Spend two minutes with a search engine and you will quickly find that several of my colleagues in the industry run specific courses in presentation skills for women, under the wonderfully self-explanatory title "Presentation skills for women". The question I was once asked by a client who rang in was whether she had to take one, simply because she was a woman. My answer was unhesitating: no. As a woman, you do not need to, and frankly should not, take a special course in presentation skills.
In the eight years I have been teaching presentation skills, I have met tens of thousands of participants, with a gender split of roughly fifty-fifty. My one and only observation is that there is a slight overrepresentation of the words "thought", "a little" and "try" among women, and a slight tendency to tilt the head gently to the left at the wrong moments in a presentation. Beyond that, the difference is zero.
Marketing a course called "Presentation skills for women" is nothing more than a sales strategy, a way to stand out from the rest of the market and attract a particular audience.
Men's and women's brains have extraordinarily few differences, far fewer than we once believed. A University of Rochester study showed exactly this. What sometimes gives women that slight overrepresentation of hesitant rhetoric is that we still tend, culturally, to treat men and women differently. Keep doing that, and the problem stays exactly where it is. Society grows more equal by the day, and to pour fuel on old gender roles in a false way like this is, quite simply, a shame.
Myth: busted.
Want to become a better presenter?
This is a short piece from David's knowledge bank. To go deeper, the best places are a keynote, a course, or one to one coaching.