Should Women Emailing Like Guys?

The title sounds weird? Isn’t it? You probably asking you : what does it mean emailing like guys? Maria Bartiromo_ a television journalist at CNBC for the Closing Bell program_ thinks having the answer. Indeed, she said that one of her New Year's resolutions was to "start emailing like a guy”.

She explained herself, saying that women tend to write emails with phrases such as “how are you” and “hope all is well, blah, blah, blah before they make their point”. In contrary, men will just give one-word response as “yup”. Emailing like a guy means going straight to the point.

Here is the video. The conversation starts at 6.30.

        But she is not the only one to think this. Deborah Tannen _ American linguist and professor at the Georgetown University_ wrote a book which has been a bestseller in the early 90’s You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.

In this book, she says for example that “In general, women tend to write longer emails and are more likely to use expression or I am inclined to say emotion” or “Women tend to mix personal talk with work talk”. She says that the hierarchy can be interpreted this as a frivolous behavior. That means she also says that the hierarchy is hold by men. Concerning men, she says that they tend to use sarcasm more frequently than women to make jokes or teasing colleagues. On the other hand, women use it in a negative way.

Her explanation is quite simple and according to me, a little bit naive. If men and women have different communication, it’s because they don’t have the same sociological background. It’s true that most of the kids are raised according to their gender. It’s not a big discovery!

        The problem is that we often do a parallelism between “feminine and woman” and “masculine and men”. These two figures _ “feminine” and “masculine” _ always existed in our culture. The feminine one is taking care of the home and  kids while the masculine one goes hunting and protects the family. And it’s true that during the Neanderthals’ era, it was the case. But nowadays, we should be able to disconnect these conceptual figures with gender! Both men and women are able to take of their kids and earn money.

Otherwise, we will still hear comments such as these in the video below. It’s apparently a class project on the book of Deborah Tannen and they clearly make no differences between these concepts. Results: men have no emotion and women are stupid.

        These kinds of stereotypes are not progress. When Maria Bartiromo says she will write emails like a guy, it’s not the good attitude but it means that there is a real issue that everyone should take in account and not only women. Answering just by some word such as “yup” is not better that asking how the holidays of your colleagues were before asking a professional related question! I do believe that we need both but more importantly, we need to stop judging. I know it sounds very naïve but hearing “Whoa, she is a woman but she talks like a guy” sounds much more stupid to me. Don't you think?