Chatterboxes

According to a widely-held belief, women talk more than men. But how can we find out whether this is true or not? Experiments have generated different results. That is not surprising. There are plenty of pitfalls which experimenters can fall into. The results may depend on the design of the experiment. For example, were the data collected in a laboratory situation or gathered from a corpus of spontaneous conversation? If it was a laboratory setting, could the tasks have influenced the results? Were the subjects discussing a topic that men traditionally know more about than women? Were subjects giving monologues or, conversing in pairs or talking is small groups? Were they talking with others of the same sex or in a mixed-sex group? In one experiment, for example, men spoke more if they were in the minority: the fewer men in the group, the larger their amount of speaking time. Conversely, this was not the case with women. Other experiments showed that men speak more in the classroom. Men initiated more interaction, no matter if the teacher was male or female (though the difference was larger if the teacher was male). Men also responded more often but only if the teacher was male! Another factor to be taken into consideration is the testees’ social class. Would the results have been different if they had been working class people and not (as is often the case in experiments) middle-class people? Is the sex of the researcher a neutral factor or could it also influence results? And, most importantly, if you are interested in quantity, what do you count: number of words, number of turns, or length of speaking time? In some experiments women actually had more turns but less speaking time. Who, then, speaks more, men or women? However contradictory the results may be, in general it seems clear that, if there is a difference, the difference is rather small, and certainly nothing like what is sometimes reported in the popular press. The numbers quoted there seem to be plucked out of thin air. One stable finding is that differences between the two groups are dwarfed in comparison with differences within either group. If the differences between men and women with regards to talkativeness are quite small after all, why then are women believed to be so much more talkative than men? Probably because people just don’t notice talkative men and silent women or, if they do, classify them as exceptions. A perfect way of leading oneself up the garden path. (Kaplan, Abby: Women Talk More Than Men … And Other Myths About Language Explained. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016: 155-189)