Are Women More Talkative Than Men ?

For quite a long time now in modern society, there has been a myth that women are much more talkative than men. In her book The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine puts a number to the myth. She said that women average 20,000 words a day while men average only 7,000. Since Brizendine is a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California it must be true -- right?

Not necessarily. It seems when asked, Brizendine was unable to pinpoint where she got that figure. She could only attribute it to "secondary sources". That is because there are NO scientific studies on this matter. The earliest use of these figures is by James Dobson of Focus on the Family (how's that for a reliable source?).

A University of Texas psychology professor, James Pennebaker, and his colleagues decided to find out if the myth was true. They had conducted some studies with 400 male and female students in the US and Mexico, where they attached recorders to study participants that would record 30 seconds every 12 minutes. The participants did not know when the device was recording.

These professors realized that this was the perfect database to answer the question of whether women talked more or not, so they started counting words spoken. The results show that the myth is simply not true!

Their studies showed that women speak an average of 16,215 words a day, while men speak an average of 15,669 (not a statistically significant difference). It turns out that neither sex is more talkative than the other -- but both talk about the same amout on average.

So another popular myth is exposed. Once again we find that men and women are very much alike. It wouldn't surprise me if even more of the so-called differences between men and women are shown to be false.

In modern society, humans are much more alike than they are different.

The picture above is of Professor James Pennebaker.