Here's an excellent summary of Deborah Tannen's research on male/female conversational differences that lead to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. For example:

Men grow up in a world in which a conversation is often a contest, either to achieve the upper hand or to prevent other people from pushing them around. For women, however, talking is often a way to exchange confirmation and support.

I saw this when my husband and I had jobs in different cities. People frequently made comments like, "That must be rough," and "How do you stand it?" I accepted their sympathy and sometimes even reinforced it, saying, "The worst part is having to pack and unpack al the time."

But my husband often reacted with irritation. Our situation had advantages, he would explain. As academics, we had four-day weekends together, as well as long vacations throughout the year and four months in the summer.

Everything he said was true, but I didn't understand why he chose to say it. He told me that some of the comments implied: "Yours is not a real marriage. I am superior to you because my wife and I have avoided your misfortune." Until then it had not occurred to me there might be an element of one- upmanship.

I now see that my husband was simply approaching the world as many men do: as a place where people try to achieve and maintain status. I, on the other hand, was approaching the world as many women do: as a network of connections seeking support and consensus.

When I read her book on the subject, I found myself seeing the male view in about 3/5 of examples, the female view in 1/5, and neither in 1/5. So I definitely found a gender correlation, although an imperfect one.

But while I believe there is some gender correlation, I don't think it is necessary to view it in a gender-based way to get value out of it. You can just look at it as a series of lessons in how other people may be viewing conversational meta-messages very differently than you. And I think these are pretty important lessons.

In most Western countries illness-related absenteeism is higher among female workers than among male workers. Using the personnel dataset of a large Italian bank, we show that the probability of an absence due to illness increases for females, relative to males, approximately 28 days after a previous illness. This difference disappears for workers age 45 or older. We interpret this as evidence that the menstrual cycle raises female absenteeism ... Finally, we calculate the earnings cost for women associated with menstruation. We find that higher absenteeism induced by the 28-day cycle explains 11.8 percent of the earnings gender differential.

This seems like good news for women. Isn't it easier to tame biology than to fight bias? For example, if this research is correct, pill strategies which result in less periods per year should reduce some of the gender gap in earnings. (as well as making life easier in other ways, from what I hear).