Erina MacGeorge

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Purdue News Service

Ms. Magazine

The calls have come from locations as far away as London, Dublin and South Africa. The media at the other end vary from students newspapers to giants such as Men's Health and The Christian Science Monitor.

All have wanted to talk with Assistant Professor Erina MacGeorge about her recent research into sex roles. Ms. Magazine's Web blog even devoted an entire entry to the research.

In it, MacGeorge tackled the "Men are From Mars and Women are From Venus" theory, which explains communication differences between men and women as resulting from different gender cultures. MacGeorge's research found that while there are small differences between men's and women's comforting skills, this is not enough to claim the sexes are their own cultures or come from different planets.

"When it comes to comforting, the Mars-Venus concept is not only wrong, but harmful," MacGeorge told Purdue News Service. "For the most part, men and women use, and strongly prefer, the same ways of comforting others – listening, sympathizing and giving thoughtful advice. Yet books like John Gray's 'Men are From Mars and Women are From Venus' and Deborah Tannen's 'You Just Don't Understand' tell men that being masculine means dismissing feelings and downplaying problems. That isn't what most men do, and it isn't good for either men or women."

MacGeorge's study, "The Myth of Gender Cultures: Similarities Outweigh Differences in Men's and Women's Provision of and Responses to Supportive Communication," is the lead article in the March issue of Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. MacGeorge's article includes three studies conducted with several department graduate students and Professor Brant Burleson.

MacGeorge said her most interesting experience resulting from the study's publication was an interview she did on a program called "UpAllNight" on the British Broadcasting Corp.'s London radio station. "They kept me on for half an hour responding to some claims recently made by a scholar at Cambridge and talking to various call-ins," she said. "It was fun listening to all the British accents."