A study showing that, contrary to popular myth, women do not talk more than men is all over the media. As if reasonable people have ever believed that shit to begin with. Do we really need a study for this? Anyone who needs examples of men being unable to shut up can just turn on C-Span or Fox News.
The study was apparently inspired by Louann Brizendine’s widely debunked book The Female Brain, which quoted the ridiculous “statistic” that women use 20,000 words a day and men only use 7,000. Researchers, to their credit, knew that this stat had to be bullshit. In reality, it turns out that the average number of words for women was 16,215, with 15,669 as the average for men.
Of course, Brizendine’s opinion on this revelation had to be obtained. To her credit, she removed the stat from her book after the first printing. But that doesn’t excuse its inclusion in the first place. She conceded that her number was incorrect and said: “The most interesting part now becomes, why, indeed, has that particular myth been so persistent?”
Gee, maybe because writers like yourself keep printing it as fact? Or maybe, just maybe, you should have asked yourself that question before using it uncritically as though it was fact.
Coming back to C-Span and Fox News (and every other news outlet, liberal, moderate or conservative), though, I can tell you right now what this myth is about. It’s about the sexist assumption that what men have to say is extremely valuable, while what women say is trivial. Of course men use fewer words– they think so carefully before they speak! They discuss important things, like politics! Women, in contrast, chatter incessantly about shoes. We’re expected to listen to men when they talk. People think that women talk more because they don’t want to listen to what women have to say.
This myth isn’t benign. It’s about devaluing women’s points of views while overvaluing those of men. It’s about reinforcing the tired notion that men are pragmatic and women are emotional, and that pragmatism innately has more worth than emotion. It’s about dismissing women and their weird, different, feeble little brains.
And I sure as hell didn’t need a study to tell me that.
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you’re completely right – my first thought upon reading this is that all you have to do to realize this little “theory” is a bunch of misogynistic bullshit is tune in to bill o’reilly spouting off at the mouth and refusing to let anyone get a word in edgewise before he tells them to shut up and cuts to commercial. what a waste of time and money.
I wonder how this connects (if at all) to those studies showing that women score higher on verbal tests.
Yeah – when I heard about the study I thought – no matter the results – the mere existence of the study will reinforce stereotypes again women.
It really is totally ridiculous- if anything I think women are socialized to speak less, particularly in a group of primarily men. Enough with the pointless gender difference studies, for Christ’s sake.
Not only is this not news, I think I remember this story breaking a couple of months ago on Alternet.
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