Is It True That Men Don’t Listen (and why not if they don’t)?

Sometimes…. sometimes too often…. men simply don’t listen. Don’t listen to what other people are saying, and more specifically, don’t listen to what women are saying.

We’re sure you’ve heard that before. We’ve certainly heard it plenty of times.

But is it true? Is it really true?

The answer seems to depend….on a lot of factors, primarily who you ask, when and in what context.

But let’s look at this in a simple, straightforward manner, like any good pollster would do.

According to a poll we conducting in March of 2021, 41% of respondents said that men do NOT listen (59% said they do).

So…. right off the bat we can see that a lot of people would agree with the sentiment that men might not be great listeners.

Women were far more likely to hold this view, with nearly 7 out of ten (69%) agreeing that men don’t listen, compared to just 31% of men who said the same thing.

Put another way, nearly twice as many women as men think that men don’t listen – men, take note! ?

But that wasn’t the only interesting thing we found when we sliced and diced the polling data.

We also found that those who considered themselves “conservative” politically were more likely to believe that men don’t listen (44%)…

…as did people between the ages of 25 to 34 (when compared to those younger and older), as well as those in the lower income brackets.

In particular, we see a significant divide around the $60,000 per year income mark: collectively, those earning less were one and a half times as likely to believe that men don’t listen when compared to those earning more (61% vs. 39%, respectively).

Lastly, we found that married respondents were far more likely than those who had never been married (67% vs. 33%, respectively) to believe that men don’t listen, while this perception gap between those who are married vs. those who are divorced is even larger (67% vs. 8%, respectively).

Remember, we asked all respondents to answer this question, regardless of their gender, marital status or any of the other demographics that we looked at.

So, what’s the lesson in all this?

We’d like to suggest that there are at least a couple.

For starts, men, please note that many people – especially women – really think you don’t listen as much as you should be.

Though, the good news is, that since so many married people believe that, it’s not really a deal breaker after all.

And that says a lot…if you’re listening!

Addendum

We asked those who said that men don’t listen to give us their best guess as to why that’s the case (according to them – not us!). Below are their responses, summarized and condensed for readability.