Communicating Across the Gender Gap: How American Men and Women Communicate Differently and How to Reach And Manage Them

A growing number of studies show again and again that most American men and women have different styles of speaking and listening. Your gender makes a huge difference in how American clients and customers perceive you and your product and can lead to misunderstandings and missed opportunities that can have consequences for your marketing, your business, your reputation for professionalism, and even your career. This multimedia, multidisciplinary program will give you fascinating practical tools for understanding how gender affects communication in American life and dozens of tips to help you in your daily work.

Topics include:

* The gender gap in the U.S.
* Why many turn off clients of the opposite sex when dealing with Americans
* How to use your own “gender style” to your advantage in communications with Americans
* Gender considerations in marketing to Americans

The Instructors

Steven Stark has a vast background in the field of communication and inter-cultural studies and has taught writing and speaking to thousands of lawyers, government officials and those working in business all over the world. A former Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School where he gave several upper-level courses on writing and speaking (including a workshop to international LLM students), he is the author of four books and one e-book. He has been a radio commentator for CNN, National Public Radio, and the Voice of America (where his role was to try to interpret American culture to the rest of the world), and he has also appeared frequently on the BBC. He has been a columnist for the Boston Globe and Montreal Gazette and has written extensively on American culture in such publications as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly where he authored a groundbreaking piece on the gender gap in the U.S.. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.

Sarah Wald is the former Dean of Students at Harvard Law School and a former Assistant Provost at Harvard University where she was involved in a number of areas related to improving the atmosphere for women students and faculty. A past president of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association where she co-authored a brief in the groundbreaking Hishon case applying the law of sex discrimination to partnerships, she has also been an Assistant Secretary of Consumer Affairs and Assistant Attorney General in Massachusetts. Her publications have appeared in numerous law reviews and magazines. A graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School, she is currently Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Read Steven Stark’s analysis of the gender gap and its effect on American politics in the Atlantic Monthly (1996)