Chatty Cathy, Chatty Charlie
Surprise! A study finds males talk just as much as females
Women are chatterboxes; men are the silent type. The statement seems so right it's hardly worth questioning. But inquisitive scientists have done just that—and they have found that it's mere myth: Men gab just as much as women.
James Pennebaker, the chairman of the psychology department at the University of Texas-Austin, was surprised when he read a story saying women on average used 20,000 words a day, while men used just 7,000. "I just knew that couldn't be right." That's because Pennebaker had spent years analyzing how people use language, monitoring everyday chatter with tiny digital recorders. So he and Matthias Mehl, a former grad student of Pennebaker's who is now an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, went back and reassessed the chatter of 396 research participants, mostly college students, they had recorded between 1998 and 2004.
Motormouths. Women and men produced almost exactly the same number of words a day on average: 16,215 for women and 15,669 for men. But there the similarities ended. A few individuals uttered just 700 words a day; the most garrulous, 47,000 words. The chattiest participant was a guy. The results were published in last week's Science.
There are differences in men's and women's language, Pennebaker says, but more in how words are used, not the number of words. In a new study of 14,000 people, he found that women rely more on pronouns, like I and he, while men tend to favor articles such as a and the. "It really reflects what they're interested in," Pennebaker says. "You only use articles when you're talking about concrete things. Women talk about people. Men talk about tools and carburetors." Or maybe that's another stereotype that, like most, is part truth, part fiction.
This story appears in the July 16, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.