Is a person's gender an important influence on how he or she behaves with others? Contemporary sociologists and other scholars have argued on this question fiercely. The following pair of passages presents two contrasting voices from that debate.
Passage 1
The desire to affirm that women and men are completely equal has made some scholars reluctant to show ways in which they are different, because differences Line between two groups of people have so often been used (5) to 'justify" unequal treatment and opportunity. Much as I understand and am in sympathy with those who wish there were no differences between women and men, only reparable social injustice, my research on styles of conversation tells me that, at least in this (10) area, it simply isn't so. I believe that there are gender differences in ways of speaking, and we need to identify and understand them. Without such understanding, we are doomed to blame others or ourselves or our own relationships for the otherwise mystifying and damaging (15) effects of our contrasting conversational styles.
It is clear to me that recognizing gender differences in conversational styles would free individuals from the burden of an inappropriate sense of being at fault for chronic disagreements. Many women and men feel (20) dissatisfied with their close relationships with spouses, siblings, parents and become even more frustrated when they try to talk things out. Taking a socio-linguistic approach to such troubling encounters makes it possible to explain these dissatisfaction without accusing anyone (25) of being wrong and without blaming or discarding the relationship.
The socio=linguistic approach I take in my work is based on my belief that many frictions arise because, here in the United States, boys and girls grow up in what are essentially (30) different cultures, so that talk between women and men is actually cross-cultural communication. For little boys, talk is primarily a means of making statements of achievement through games like bragging contests. This may also be done by exhibiting knowledge or skill and by (35) holding center stage through such verbal performance as storytelling, joking, or imparting information. Little girls appear to be eager to share and compare interests and ideas. Emphasis is placed on displaying similarities and matching experiences. For them, the language of conversation (40) is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connection and negotiating relationships. So this view of children's behavior predicts that more women than men will be comfortable speaking one-on-one, to individuals. And even when addressing an audience, women may be (45) more concerned than men with establishing rapport.
Passage 2
Gender stereotypes should concern us for several reasons. First, they may dictate what we notice and bias our perceptions in the direction of expectation. Some researchers attempt to elucidate gender differences in (50) order to help women and men understand and respond to one another better. In the process, however, their work encourages people to notice and attend to differences rather than similarities, to perceive men and women in accordance with stereotypes that may not accurately depict their behave (55) for or intentions. Second, gender stereotypes may not only describe behavior but also prescribe it, dictating how men and women "should" behave. People begin to act in ways that support other people's gender-role expectations of them.
(60) It is time to rethink our understanding of gender, to move away from the notion that men and women have two contrasting styles of interaction that were acquired in childhood. We need to move from a conceptualization of gender as an attribute or style of behavior to an understanding (65) of gender as something people do in social interaction. As a noted scholar proposes, "None of us is feminine or is masculine or fails to be either of those. In particular contexts people do feminine, in others, they do masculine." People display contradictory behaviors as they (70) encounter different social norms and pressures.
Some researchers view male-female conversations as cross-cultural communication. The two-cultures approach postulates that difficulties in communication between men and women arise because of a clash of conversational (75) styles. But this approach has a number of limitations. First, the coherence of male and female subcultures in childhood has been exaggerated. We arrive at a contrasting picture of the cultures of boys and girls only by singling out those children who fit common gender stereotypes and marginalizing (80) others. We fail to notice the children who do not fit those stereotypes, for example, boys who excel at caring for younger siblings or girls who enjoy building things in shop class. Second, although children may choose same-sex playmates as preferred partners, they interact daily (85) inside and outside school with the opposite sex. Children have countless experiences communicating with people of both sexes: they do not learn to communicate in gender-segregated worlds. They learn to display different styles of interaction in different contexts: they do not learn a single (90) gender-related style. The same child may display dominance and give orders to a younger playmate but show deference and follow orders from an older friend.
In lines 36-41 ("Little girls ... relationships"), the author of Passage 1 assumes that for girls, a primary function of communication is to.
A
Foster a sense of intimacy between speaker and listener (
B
Establish a set of conversational rules shared by speaker and listener
C
Promote nostalgic feelings about past friendships
D
Convey information previously unknown by the listener (
E
Create an objective atmosphere for personal