This study (news report here) seems well crafted, but I have a few nits to pick about it. Some researchers attached microphones to college students for a few days, then counted the number of words they used. The findings:

–Men averaged 15,669 words per day, women 16,215. The difference is not statistically significant.
–The three biggest talkers (highest:47,000), and the most quiet person (500), were all men.

My issues:

–The “rats and sophomores” phenomenon. College students are not representative, especially since they live in dorms and, as such, are in constant social interaction. The most common reason for the stereotype that women talk more — in married couples, sometimes women yap at their husbands all the time and stay on the phone for hours with their girlfriends — isn’t even factored in. Some guys love to hear themselves talk (as in, probably, the three who topped this study), and college is conducive to that, but I’d guess later in life you’d find different results.

–Even with this research problem, women did talk slightly more than men — the fact the difference isn’t statistically significant doesn’t “prove” than women and men talk equally, even in this situation. It just shows that the difference, whatever it is and in whichever direction it’s in, isn’t severe enough to measure with this sample size.

–No one is reporting the median numbers for men and women, and I’m too cheap to pay for the study. (Remember your high school math: Mean is when you add all the numbers up and divide by the number of observations; median is when you line all the numbers up and pick the middle one.) If the three highest talkers are men, with numbers up around three times the mean, and women have a slightly higher average, I’d be at least interested in hearing how the numbers in the middle matched up. The low end also was heavily male as well, though, so I’d need the data to be sure.

–Finally, the media can jump all over something that proclaims to disprove a stereotype, but this kind of study is old news. The Boston Globe ran a piece by a researcher once that said:

According to a 1993 review of the scientific literature by researchers Deborah James and Janice Drakich, “Most studies reported either that men talked more than women, either overall or in some circumstances, or that there was no difference between the genders in amount of talk.” The research since that review, including counts from my own research, follows the same pattern.

If these studies used better research designs (and I doubt they did — psychology professors often make freshmen participate in upper-classmen’s research, so it’s cheap), they could answer my concerns.

Blog: Robert VerBruggen