ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Since the early 1990s, the theme of men and women metaphorically ‘speaking different languages’ has become ubiquitous in popular culture. According to books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (Gray 1992), women love to talk, whereas men prefer action to words. Women view talking as a way of connecting with others emotionally, whereas men treat conversation either as a practical tool or a competitive sport. Women are good at listening, building rapport with others and avoiding or defusing conflict; men confront each other more directly, and are less attuned to either their own or others’ feelings. More recently, a new wave of popular science writing has linked these observations to differences in the way male and female brains work (e.g. Baron-Cohen 2003; Brizendine 2006). One study of Australian schoolchildren’s attitudes to foreign language learning (Carr and Pauwels 2006) found that pupils as young as 12 knew all the ‘Mars and Venus’ clichés. ‘Girls can do languages – that’s how their brains are’, said one boy. Another commented: ‘Girls enjoy talk: it’s what they do, what they’re good at’. And most of the girls agreed that ‘boys are hopeless communicators!’.
