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IZOLDA TAKÁCS: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY acceptable. She has — guoting psychological and psycho-linguistic experiments — elaborated for example how men and women practice different strategies in their thinking patterns and communication. She claims that women are born with the trait of considering the establishment of relationships and friendships to be paramount. She states that this can even be observed in kindergarten, where: Girls share secrets, toys, etc. with each other, whereas boys already start competing, fighting with each other, creating a hierarchy from the get-go. Not only in terms of having an alpha male, but a complete set of subordinations, a pecking order below that. With boys, the aim of every single act of communication is to figure out who can reach a dominant position. And this applies to their relationship toward women as well. If a couple gets lost, for example, it is always the female asking which the right way is, a male would never ask that, because that would render him in a subordinate position. (Subject no. 4, social sciences) Tannen sums up the assumed differences between men and women in her infamously heavily criticised book You Just Don’t Understand, which are divided into six groups. The thoughts presented in the book all manifest themselves to a degree with every single interviewee belonging to this type, the members of which tend to group male and female characteristics and traits in a fundamentally similar way. Tannen has contrasted the fundamental otherness of the two genders with the help of categories she invented, thus creating opposition pairs like (1) independence (men) — intimacy (women), (2) advice (men) — understanding (women), (3) information (men) — feelings (women), (4) status (men) — support (women), (5) orders (men) — proposal (women) as well as (6) conflict (men) — compromise (women). Tannen presents men as more independent and competing with each other, whereas women prefer intimacy and sentiments. Furthermore, men often apply confrontation as the instrument for reaching a solution to an argument or other situations, thereby conveying and shaping their social status.*”’ The opposites listed above can be added to the series of well-known, ossified binary oppositions associated with gender (like women: sensitivity, empathy, matter, body, irrationality, versus men: mind, logos, form, leader, logic, rationality). And if we assume the characteristics and traits associated with stereotypes regarding men are much more applicable to the image of a leader, we can explain why the majority of women (and men alike) think a leadership role is something fundamentally not for women. 271 Tannen, D.: You Just Don’t Understand. Women and Men in Conversation, London, Virago Press, 1991. * 90 ¢
