Speaking Up

Though it is somewhat limited in scope, empirical research on the differences in in-class participation rates between female and male law students (both “observed” and self-reported) consistently suggests that males volunteer and speak more than females do. (See e.g. this article at around page 828, et seq.) This data contrasts fairly dramatically with assertions made in “The Female Brain”by Louann Brizendine. At the Language Log blog, Mark Liberman noted:

It’s recently fashionable for books and articles to enlist neuroscience in support of the view that men and women are essentially and unavoidably different, not just in size and shape, but also in just about every aspect of the way they see, hear, feel, talk, listen and think. These works tend to confirm our culture’s current stereotypes and prejudices, and the science they cite is often overinterpreted, and sometimes seems simply to have been made up. I recently discussed an example from Leonard Sax’s book Why Gender Matters (“Are men emotional children?“, 6/24/2006), which David Brooks has used to support an argument for single-sex education. The latest example of this genre, released August 1, is Louann Brizendine‘s book “The Female Brain“.

Here’s what its jacket blurb says:

Every brain begins as a female brain. It only becomes male eight weeks after conception, when excess testosterone shrinks the communications center, reduces the hearing cortex, and makes the part of the brain that processes sex twice as large.
Louann Brizendine, M.D. is a pioneering neuropsychiatrist who brings together the latest findings to show how the unique structure of the female brain determines how women think, what they value, how they communicate, and who they’ll love. Brizendine reveals the neurological explanations behind why
• A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000
• A woman remembers fights that a man insists never happened
• A teen girl is so obsessed with her looks and talking on the phone
• Thoughts about sex enter a woman’s brain once every couple of days but enter a man’s brain about once every minute
• A woman knows what people are feeling, while a man can’t spot an emotion unless somebody cries or threatens bodily harm
• A woman over 50 is more likely to initiate divorce than a man
Women will come away from this book knowing that they have a lean, mean communicating machine. Men will develop a serious case of brain envy.

I looked through the book to try to find the research behind the 20,000-vs.-7,000-words-per-day claim, and I looked on the web as well, but I haven’t been able to find it yet. Brizendine also claims that women speak twice as fast as men (250 words per minute vs. 125 words per minute). These are striking assertions from an eminent scientist, with big quantitative differences confirming the standard stereotype about those gabby women and us laconic guys. The only trouble is, I’m pretty sure that both claims are false.

Liberman has a who series of posts about this topic, listed here, plus a new entry today where he notes with respect to this assertion: Did you know that, on average, women use 15,000 words a day while men use 7,000?

Reader, did you know that, on average, there are 23 different versions of this phony comparison published every day in the world’s media? Well, that’s not true either — but I think this is the 11th different pair that I’ve come across so far, ranging from a high of 50,000 vs. 25,000 to a low of 5,000 vs. 2,500. (And in case you’re coming late to this discussion, all of these numbers seem to have been made up or copied from someone who made them up — the many studies that actually count words and correlate the counts with sex find no group difference, or a relatively small difference. When a difference is found, it’s usually in the direction of more words from men.)

He also explained all this at Boston.com. As for why so many people seem to want to believe that women speak more than men, here is a trenchant observation from Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:

I think what’s happened is this: The old stereotype was really just,”Women talk too much,”with”too much”being defined as”more than someone in their lowly station should.”But nowadays the people who want to tell women they are out of place and need to STFU can’t just tell women that their chattering mouths are taking up valuable time …. Knowing that they had to pretend to believe in equality, sexists then simply sculpted a myth of the taciturn man to shame women with so we’ll shut up.

NB: Deborah Tannen’s review of “The Female Brain” is excerpted here.

–Ann Bartow