Ammunition

[trixtah]

I was in my favourite cookery shop in Kingston a few weekends back, perving at some of the yummy utensils they stock (yeah, I suppose it doesn't help my butch cred to admit that I do cookery-shop-perving more than I do the hardware store kind). I was pissed off to see them stocking copies of Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps as a kind of novelty item by the checkout. I mean, give me a break.

Then a couple of weekends ago, there was an interview in the Guardian with Louann Brizendine, who wroteThe Female Brain. No, the book unfortunately doesn't seem to say "there's more communication method variation within the female sex than between the sexes"). Alas, her assertion was that women speak/communicate way more than men do: "Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand." After further unravelling, it seems that this statistic was referring to "communication events" (ie. words, gestures, body language), and guess what? It came from Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps! Wow, in-depth research there. The Guardian did a wee test themselves to see if her assertion was borne out with two of their journalists, and, surprise surprise, it wasn't.

But, yay, I've just found an excellent blog called Language Log, which thoroughly debunks the stupid myth of women talking much more than men, with reference to both of those books. They also have an interesting discussion on a study that was done in the late 80s, called "Power displays between women and men in discussions of gender-linked tasks: A multichannel study". Mark Liberman (the blog poster) summarises some of the main points:

	Male	Female
Time speaking	40%	28%
Speech initiations	14.0	12.9
Looking while speaking	34%	30%
Looking while listening	44%	59%
Rate of gesturing	0.09	0.05
Frequency of chin thrusts	1.62	0.26
Frequency of smiling	10.6	13.6
Frequency of self-touching	6.1	6.5
Frequency of laughing	4.1	6.0

So the guys did more of the talking, as is often the case -- 43% more, this time, which is a bigger difference than one usually sees. What about non-verbal signals? Well, the guys did 80% more gesturing, and produced 623% more chin thrusts. The gals did 28% more smiling, 7% more self-touching, and 46% more laughing. Dovidio et al. didn't count eyebrow motions, it's true. But there's certainly no support here for the view that women produce about three times more "communication events" on average than men do.

If you check out the study design, it actually looks worthwhile. And I'm so glad to have some more ammunition against the "Men are from Mars" types who refuse to make appropriate reference to differences within the genders before highlighting the differences between them -- and which are often negligible in comparison.

[And, man, I can't wait for my replacement modem to arrive. This researching and posting after hours from work is a drag.]

Comments

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Totally. I mean, I know I talk a lot, but I barely hold my own against most of the guys at work.

Actually, I wonder if that's why I talk a lot. Kind of a reflex to drown out nerdboys who are ranting on about technologies X, Y and Z at great length?