It’s “common knowledge” that women tend to talk more than men.
The common stereotype has the woman chatting away to a silent man — the implied message being that women fill the airwaves with non-critical information while men are able to respond efficiently by cutting to the chase, making every word count.
But is this picture really true?
In 2006, neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine authored a book called “The Female Brain”. In this book, she cited a study showing that women used on average 20,000 words per day to men’s succinct 7000 words per day. These numbers have since circulated throughout television, radio, and print media (e.g., CBS, CNN, National Public Radio, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Washington Post).
The 20,000-versus-7000 word estimates have achieved the status of a cultural myth in that these types of differences have been used by the media for the past 15 years.
But in a new study published in the journal Science (Vol. 317. no. 5834, July 6) suggests otherwise.
The authors of the new study (Matthias R. Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairan Ramirez- Esparza, Richard B. Slatcher, and James W. Pennebaker), note that, in reality, no previous study has systematically recorded the natural conversations of men and women for extended periods of time.
As a result, there has not been any data for reliably estimating differences in daily word usage among women and men.
The researchers used a device called an EAR (electronically activated recorder) — a digital voice recorder that unobtrusively tracks people’s real- world moment-to-moment interactions — which works by occasionally recording snippets of conversations, while participants go about their daily lives. Because the digital recording happens unobtrusively and periodically rather than all the time, participants can’t control or sense when the EAR is on or off and we are more likely to get their natural talking patterns.
The EAR was used to track naturally spoken words and to estimate how many words women and men use over the course of a day.
EAR recordings from 396 university students from the U.S. and Mexico (210 women and 186 men) were collected between 1998 and 2004.
Women and men both use about 16,000 words per day. There was no statistically meaningful difference between these numbers of words and there were very large differences between individuals of around 8000 words per day. One limitation of the study is that all the participants were university students — we don’t know yet whether then same pattern holds for individuals with different levels of education.
So — Women don’t typically use more words than men to express themselves.
Every word of a woman counts as much as those of a man.
What do you think this study potentially means for women in politics? How does it change how you think about women’s communication styles?
For a summary of this study, go to the World Science website for the article: Do Women Really Talk More than Men?
Filed under: Brains and Politics, Media
