Males or Females: Who Talks More?

The assertion that women are talkers and men are doers has taken on the proportions of an urban legend. Many people take this as fact, without questioning the accuracy of the statement. An informal look around just about any social or work group usually reveals that both men and women are talking equally.

I'm not sure how long the myth has been perpetuated. Perhaps it goes back to the days when men went off the work and women sat around in coffee groups during their daily break from housework. The myth about the fairer sex and their love of talk probably goes back even further than that.

It was with great interest that I read an article in Reuters' written by Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor (today.reuters.com) . The article reported on a study published on July 5, 2007 in the journal Science. The study challenged the common wisdom that women are biologically programmed to talk more.

The study was led by psychologist Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona. Mehl and his colleagues had been struck by the myth that women talk more than men and have a bigger vocabulary. Mehl said in a telephone interview to Reuters "So we generalize and say that women just talk all the time."

The results of the study challenged the generalization that women talk all the time. Mehl explained "Women and men both use on average about 16,000 words per day, with very large individual differences around this mean.

Subjects of the study consisted of 396 U.S and Mexican college students. The students wore a personal digital assistant with a recorder. The devices recorded for 30 second periods every 12 minutes or so. This gave representative samples of the amount the person talked. The words were transcribed and analyzed by researchers.

Researchers of the study wrote "The data suggest that women spoke on average 16,215 words and men 15,669 words over a period of an average of 17 waking hours.

Researchers did find a lot of variation from most to least talkative, but it was not divided along gender lines. For example, the most talkative male in the study used 47,000 words while the least talkative male spoke just a little over 500 words.

There may have been social or cultural factors at work, but it does not appear to be a biological difference that accounts for variations in talkativeness.

Although the amount of talk was not divided along gender lines, the subject matter did show a stereotypical difference. Men talked more about technology, work, money and numbers. Women talked about fashion and relationships.

The ability to babble on senselessly is is not divided along gender lines. Both sexes can babble. Mehl said, "Sometimes you find a stream of words but people don't say very much. You just talk and talk and talk".

Even though some men like to accuse women of talking endlessly, it seems that both sexes have the ability to chatter incessantly. It's nice to know that the capacity to babble incoheritantly is not a sexual trait.