Wojtek makes good points in his post about male left discourse (let me apologize here to Joanna for a sharp comment I made about something she posted a few days ago). However, social class enters the picture here as well. There are, after all, women on the left who have some money. Who have others cleaning their homes (almost always women), who send their kids to daycare (always poorly paid women), who go out to eat frequently (where they are served by poorly paid men and women, the poorest of whom are minorities slaving away in the kitchen), and so forth. Who discourse with one another but don't engage the working class very much. Who share a whole set of attitudes, modes of speech, etc. connected to their social class. The whole business gets pretty complicated.
What do others think of this scenario? I used to teach workers in Johnstown, PA. Steelworkers mainly, and therefore mostly men. It could be a rough group, profane and macho, to use Wojtek's word. No grades and none of your standard teacher-student inequality. I asked a women with whom I taught if she was interested in teaching a class. She said yes. I was glad since we didn't have many women teachers in this program, and she grew up in a mining town nearby and, I thought, would be connected to the students because of this. However, she lasted one term. She couldn't deal with the men. I was disappointed, thinking that she should have dealt with the situation from the beginning, and if she had, the class would have gone smoothly. I wondered, too, if the authoritarian atmosphere of the college classroom, to which she had no trouble adapting (I had observed her class at college, and a woman I know told me that she was extremely dismissive of views with which she did not agree), hadn't made her incapable of dealing with the more egalitarian (if male and somewhat macho) classroom of steelworkers.