During the process of growing, in most of the time, boys and girls only communicate with their respective genders, but seldom communicate with out-group members. Boys usually have more friends than girls, while the friendships between girls’ are more stable. Boys’ games are of competitive and many participants from various ages. So the hierarchy in boys group is emphasized. Their language is aggressive, debatable and ordered in order to gain the control place in the game. On the contrary, girls tend to cooperate with each other. Their status in a conversation is equal. And their language is used to chat and build a good relationship. The respective communication groups during their childhood cause the life-long different speech behavior.

When boys and girls are grown-up, they operate in two very different social worlds. Men are in an ongoing contest, competing with everyone by displaying their competence and skill. Why don’t men ask for directions when lost? Because it puts them in a you-know-more-than-I-do position. Women are cautious but persistently seek intimacy; they want emotional support, cooperation, and praise. There isn’t even a reason for them to be not polite to others. Given these different orientations, it is no wonder the sexes have trouble communicating!

When women hear a new or different idea, they set their doubts and disbelief aside and tune in carefully to what the person is saying; they try to see it from the other person’s viewpoint. Women try to understand the other person’s opinion as completely and deeply as possible; they cognitively “go with them”, wanting to hear the person’s views and understand why they think in this way. Women seek to make sense of the new idea, to grasp how it can be seen as accurate and useful. This is certainly a “way of knowing” and could be called the “believing approach”. It involves empathizing with the speaker to cooperatively assimilate the truth together, i.e., cooperating. Women effectively use this same listening style when someone has a personal problem.

Contrast this with a common male approach: When someone expresses a new idea or one a male doesn’t agree with, he immediately starts arguing in his head. He tries to stay unbiased and coolly impersonal, if he can, but he questions the validity of everything—“How do you know that?” “Is that logical?” “How reliably was that measured?” “Aren’t some other experimental approaches or control conditions needed?” “Aren’t there exceptions or other explanations or conclusions possible?” “What are this person’s motives and biases?” This is critical thinking; it is the essence of the scientific method; it can be called an adversarial or “doubting approach”.

To some extent, the gender differences in communication patterns are also related to power. When people are strangers, they expect less competence from women than from men. But if women are known to have prior experience or expertise related to the task, or if women are assigned leadership roles, then women show greatly increased verbal behaviors in mixed-sex groups. They will use more powerful words than being over polite. A study of witnesses in a superior court found that educated professionals who have high social status were less likely to use “powerless language”, regardless of gender. Thus, differences are linked to power, and are context-specific. Differences are socially created and therefore may be socially altered. Some studies have found that talking time is related both to gender because men spend more time talking than women and to organizational power because the more powerful spend more time talking than the less powerful.