DO WOMEN talk more than men? Yes and no. Well, no. According to a neuropsychiatrist (it would take 500 words to describe what that is and you may not need to know) called Louann Brizendine in a book called The Female Brain, women average 20,000 words a day.
Men, strong, silent types that we are, average only 7,000.
But wait.
This fascinated a linguist called Mark Liberman who went looking for the study the figures were based on. He couldn’t find a study. It turns out the figures came from a self-help book.
As the author of more than one self-help book myself, I would be the first to acknowledge that a neuropsychiatrist should probably be taking her figures from hard, scientific research and not from people like me.
Subsequently, researchers in Arizona sampled the speech of 380 men and women over several days using recording devices activated remotely.
They found that men and women each average about 16,000 words a day. The mere fact that it has taken me more than 150 words to tell you this makes the point, I think, that men use lots of words, too.
Yet it’s almost an article of faith in popular psychology that men and women talk differently, and especially that women talk more than men. That this untruth “feels” right illustrates the strength of these popular ideas.
Another article of faith is that men are more competitive and aggressive in their conversation than women. In fact, according to Prof Deborah Cameron of the University of Oxford, writing in The Psychologist, research into the speech of 12-year-old girls and adolescents shows that the gentle sex boast, brag, bully and order each other about in speech just like guys do.
Actually, parents of girls, teachers of girls, and girls themselves will not be terribly surprised by this. And yet the idea that men are more competitive in conversation “feels” right, just as the idea that women talk more than men “feels” right – further evidence that, as they say in Recovery Inc, feelings are not facts.
Another myth is that men are more direct than women. A man will say “No”, whereas a woman will say, “I have to stay in and wash my hair tonight.”
Not so, says Prof Cameron. English-speaking people of both sexes beat around the bush when they have to say “No”.
Asked if they’d like to go for lunch after the meeting, they’ll say something like, “I’d love to, but I’ve got to finish that report for his nibs” or words to that effect. I’ve been told enough lies by enough people, and I have told enough lies to enough people, to agree with Prof Cameron on this one.
Also widespread is the idea that men and women talk a different language. We just don’t understand each other. Yet, according to Prof Cameron, “when researchers have looked for empirical evidence to support speculations about male-female miscommunication, they have generally failed to find any”.
So women know what men are talking about, and men know what women are talking about.
The whole “women talk more than men” myth probably gave rise to another myth, namely that women are better with words than men.
If they do all that talking, they must be real champs when it comes to verbal ability. But verbal ability tests show the differences between men and women to be “small or close to zero”, says Prof Cameron. Women are better at spelling but that’s as far as the difference goes.
Prof Cameron has written a book called The Myth of Mars and Venusin which she attacks the idea that men and women communicate so differently that this alone leads to conflict between them. That myth, as she would call it, is put forward in popular books, such as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venusby John Gray and You Just Don't Understandby Deborah Tannen.
I’m sure she’s right. But for as long as the myths “feel” right, they will win out over the science every time, and we will all go on pretending we are a mystery to each other.
- Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. (He's also a man.)