Do you think most women talk a lot? Are the men in your life silent to the point of distraction?
Well, it turns out that when it comes to speech rates, the battle of the sexes actually results in a tie.
A new study shows that men and women use approximately the same number of words, averaging 16,000 a day, give or take a couple of Starbucks orders, refuting the notion that women are the chattier gender.
The finding, published in a study called Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men, appears in the July issue of Science. "The stereotype sort of pushed people into a corner, where they think that to be a man they can't talk," said Matthias Mehl, the study's lead author and a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
"I think this frees people from those gender constraints."
His research, done in conjunction with the University of Texas at Austin, was inspired by a book released last year called The Female Brain, in which neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine stated that women use about 20,000 words a day, and men 7,000.
The claim has since been reprinted everywhere from The New York Times to the website WomenAreInsane.com, but to Prof. Mehl and his academic partners, they were fighting words.
For the past eight years, his research group has been logging the speech patterns of 396 volunteers, using a specially designed, electronically activated recorder, which tapes 30-second snippets of conversation every 12.51/2 minutes.
They looked at the word rates of 210 women and 186 men aged 20 to 30 over a six-year period. "We were very sure that it was going to be much closer," Prof. Mehl said of the gender disparity.
"But we were surprised that they came out so close."
The results showed only a tiny difference between the sexes, with women averaging 16,215 words a day, and men 15,669, a variation Prof. Mehl says falls below the threshold for statistical significance.
The individual differences, meanwhile, were impressive. The most talkative person in the study used 47,000 words in one day, while the quietest logged 700. Both were men.
"Obviously there are different amounts of hormones floating around, but with regards to how much we talk, they don't seem to matter," Prof. Mehl said.
The professor, who has worn the recording device for a 10-day period, says his word rate is above the 16,000 daily average; his wife's falls below.
But the researchers did notice that while the genders speak about the same amount, they do not speak about the same things. Men talk more about technology, sports and money, and use a lot more numbers to make their points, while women tend to talk more about relationships. Women also favour pronouns — he, she or I — while men prefer articles — a or the.
And yes, the suspicions of all those married men out there have been confirmed: People in relationships do talk more than those who are single.
The researchers caution that any variations between men and women should not be overanalyzed. "I think we have to be cautious when it comes to sex differences," Prof. Mehl said. "People tend to see them everywhere and make them bigger than they are."
But he did make one other observation: Both sexes are equally boring.
"When we started coding the conversations, we had to introduce a category called "nothing" because much of what we talk about doesn't have a clear topic," Prof. Mehl said. "Our daily conversations end up being pretty mundane."
