--- title: "You Don't Need to Write Separate Speeches for Men and Women" date: 2026-09-08T14:30 author: Julien Reszka description: "Conventional wisdom says a persuasive message can only move half a room. Research on fear appeals found the exact combination that moves everyone instead." keywords: ["government", "decision-making", "social dynamics", "stress"] canonical: https://julienreszka.com/blog/you-don-t-need-to-write-separate-speeches-for-men-and-women/ --- # You Don't Need to Write Separate Speeches for Men and Women Conventional wisdom says a persuasive message can only move half a room. Research on fear appeals found the exact combination that moves everyone instead. The conventional wisdom about a speech, or an ad, is that it can only ever move half a room: fight for one side, connect with the other, and accept that the rest will tune out. A 2024 field experiment shows that split happening in a real election. The identical mayoral campaign, run as a negative ad, raised turnout among men by about eight percentage points and changed nothing for women. Run as a positive ad instead, it swung women's votes and left men where they started. Economists Vincenzo Galasso and Tommaso Nannicini had found the two halves of the room, each one moved by a different half of the message. For decades, the stress response behind that split was treated as one universal circuit: fight or flight. In 2000, psychologist Shelley Taylor described a different pattern in women. Under threat, women lean more toward protecting their group and pulling it closer, a pattern she named tend and befriend. The mechanism is oxytocin, a hormone that promotes calm and connection under stress. Estrogen strengthens its effect, and androgens blunt it, so the same hormone pulls the average man toward confronting a threat and the average woman toward gathering people close. The same split shows up in groups, not just individuals. Mark van Vugt and colleagues found that men cooperate more with their own team specifically when it is competing against a rival group, while women's cooperation holds steady either way. Men bond over a shared fight. Women bond by default. Two levers follow from this, and each one only moves half the room: - Naming a threat and calling people to fight it together moves men, an effect that fades once the threat is gone - Naming the team on its own, through care or protection, moves women without needing a threat at all None of this means the room has to split. A meta-analysis of fear appeal research by Kim Witte and Mike Allen found that a message pairing a real threat with a clear, doable response beat either lever alone, and gender barely predicted who it moved. Naming a danger only pulls one lever. Naming a danger and handing people something to do about it pulls both, in the same room, at the same time. A speech, or an ad, built to move an entire room does not need to pick a side between fighting for one half and connecting with the other. It needs both in the same breath: a real threat, and something concrete to do about it. That is not a compromise between the two levers. It is the one message neither lever can reach on its own. --- **Actionable insight:** Stop assuming a message has to choose an audience. Pair a real threat with something concrete people can do about it: fear appeal research found that combination moves everyone, while either lever alone only moves the half it was built for. ## Key figure **8 pts** — The turnout gap between men and women left by a threat-only ad, a gap that closes once the same threat comes with a doable response *Source: Galasso, V. and Nannicini, T., Persuasion and gender: experimental evidence from two political campaigns, Public Choice, 2024* ## Myth vs reality **Myth:** A message built to persuade a room can only ever move half of it: fight for one side, or connect with the other, never both. **Reality:** A negative-only political ad split male and female turnout by eight points in a real campaign, but fear appeal research shows that pairing the same threat with a doable response moves both audiences about equally instead. *Source: Galasso & Nannicini, Public Choice, 2024; Witte & Allen, Health Education & Behavior, 2000* ## Quote > "Fear appears to be a great motivator as long as individuals believe they are able to protect themselves." > > — Kim Witte and Mike Allen, Concluding their review of the research behind the Extended Parallel Process Model *Source: A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals, Health Education & Behavior, 2000* ## Products I recommend Free credits to start, pay only for what you use after. - [Generate ad copy variants](https://reloadium.com/reloadium-copywriter?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fjulienreszka.com%2Fblog%2Fyou-don-t-need-to-write-separate-speeches-for-men-and-women%2F) - [Simulate your post](https://reloadium.com/reloadium-instavibe-simulator/?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fjulienreszka.com%2Fblog%2Fyou-don-t-need-to-write-separate-speeches-for-men-and-women%2F)