Speaking the truth, evening the score
Contrary to essentialist stereotypes, women speak roughly the same number of words as men. The female “chatterbox” stereotype is the counterpart to the idea that men are more laconic, but also more logical and better at sciencey stuff. There’s never been any proof of those stereotypes, and now there’s proof that they’re wrong:
Researchers recorded the daily conversations of 400 university students in the United States and Mexico over a period of several days. They found that females spoke about 16,215 words each day, and males uttered an average of 15,669 words, which was considered a statistical dead heat.
It seems like a minor victory, but this actually knocks out one of the keystones of dumb stereotyping. And maybe now that we all know women’s words are no cheaper than men’s, everyone will be just a little more likely to stop and listen when women talk.
Science Quiets Myth Of ‘Chatterbox’ Females [via Washington Post.]
July 5th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
In feminist linguistics, there’s a theory called the 30%-rule. If women start to take up more than 30% of the conversational space, they start to get considered to be dominating the conversation. (See Dale Spender’s work…) As a side note, Susan Herring has done a lot of fascinating work with women, linguistics and the online sphere, and noted at one point that the 30%-rule is sometimes more strictly applied (if I remember correctly) in online conversations.