Do women really talk more than men?
Women talk too much. Women are more talkative than men. At work or home, no matter. This pervasive stereotype has been around for a very long time. But how true is it?
Babble of the sexes
A research team led by the University of Arizona (U of A) in the United States recorded over 2 000 people to find out. The results showed that women outtalked men – but only during a specific period in their lives. The study was published in the ‘Journal of Personality and Social Psychology’. “There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men,” co-lead study author Colin Tidwell, clinical psychology doctoral candidate, commented in a news release. “We wanted to see whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested.” Women between the ages of 25 and 64 spoke about 3 000 more words per day than their male counterparts. Women spoke on average 21 845 words daily, while men 18 570. However, there was no noteworthy gender gap in daily word count for several age brackets: 10-17, 18-24, and 65 and up. Overall, women spoke only 1 073 more words per day than men. The difference between the two is smaller than previously thought.
The gift of gab? Tell me your age
The researchers don’t know precisely why women might talk more during early and middle adulthood. “Gender-linked differences in child rearing and family care are one possibility that could account for this difference,” explained senior author Matthias Mehl, professor in the Department of Psychology. “If biological factors like hormones were to be the main cause, a sizeable gender difference should have also been present among emerging adults. If societal generational changes were to be the driving force, there should have been a gradually increasing gender difference with older participants. Neither, though, was the case.” Another observation was that, in general, people are talking less than ever, sliding from about 16 000 words a day to about 13 000. This likely has to do with the digital media age. The researchers analysed data from 630 000 recordings from 22 studies across four countries. They covered 2 197 participants aged 10 to 94. The people wore a device that regularly recorded short clips of their daily conversations. Mehl is helping to develop SocialBit, a wearable device that measures an individual’s social interactions throughout the day without recording their content. “I’m fascinated by the idea that we know how much we need to sleep, we know how much we need to exercise, and people are wearing Fitbits all the time, but we have no idea how much we’re supposed to socialize,” he concluded. “The evidence is very strong that socializing is linked to health, at least to the same extent as physical activity and sleep are. It’s just another health behavior.”
Keywords
talk, talkative, word, speak, gender, age, man, woman