There are certain stereotypes about how relatively chatty men and women are, but what does the science say? A comprehensive new study shows that women tend to do more talking for much of the middle period of their life.
The study found that between the ages of 25 and 64, early to middle adulthood, women average 3,275 more words per day than men – or 20 more talking minutes. Across the other age ranges, the figures were more or less the same.
“There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men,” says clinical psychologist Colin Tidwell, from the University of Arizona. “We wanted to see whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested.”
Some of the same researchers were involved in a 2007 study that found men and women spoke about the same number of words per day – 16,000 or so. This time the research team went bigger: 2,197 participants, four countries, 14 years of data collection, and a breakdown across different age groups.
Snippets of chats were collected at random times using a specially designed electronic recording device worn by the participants during their day-to-day lives. A total of 631,030 ambient audio clips were used, and processed through statistical models.
The new data revealed nuances the 2007 study missed, including the discrepancy in early to middle adulthood. What the data doesn’t show is the reason for this gap – but the researchers think mothers chatting to kids could be one reason, with gender roles often having women shoulder most of the burden of childcare.
“If biological factors like hormones were to be the main cause, a sizable gender difference should have also been present among emerging adults,” says psychologist Matthias Mehl, from the University of Arizona.
“If societal generational changes were to be the driving force, there should have been a gradually increasing gender difference with older participants. Neither, though, was the case.”
There was plenty of variation between men and women across the ages – a lot of the people involved didn’t conform to the statistical norm. There were talkative and taciturn individuals in both genders.
The least chatty participant was a man, who managed a mere 62 words per day. The most chatty participant was also a man, who reached 124,134 words per day: assuming he slept for eight hours in every 24, that’s almost 130 words every waking minute of his day.
The data also showed that people are talking less over time, regardless of age and gender – something the researchers put down to more and more screen time.
But even though this study is much larger than the 2007 one, there is even more uncertainty in the results, researchers say.
For instance, in early and middle adulthood, women were found to say between 1,500 and 3,600 more words per day compared to men. That’s quite a large spectrum, with the bottom range representing just 10 minutes or so of normal-paced talking and the upper range representing 23 minutes. Much larger sample sizes are needed to tease apart all the various confounding factors that could be impacting these results other than sex or gender.
In future studies, the team wants to look more closely at our chatting habits and our overall well-being.
“The evidence is very strong that socializing is linked to health, at least to the same extent as physical activity and sleep are,” says Mehl. “It’s just another health behavior.”
The research has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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