While it is interesting that more boys speak up in Zoom classes when they have questions and more girls ask questions or share comments through email, I don’t particularly think that this is something that is influenced by the gender. For example, in some of my other classes, a ton of girls are speaking in class and many of the boys stay quiet. Most likely, this is influenced by personalities or the mood of a person on a given day. Some of the girls who are attending tech class zoom may be more reserved than the boys because they just don’t like speaking on camera, or some of them may only think of questions later, after the Tech zooms are over. I know that I don’t really like speaking on Zooms because I get nervous when I think of the whole class hearing me and I am more comfortable drafting an email, where I can rewrite and revise my thoughts multiple times before having them shared. I also know that other girls hate having to write emails because they take too long and they just want to get things over with and share their thoughts on a whim. To me, that’s quite disturbing, but that’s just my opinion. Additionally, I know some boys who don’t really feel comfortable talking through Zooms because everyone is watching and catching every word you say, which I can relate to, because I don’t really like that either. Due to this, I don’t really think that the differences in communication is dependent on the gender of a student and relies more on how comfortable the feel speaking in class.
Technology 7: Differences in Communication Between Genders
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Responses to this blog prompt have been so interesting — learning the perspective of each individual responding has been more valuable than the actual response!
So yes I agree, of course gender doesn’t really drive the different responses, even if there are patterns of behavior that we can observe from one group compared to another.
Several students have suggested that at this age girls tend to be more shy and like to think things through before they speak in front of others, while boys more outgoing and like to talk — this might explain the pattern of behavior that we are observing.
I wonder how these behaviors might change from the time we are very young to now in middle school and how it might change again as you move into high school and college and beyond?