Cheryl Wakslak has long studied the power of abstract communication.

Her papers over the years have explored abstract language and power, the use of abstract messaging to reach larger audiences, and the benefits of abstraction in communication across distance. The USC Marshall McAlister Associate Professor in Business Administration is an expert on abstraction and psychological distance, as well as the impacts of abstract versus concrete language.

But it wasn’t until her work on abstraction and power made her consider her own communication style that she started to wonder about gender differences in the tendency to speak more abstractly or concretely.

As she developed this line of research, Wakslak continued to evaluate her own communication style.

“This paper is the most real-world research I’ve done,” she said. “Personally, it’s made me more conscious, thinking more about how I should communicate given the context. Details aren’t bad. Abstract isn’t always better. It’s context specific. In an emergency or situation with high uncertainty, being concrete may be helpful.”

Even with investment funding, she said, context is critical.

“For example, we are seeing some evidence that with crowdfunding, concrete communication may offer some advantage. There you’re not trying to upend an industry. The context is different, and it matters.”

With years of data that they could look at from this angle, Wakslak and her colleagues found a consistent pattern: across a wide variety of contexts, from lab tasks to blog posts to the speech of members of the U.S. Congress, women tended to speak more concretely than men (“Gender Differences in Communicative Abstraction,” American Psychological Association, APA PsycNe, 2020).

Even more, their research went on to demonstrate the salience of abstraction in the real world (“Sizing Up Entrepreneurial Potential: Gender Differences in Communication and Investor Perceptions of Long-Term Growth and Scalability,” Academy of Management Journal, 2021).

The researchers recognized right away the connection between the basic research and its application in a business setting. “The implications are important,” Wakslak said. “The way women deliver information has the potential to impact their ability to emerge as leaders.”

Concrete vs. abstract

Wakslak said the first thing her team was interested in was whether gender differences systematically exist in communicative abstraction, or the use of speech that focuses on the broader picture and ultimate purpose of action rather than concrete speech focusing on details and the means of attaining action. There was a lot of anecdotal evidence of the gender communication difference, and Wakslak’s own work implied it, but large amounts of data had not been examined for this pattern.

Wakslak’s “Gender Differences” paper, published with Priyanka Joshi of San Francisco State University (a former USC doctoral student), Laura Huang of Harvard Business School, and Gil Appel (formerly at Marshall), of George Washington University considers the developmental, psychological, and social conditions that can cause women to speak more concretely than men, and looks at speech patterns in a variety of situations.

They started with their own prior work on the effects of audience distance or size on speech abstraction and went on to using both tightly controlled paradigms and field data consisting of open-ended speech contexts. They tapped large archival data sets of written and spoken language from publicly available repositories of naturally produced speech and text.

Across these varied contexts, Wakslak said, “we find that men tend to communicate more abstractly than women. We also identify several moderators for this effect, suggesting that it does not reflect a fixed tendency of men or women but rather emerges within specific contexts.”

One such context is the entrepreneurial space. In the paper, “Sizing Up Entrepreneurial Potential,” Wakslak and her team focused on what women and men were saying when they were looking for investors.

“Female entrepreneurs have a tendency to use more concrete language when describing their ventures than their male counterparts,” said Wakslak. “This can be a disadvantage in contexts where investors are after high growth investments. We find that the use of abstract speech affects investors’ perceptions of which ventures are oriented toward long-term growth and scalability, which in turn affects the likelihood that a venture will receive investment.”

Ambidexterity is important

The good news for women is that knowing how they communicate means they can tailor their messaging to achieve optimum results.

“Ambidexterity is important,” Wakslak said. “Both men and women can benefit from considering context, goals and whether they are effectively conveying what they want.”

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