I have my own theories on this one. After years of working in a technical field and finding myself having to modify my natural communications style, I finally realized a pattern. Having recognized this pattern, I then also noticed the majority of people in leadership positions seemed to fall near one point in this pattern.
It was not the people with the best language skills who seemed to be in leadship positions. In fact, it appeared to be those with somewhat limited, but not too limited language skills. Having thought about this, I figured the language skills were in some ways ideally suited to communicating with a wider audience. Those with limited skills would be able to understand them. Whereas those with greater language skills were also able to understand them as their advanced language skills give them the ability to deal with a wider variety of language styles.
Interesting to hear of a book name The Bell Curve. I wonder if it even comes close to my own bell curve. My own bell curve has an arbitrary scale of 0 to 10 (value is not an indication of better or worse). On this scale, society seems to most often choose people in the 2 to 4 range for leadership. In my opinion, people with the most flexibility to deal with language fall in the 6 to 8 range.
In my estimates of the gender differences, the centers of the gender bell curves are very slightly different. The male curve centers at 4.7 and the female curve centers at around 5.1. So overall, not much of a difference on average between males and females. However, at certain points on the curves, there can be significant gender statistical differences. So for example, at around the 3 point on my arbitrary scale, there are 4 men for every 1 female.
Most of this is nothing more than theory and a lot of estimation. Used some real statistics combined with a whole lot of estimates. Now, I realize I have indicated on average males have slightly poorer language skills. Then again, I am male, so does this make it ok. Either way, I feel it is important to try and understand how things work, whether the results are necessarily what we may want them to be.
I am not overly convinced by my own thoughts on this. Just a hypothesis at this point. I just thought it would be interesting to put it out there. The only reason I put out the rather poorly derived numbers, was to help clarify the idea. One was the fact, the positions of greatest skill in a given area is not necessarily at the end of the scale. Also, it indicates both males and females span the entire range, but in differing proportions. This is also an over simplification of what I have come up with.
