Clothes, cultures and sex

"What should I wear when I go to work in Oxford in England?" someone asked me recently. As a British person who had spent three years studying in Oxford, and who had also experienced the formality of colleagues in the London company HQ, I answered confidently "dress formally".

As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Oxford office the person was going to had begun life as a start-up company with young employees, most of whom were software developers. Jeans and jumpers were the rule, suits and ties taboo. My experience was based on my university days 30 years ago and on HQ culture. For me, it was a lesson in the need to take not only national, but also age and professional cultures seriously.

Among the many definitions of culture that are out there today, I find the most useful one to be "a shared system of values, beliefs, meanings and behaviour". Culture can be national, but also professional, regional or connected to age, religion or the company you work for (corporate culture).

A view that there are cultural differences between the genders has prompted a whole range of popular books, the most famous of which is Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Recent research challenges many of the assumptions behind these bestsellers. In Business Spotlight 2/2009, we look at gender communication with special reference to The Myth of Mars and Venus. Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?, a fascinating book by an Oxford professor, Deborah Cameron.

For me the message is that stereotypes about cultures, whether national, professional or related to gender, should carry a government health warning.