Cultural differences as a potential mediator?

In our short interviews with random passersby in and around the Union building, we maintained control over some variables.  For instance, the wording of the initial question was the same: "Do you believe that men and women can just be friends?"  We also determined that the male group (2 group members) and the female group (3 group members) were to each interview five males and five females.  However, we did not record any other demographic information about our interviewees.  On reflection, perhaps race and ethnicity would have played a mediating role in the responses we received from this short study.

Despite the overwhelmingly uniform response of "Yes!" to our initial question, our team made some post-hoc observations to subtle differences in interviewees elaboration of their responses.  These disparate answers were occasionally tied to potential differences in culture.

One notable encounter was a single male interviewee who responded "No" to our initial question.  He was an international student from Korea, and explained that males and females could not be just friends "because the different sexes are biologically different, so they aren't meant to be friends."  His response, although not necessarily related to culture, may hint at a confusion between sex, which is biologically determined, and gender, which is socially constructed.

Another male interviewee identified himself as a student from Africa.  Though he responded "Yes" to the initial question, he also admitted to treating his male and female friends differently.  He said, "I think it's just [natural] to treat people the way you've been raised."  He also further mentioned that he thought that this was because of culture, explaining that for himself, being raised in Africa, "men and women have different gender roles in society."  Although he was unable to give an example of how these different treatments play out in the friendship context, he gave a situation where in church, males and females sit on different sides from each other.  A third interviewee, who our team observed to be a Hispanic female, explained the difficulties and pressures presented by society on a cross-gender friendship.  "It's hard to have a really close relationship with a guy," she explained, drawing from her own personal experiences.  "Nobody believes that you are just friends - they think you [spent] the night together. ... My friends ask me, 'What's going on with him?  Do you have [feelings] for him?  Why are you spending [so] much time with him?'"

From these answers, our team observed a degree of interaction between cultural gender norms and the possibility of cross-gender friendships.  Whether pressures come from larger societal expectations of gendered behavior, or from individual friends questioning the nature of the relationship, culture seems to play a role in mediating individual perceptions of platonic friendships.