Writing Characters: Sorry but Yes, Females and Males Speak (very) Differently.

And we speak differently whether or not members of the opposite sex are the the room or hearing distance. Both are more reserved in the presence of the opposite sex.

So when writing characters, don’t force the audience out of suspension of disbelief.

Laurelle asked: —“Why does Cane find it necessary, in a 2009 publication, to include an essay (within the chapter on J.D. Salinger) titled, “How to create female characters that readers remember?” I mean, really.’—

Because men are as notoriously bad at creating female characters, as women are at creating men. Dialog that is counter to type (falling out of character) is one of the most common failings of authors, with misgendered speech the most common means of creating cardboard characters. Sensitivity tends to vary between male and female cognition with empathizing minds (dominantly female) tolerating it (not breaking suspension of disbelief), and systematizing minds (dominantly male) not tolerating it (breaking suspension of disbelief). In fact, it’s rather humorous that you even mention this because you’re demonstrating it. The most common demonstrably female cognitive bias is NAXALT (“not all x are like that”) meaning failure to grasp a distribution.

Now all of us vary in our distribution of systematizing(autistic extreme) male bias and empathizing (psychotic extreme) female bias and we find masculinely biased females and femininely biased males. But that doesn’t change the fact that while some of us are insensitive (empathic) to patterns of behavior and some of us are extremely sensitive to behavioral patterns (systematizing), that the audience’s (marketplace’s) tolerance (willingness to keep investing time in the author’s work) is unaffected by one’s ability to construct a believable character that meets the target market’s demand for suspension of disbelief.

Same is for age, same is for occupation, same is for socio-economic class. Same is for time period.

BTW: Stereotypes are the most accurate measurement in the social sciences, for obvious reasons: they’re continually tested empirically every day. Analytic males have the most accurate judgement of groups (patterns of action), and slightly sensitive females have the most accurate judgement of individuals (patterns of empathy(feeling)). This measure averages out at somewhere between .2 and .5. So it isn’t an extreme advantage or disadvantage. But it does matter. ie: If you write a romance novel it doesn’t matter as much as if you write a spy thriller.

Hope this is useful for other writers.

Cheers.