Planets Collide Study Disputes Mars-Venus View, Suggests There Are Many Similarities In Men And Women

We’ve been told that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

Now comes a professor who says maybe we’ve been told wrong.

John Gray’s wildly popular Mars-Venus best sellers, and similar books, have pushed the notion that men and women are from radically different “cultures” with different styles of communicating.

Women talk about their feelings; men don’t. Men offer solutions when listening to someone else’s problem; women empathize. Women have a bad day and need to talk about it, which men interpret as a personal attack on their failures as husbands.

Read enough of this stuff, and you begin to wonder whether you should even attempt to talk to your spouse without the services of a translator.

Well, put the translator on hold.

Some of these alleged differences between men and women exist, says Brant Burleson, a Purdue professor of communications. But a study he conducted has found that a lot more of them don’t.

There is, to be sure, a style of communication that is sensitive and empathic and seems to come more naturally to women, Burleson says. But the idea that it isn’t also practiced by men is wrong.

Men may tend to be more aggressive and goal-oriented in their communication in the business world (Burleson didn’t study that realm). But in personal relationships, they’re as capable of sensitivity as women, and possibly as likely to show it, he says.

Burleson found, for example, that when men are taking care of their children or elderly parents, they display the same “emotional sophistication” as women.

“Their word choices and style of interaction do approximate those of women in similar roles.”

Good communicators of either sex acknowledge feelings, show support and listen well, he says. In his studies, vast majorities of men and women preferred this style of communicating.

The results argue against the idea that men and women have differences so great as to suggest two alien cultures, Burleson says.

“There are a lot more similarities than there are differences.”

The problem with believing in two cultures is that it may lead people to try to accommodate the supposedly masculine, aggressive way of communicating, when that way doesn’t work well in relationships, Burleson says.

He isn’t the first communications expert to express doubt about the Mars-Venus view. But I was interested in what he had to say because something in me just loves the sound of pop-culture theories collapsing.

And they always do collapse.

Consider the self-esteem craze. For years, we were told that boosting kids’ self-esteem was essential to their well-being. Then someone noticed that teenage criminals seem to have plenty of self-esteem. Someone else noticed that kids are pretty savvy to phony praise.

The whole issue has now been reduced to a chicken-and-egg argument over whether kids succeed because they have self-esteem or whether they have self-esteem because they succeed. The answer, as far as I can tell, is that no one knows, so I’ve stopped listening.

But not even Burleson is advocating that we stop listening to John Gray and his Mars-and-Venus arguments.

Gray, even if he’s wrong, is doing some good by getting men and women to at least contemplate better ways of communicating, Burleson says. Just don’t buy it when Gray says he has all the answers.

In fact, if you want to get rich, you might try marketing a theory of your own on the topic.

The public has a tremendous appetite for it.

Gray’s original Mars-and-Venus book has sold more copies than anything other than the Bible in the 1990s.

The Columbus Metropolitan Library has 60 copies. When I checked last week, all of them were out and 40 people were on the waiting list.

Burleson says he’s labored quietly in communications research for 20 years and never received a fraction of the attention he’s now getting for addressing this issue.

“I think that just suggests the intensity of interest in this topic.”