gender issue and leadership
...calls, electronic mail, cable television, or satellite broadcasts). Communication is a vital part of personal life and is also important in business, education, and any other situation where people encounter each other. In every society, humans have developed spoken and written language as a means of sharing messages and meanings. The most common form of daily communication is interpersonal—that is, face-to-face, at the same time and in the same place. “The most basic form of interpersonal communication is a dyad (an encounter or conversation between two people). Some dyads exist over a long period of time, as in a marriage or partnership. Communicating well in a dyad requires good conversational skills”(Encyclopedia). Communicators must know how to start and end the conversation, how to make themselves understood, how to respond to the partner's statements, how to be sensitive to their partner's concerns, how to take turns, and how to listen. Together, these abilities are called communication competence. “Shyness or reluctance to interact is called communication apprehension. Persuasion is the process of convincing others that one's ideas or views are valuable or important”(Encyclopedia). Communication may also occur in small groups, such as families, clubs, religious groups, friendship groups, or work groups. Most small-group interaction involves fewer than ten people, and the communicators need the same communication skills as in a dyadic conversation. However, the most important thing in communication between two or between groups is the human voice, it is an extraordinary human instrument. Every time we speak, our voice reveals our gender, age, geographic background, and level of education, native birth, emotional state, and our relationship with the person spoken to. All these clues (and many more) are contained in even small fragments of speech, and other people can “read” our voices with remarkable accuracy. When we speak, we “encode” important information about ourselves, when we listen to others, we can “decode” important information about them. Moreover, in the...