Study Says Men Talk As Much As Women

By Anastacia Mott Austin

You may have heard the joke. A woman and her husband are discussing the idea that women talk twice as much as men. The woman tells her husband, "That’s because we have to repeat everything we say." The husband responds, "What?"

Apparently the joke was on all of us, because a new study coming out this week in Science journal disproves the long-held myth that women talk more than men.

The study’s co-authors, psychologists Matthias Mehl of the Univeristy of Arizona and James Pennebaker from the University of Texas, recorded 396 college students’ conversations over a period of 10 days, with the participants unaware of when they were being recorded. They had previously performed six similar language studies, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, from 1998 to 2004. Though they originally did the study to look at people’s responses to emotional experiences, they were struck by a magazine interview about a year ago touting a statistic that women used an average of 20,000 words per day to men’s 7,000.

The New York Times interview was between Deborah Solomon and Dr. Louann Brizendine, who wrote the book "The Female Brain." A professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of California, Dr. Brizendine claimed the 20,000-7,000 statistic in her book, and it has since gained wide acceptance in the larger community.

That didn’t sound right to Mehl and Pennebaker. "I just knew that couldn’t be right," said Pennebaker to reporters, based on his experience with language studies. Mehl agreed. "The 20,000 vs. 7,000 word estimates appear to have achieved the status of a cultural myth."

Though it hadn’t been their initial goal, the two decided that they had the perfect data on hand to find out if it was true. It wasn’t.

Their study showed that in three of the language experiments, men talked more than women, and in three others, women talked more than men. On average, women used 16,215 words per day to men’s 15, 669, a statistically insignificant difference.

The study’s authors said that there were much larger statistical differences between individuals in the study than between men and women in general. For example, Mehl said to reporters, "Just to illustrate the magnitude of difference, among the three most talkative males in the study, one used 47,000 words [per day]," or about one word per second. "The least talkative male spoke just a little more than 500."

When asked where she obtained the data to support her claim of the 20,000 to 7,000 ratio, Brizendrine claimed to have gotten her information from "a variety of secondary sources," and had in fact omitted the statistic from subsequent book printings after several psychologists complained.

Mark Lieberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says there never was any such data, and that a search to locate the origin of the claim proved fruitless. "My current belief is that this started as someone’s idea of a plausible estimate," Lieberman told reporters. "And [it] was turned into a false scientific factoid by writers who like to misuse the authority of science."

For Brizendine, she apparently missed the irony in her words when she stated that "…the most interesting part now becomes now, why, indeed, has that particular myth been so persistent?"

Perhaps because she wrote about it in her book?

Maybe it bears repeating. Perrhaps in writing this statistic as fact and disseminating it to untold numbers of book buyers, somehow that’s how the myth has become "so persistent?"

One can imagine Brizendine’s reponse: "What?"