|
|
 |
|
Surveys show men, women
chatter about equally
of TheColumnists.com
There’s been a lot of talk lately about, well, talk.
For millennia, everyone has agreed that women are the chatty ones. Men, the strong silent type.
“How was your day dear?”
“Fine.”
“Millicent broke her fingernail trying to open a can of tuna, and the cat coughed up a hairball. I do wonder what in the world we’re going to do for Christmas this year. Do you thing we should have the Millers over? I hope Macy’s is going to put those brown pumps on sale next week.”
“Umph.”
Now, it turns out, the above sexist stereotype is probably not true. Researchers hooked up electronic gadgets to some 400 male and female college students and, what do you know, both sexes talked at about 15,000--16,000 words a day, give or take. The research was headed by Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona.
Backing those findings, a separate analysis of 63 studies of yakkity-yak done by Campbell Leaper and Melanie Ayres of the University of California at Santa Cruz showed that the differences in talkativeness between men and women are negligible. In fact, men tended to talk more than women, as measured by some criteria--for instance, the number of statements and “mean utterance length.”
There goes Gary Cooper.
The fact that both men and women tend to use the same number of words a day in general doesn’t mean that there are no significant differences between men and women in how they use language or express themselves in conversation, or even why they talk, say the experts.
Men talk to impart information, or to achieve status; women tend to talk to bond. The wonderful Deborah Tannen of Georgetown University says men appear more comfortable in “public” conversation than women. A man may tend to dominate the conversation at a dinner party, for instance, but will seek to bury himself in the newspaper when he’s home alone with his spouse. By contrast, she wants to talk to him for companionship and may not be as talkative during the dinner party. Same thing in the classroom--males tend to talk more than females, some researchers have said, although that situation may be changing.
An entirely unscientific monitoring of conversations between men and women at nearby tables in restaurants done over several decades by yours truly tells me that men almost always dominate the conversation. In that environment, they are the garrulous ones, not the women.
I don’t know if we’re quite at the point where we can say that men and women are the same except for some plumbing differences. I would argue, for instance, that in a business setting, apart from language, women tend to be the more conservative ones. That may be because they don’t want to endanger hard-won gains by agreeing to some harebrained scheme put forth by a man.
Probably the safest and most accurate conclusion we can draw from all this is that verbosity depends upon the situation and--most of all--the individual, regardless of whether that individual is male or female.
But in the meantime, what are scriptwriters, comedians and social pundits to do, now that the assumption undergirding one of their comic/sociological/psychological staples has been knocked out?
I’ll bet they’ll want to talk it over.
©2007 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted July 30, 2007.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Chuck McFadden. To send
an email, click here and don't forget to mention Chuck's name:
talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|