“In short, saying that Brizendine’s claims about sex differences in language are not exactly scientific gives “not exactly” a bad name.”

From Three Quarks Daily:

… by a unanimous vote, this year’s Becky [awarded to the promulgater of the single most ridiculous or misleading bit of linguistic nonsense that somebody manages to put over in the media] goes to the psychiatrist Louann Brizendine, whose bestselling book The Female Brain argues that most of the cognitive and social differences between the sexes are due to differences in brain structure. It’s a controversial thesis. The New York Times‘s David Brooks and others have hailed the book as a challenge to feminist dogma, and Brizendine herself has charged that her critics are angry because her conclusions aren’t politically correct. Actually, though, you can leave out the “politically” part. The reviewers for the British science journal Nature described the book as “riddled with scientific errors.” And in newspaper commentaries and posts on the LanguageLog blog, the University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman has been meticulously debunking Brizendine’s claims about men’s and women’s language.

For example, Brizendine asserts that differences between men’s and women’s brains make women more talkative than men, and goes on to say that women on average use 20,000 words a day while men use only 7000. That factoid conforms so neatly with gender stereotypes about chatty women and taciturn men that a lot of people were indignant that anybody would spend money to discover anything so obvious. One reporter at a San Francisco TV station began his story on Brizendine by saying   “Here’s a news flash. Women talk more than men. Duh.”

Except that, duh!, it isn’t true. It turns out that the figures Brizendine reported had been taken from a book by a self-help guru who had simply pulled them out of the air. And the studies that have been done generally show either that men talk slightly more than women or that the two sexes talk about the same amount.

Or take Brizendine’s claim that women on average speak twice as fast as men do. That’s another cherished bit of gender lore, but no research shows anything of the sort — the best evidence indicates that men on average speak a bit faster than women do. Nor is there any scientific basis for her claims that men think about sex every 53 seconds while women think about sex only once a day, or that women are more emotionally attentive because their more sensitive hearing enables them to hear subtle tones and nuances in speech that escape men.

In short, saying that Brizendine’s claims about sex differences in language are not exactly scientific gives “not exactly” a bad name. Yet the media generally covered the book uncritically, without running the claims past linguists or neuroscientists, or apparently, past their own science writers, either. In fact the book got much more media attention than any of the serious recent research on the biology of sex differences. That work suggests a more complex picture of the relation between nature and nurture. But in the lifestyle sections where these language items inevitably end up, the preference is for simple stories laced with plausible-sounding nuggets that confirm what we think we already know — that English is the biggest language, that teenagers are inarticulate. Or in this case, that women are congenital chatterboxes.