Taalgebruik op de Werkplek

Male/female communication training offered by enterprises to their company executives starts mostly from common sense ideas about sex-based differences in language use. The corresponding guidelines for women as newcomers in the public sphere as well as for men, often derived from one or more out of three well known theories, are shown to necessarily lead to deceptions because of their gender blindness. A gender approach to differences in language use between men and women cannot produce direct guidelines for language users but may help them to benefit from the fact that all language users, newcomers included, are norm subjects in interaction.