Speaking Like a Lady: College Students' Perceptions on the Differences between Men and Women in Public Speaking

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine how the attire of male and female public speakers affects college students‟ perception of their credibility. This study was conducted by having a sample of currently enrolled undergraduate students watch a video recording of a male speaker and a female speaker give an identical speech and then evaluate each of them based on ten sets of criteria. The male and female speaker each had three possible videos for the speakers to watch where they were either dressed casually, professionally, or night-out attire. After assessing the two speakers in the random appearance selection, each participant filled out a demographics questionnaire to provide information about their gender, age, ethnicity, and political affiliation. Unfortunately the results proved to have little to no significance with the difference scales based on credibility of each speaker. This is mainly due to the lack of sample size for the participants, indicating that although the topic of this study is of interest, it needs a larger sample size for future investigations in order to yield significant results.