Do women talk more than men?

Women use an average of 20,000 words a day, compared to the mere 7,000 that men utter. At least that’s the assertion of a number of self-help and popular science books. Quoted by apparently authoritative experts and widely reported, it’s a statement that bolsters the stereotype of the fairer sex spending their days gossiping, while the stoic men folk get on with it, whatever it is, without the need to chatter. But is it actually true?
Talkativeness can be measured in various ways. You can get people into a lab, give them a topic to discuss and then record their conversations. Or you can try getting them to record their everyday conversations at home. You can count up the total number of words spoken, the time each person spends talking, the number of turns an individual gets in a conversation, or the average number of words spoken in a single turn.
By combining the results of 73 studies of children, US researchers found girls did speak more words than boys, but only by a negligible amount. Even this small difference was only apparent when they talked to a parent, and was not seen when they were chatting with their friends. Perhaps most significantly it was only seen until the age of two-and-a-half, meaning it might simply reflect the different speeds as which boys and girls develop language skills.
So not much difference among kids, but what about adults? When Campbell Leaper from the University of California, Santa Cruz, the psychologist who found the very small difference in young children, carried out a meta-analysis on the subject, it was men who talked the most. But once again the difference was small. It was also striking that lab-based studies in which pairs or groups were given specific topics to discuss found greater differences than those carried out in more real-life settings. This suggests that perhaps men were more comfortable in unusual, novel laboratory settings.
Leaper’s findings supported a review of 56 studies conducted by linguistics researcher Deborah James and social psychologist Janice Drakich published in a 1993 book on male and female conversational styles. Only two of the studies found women talked more than men, while 34 of them found men talked more than women, at least in some circumstances, although inconsistencies in the way the studies were done made them hard to compare.
But despite all the evidence to the contrary, we seem wedded to the idea that women talk more. In fact it’s just one of many areas of life in which we expect significant differences between the sexes, but when the research base as a whole is taken into account, men and women are often far more similar than popularly believed.

Credit: bbc.com