Women Talk Three Times As Much As Men
Here we go – another fallacy, distantly related to that other mad idea that we only use ten per cent of our brains
(Actually, with some people, that would clearly be an over-estimate)
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What utter nonsense, and yet somehow this myth of the talkative woman persists.
There’s an interesting article here, in the Guardian, about the myth of Venus and Mars.
What is most interesting to me is that at the root of the popular fallacy there is often just one piece of published work that it can be traced back to – and often there is no basis in fact. It’s simply that some ideas seem to fit in with popular misconceptions, and these ideas spread – an idea virus or meme.
In this case, Professor of Phonetics, Mark Lieberman, discovered the root came not from a reputable study, but from a self help book. He investigates further and discovered that a variety of different books gave a range of average female word counts from 4 to 25 thousand a day- and not one single claim was backed up by research.
Then there’s the Essential Difference, a book by Simon Baron Cohen, that talks about the difference between the female and male brain. Of course, female brains are gentler and more caring…women make better school teachers, nurses and counsellors. The male brain makes better scientists and engineers. How surprising and co-incidental that one kind of brain earns more money than the other….
His argument falls apart however when he says that men can have a female brain, and women can have a male brain. This sounds like linguistic and philosophical gymnastics to me. What proportion of women would have to be shown to have “male brain” characteristics to demonstrate a cultural rather than biological bias? What if arguing logically and speaking out of turn and heaven forbid, interrupting a high status male with a scientific brain means we are unfeminine… maybe even feminist?
The feminist Dale Spender once suggested an explanation: she said that people overestimate how much women talk because they think that, ideally, women would not talk at all.
So I’ll be quiet now. As if 
(Wouldn’t it be lovely if we managed to get the right ratio of blog comments here 
)
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About Ann GodridgeAnn Godridge has just completed her first crime novel, The Mermaid's Shroud, and has started work on the sequel. Her story the Tree of Knowledge was shortlisted for the Asham Award. She writes about writing and sometimes about textile arts at her blogStraw into Gold. You can find out more about her here - About Ann G.
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12 Responses to Women Talk Three Times As Much As Men
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even if they win the ''argument'' and there is a proof that women talk more than men, we do talk sense….
now about the male v female brain it defently has a cultural aspect to it as well as physiology… women can be trained and proved to be engineers, doctors, scientests etc… but i wonder if men can really be trained to bear children or to do all the jobs women juggle and still do their jobs as well as we do….
however, i dont wish to be a train driver, or a builder, or to handle any thing heavy, its personal matter too…
Ann, keep quiet now and i will join you
Ann, am speechless
maybe we talk more in the hope that more will get into their heads…
There's just no clear evidence that we do talk more, Sarah. Maybe we do, maybe we don't.
Like most everything else I reckon it's an individual thing. And although I talk a lot, I also listen a lot too. It's a two way thing, conversation – same online as offline. If you talk to people, mostly they talk back to you.
Hi Ann
I thought we only used 5% of our brains – now I see it's DOUBLE that
do I need to round up more grey cells?
I don't know why but this bit in the article leapt out at me:
“Psychologists have found in experimental studies that when interpreting situations people typically pay most attention to things that match their expectations, and often fail to register counter-examples.”
So, if it fits in with our world view we're more likely to notice it, go along with it and accept it as 'true' and 'the norm' whereas if it doesn't we'll either miss it or ignore it or, if we do clock it we'll tell ourselves it's the exception. And actually, thinking about that it's easy to recall lots of examples that demonstrate just how true it is!
Twitter: Linda_Mattacks
Exactly! It is amusing sometimes to read reactions to the same article by people who have opposing beliefs – people can always find a way to support their own preconceptions.
I expcet it's much the same with the election debates – people think that Cameron or Clegg or Brown made a good argument, when actually all they did was make an argument the viewer agreed with. Disconcerting, isn't it?
I remember an experiment (haven't got time to find it and source it) where a social gathering containing equal numbers of both genders was recorded. The people present were asked to estimate what proportion of the conversation was made by women, and by men. I can't remember the actual figures (sorry), but the men hugely overestimated the women's percentage. It was something like men estimated women contributed 75%, the women estimated it was about 50% and actually the women contributed less than 40%.
I remember the conclusion being that men perceive that women talk around twice as much as they actually do.
Twitter: evenbreak
That makes sense to me, Jane. As Dale Spender put it, some people think women shouldn't talk at all, and they interpret anything as too much.
Well, of course there are some biological differences, but there are biological differences between women too. And although men might not be able to bear children, I've known some who do the lion's share of bringing them up – and a very good job they make of it too.
I have to confess I can't imagine wanting to be a builder either – but I don't think Ryan wants to be either. Astronaut though, maybe…
I have to confess to having quite a masculine-type brain, and I can't multitask at all. I do talk a lot, but when I'm on the phone with my boyfriend, he talks more than ANY man I've ever come across, and I'm simply reduced to “mmmm” and “yes” every now and then!
I've just finished reading a fabulous book called Risk, the Science and Politics of Fear by Dan Gardner, which is well worth the read. In it, amongst many issues he discusses, he writes about we believe what we believe and won't be swayed from it, despite evidence to the contrary, and why this is so. So yes, I think that men who think women talk too much probably think they shouldn't talk at all.
I do also think that man are often somewhat thrown by what we talk about. Women are generally quite quick to dive into very personal issues, where men would rather have their toenails ripped out one by one rather than discuss issues like sex and relationships (not just couple relationships). So maybe they also think we talk too much because we talk about issues that are “too much” in their book.
How can you have a “masculine” brain, Morag? That's my point, really. It's a logical impossibility – you are a woman therefore your brain in feminine. What you mean is that your brain works like the stereotype we have all been brainwashed into thinking of as masculine.
Anyone who points this out is told it's an exception – but actually there are so many exceptions that if we were reasonable then we would come to see that the exceptions are so numerous the concepts don't actually make sense.
Some men may not dive happily into talking about issues like sex and relationships – others do. Ryan for one – but also people like Freud, and Jung – and all the male poets and novelists who have ever existed – Shakespeare, Henry James, Ian McEwan. On Chesil Beach, which I hated witha passion, was as minute and detailed a close analysis of the minutiae of a relationship as you could ever hope to avoid…
I think Morag is referring to left vs right brain thinkers.
ie
left brain: logical and numerical linear thinkers, think scientists, computer programmers and engineers
right brain: touchy-feely, emotional, creative types such as artists, poets, writers etc
Historically, men and women have fallen into the two camps by dint of trade, but that is a huge generalisation of stereotypes and now we have people in both camps with more women in science and many men feeling more comfortable with creative roles.
Twitter: maverickny
Again, I wonder if the left and right brain idea is just a convenient way of splitting it for us to talk about it – rather than any kind of reflection of reality. Scientists use creativity and artists need craft and logic too – and there's a reason we have a corpus callosum
We do have a tendency to split things down an imaginary dotted line in the middle in our feeble attempts to make sense of reality. So we split the mind and body – as if they are two separate things, and this is just another of those conveniences, perhaps.