Communication involves the basic components, which are the information, sender, receiver, as well as the media through which it takes place. Its effectiveness is realized only when the recipient understands the intended meaning and reciprocates through feedback. Three steps are involved in the process, which is the conception of the idea, the feeling or information, by the person intending to communicate, relaying of the information is passed through words or symbols (verbal and or nonverbal). Finally, the recipient decodes or translates the symbols or words into understandable pieces, which can be responded to and therefore responds through what is the feedback to complete the cycle.

Humans have varying ways through which they communicate and the differences may be dependent on personal background in culture, education, age as well as on gender among other factors. Femininity or masculinity are attributes that effectively explains the speech characteristics that individuals exhibit in communication. In fact, studies indicate that men and women adopt particular strategies of communication as influenced by their sexual orientation and the cultural and social dictates on gender orientations (Anon, 2). The styles and strategies that men, as well as women, adopt for communication are described by ‘debate versus relate’, competitive versus co-operative’ and ‘report versus rapport’. It is, however, worth noting that conversation is an art of every day hence is not restricted to either social or working environment but rather to all such environs. This paper, therefore, intends to study how the differences between men and women’s communication strategies relate to social or biological norms. The comparison is also aimed at establishing what values of the society that the different approaches reveal.

The conception of the differences exhibited by males and females is often viewed from the point of who talks more, who interrupts in a conversation, gender patterns in meetings and conversation set-ups, differences in assertiveness and such other common differential attributes. For instance, men initiate more conversations while compared to women in social settings while women exhibit more tolerance to interruptions by men in conversations as against men. Hobbs (243) shows that in sociolinguistic research, women adopt more polite word strategies while communicating as against men.