The common belief is that women speak more than men. There are even ‘scientific’ books that come out with this claim. Is that really true?
Women use an average of 20,000 words a day; the number of words that men speak are only 7,000. At least that’s what some popular science books claim. Many experts cite these books; thus, women’s gossip as they spend the day without the need for men to talk, to concentrate on what needs to be done to strengthen the common opinion. So, is all this really true?
There are many ways to measure conversation. You can record people’s conversations by asking them to talk about a topic of your choice. Or you can ask them to record their daily conversations in the home environment. You can then calculate the total number of words spoken, the length of time people talk, the number of times everyone uses speech during a chat, or the average number of words each time.
American researchers who examined 73 studies conducted on children showed that girls spoke more words than boys, but the difference was very small. In fact, this difference was only seen when children talked to their parents, not in the conversation between them. Most importantly, this difference was only seen until the age of two and a half; that is perhaps a temporary phenomenon reflecting the speed difference between girls and boys in terms of the development of language skills.
Men actually talk more
So there is not much difference between children. So, how is it for adults? Campbell Leaper, a psychologist at the University of California, who signed the study that pointed out this small difference between children, concluded that men spoke more in a collective analysis. But again, the difference was small. It was observed that the difference was higher in groups given a specific subject for their speech in the laboratory. Perhaps men felt more comfortable in this new and unusual laboratory environment.
Leaper’s findings supported the conclusions of dozens of studies conducted by linguists and social psychologists. Although differences in the way each study was conducted made it difficult to compare, only two studies concluded that women spoke more than men, while 34 studies revealed that men spoke more than women.
Women are slightly ahead of men
Real-life conversations are the most difficult to measure because of the difficulty of recording. But to overcome this handicap, the psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas has developed a special tool. This electronic recorder was activated for a period of 30 seconds. The study, published in 2007, showed that during the 17-hour period of awake in the United States and Mexico, women spoke 16,215 words and men spoke 15,669 words. So the difference was again very small.
Not all conversations are of the same kind. Perhaps one of the important factors is who else listens to the conversation. In a study conducted at Victoria University in New Zealand, 100 public meetings were held and it was seen that men, who make up two-thirds of the audience, ask for three-quarters of the questions, and that even if they had the same number of audiences as the gender, they asked about two-thirds of the questions.
How scientific is that?
Even though there is much evidence in the opposite direction, we seem to be locked in the judgment that women speak more. This is one of the issues that we expect important differences between men and women; however, research suggests that men and women are similar in many respects, contrary to popular belief.
So what is the source of the judgment that men speak 7,000 words and women speak 20,000 words? Such a sentence appears on the back cover of the book titled ‘Women’s Brain Lou published by Louann Brizendine, a psychiatrist at the University of California. When Mark Liebermann, a professor of language at the University of Pennsylvania, frequently interrogated this quoted data, Brizendine acknowledged that the data was taken from a random personal development book, acknowledging that his science was questionable and promised to remove it from future editions.
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