You’ve probably heard someone make the assertion that women use 20,000 words and men only use 7,000 or thereabouts. And you’ve probably wondered exactly where that statistic comes from, because the person citing the stat typically waves in the direction of “studies” to support it. But, you know, it sounds like it might be right, because everyone knows women are more verbal than men, right?
Well, not exactly.
It’s easy to see how funky numbers about an exotic language can turn into an urban legend. But it might surprise you to find apparently authoritative sources doing the same thing with basic facts about your own language use.
Here’s one example: Over the last 15 years, a series of books and articles have told us that women talk a lot more than men do. According to Dr. Scott Halzman in Psychology Today, women use about 7,000 words a day, and men use about 2,000. On the other hand, Ruth E. Masters, in her book “Counseling Criminal Justice Offenders,” tells us that “Females use an estimated 25,000 words per day and males use an estimated 12,000 words per day.” And according to James Dobson’s book “Love for a Lifetime,” “research tells us” that God gives a woman 50,000 words a day, while her husband only gets 25,000.
A bit of Googling easily turns up at least nine different versions of this claim, ranging from 50,000 vs. 25,000 down to 5,000 vs. 2,500. But a bit of deeper research reveals that none of the authors of these claims actually seems to have counted, and none cites anyone who seems to have counted either.
Fancy that.
Sounds a bit like one of those “just-so” stories explaining why women “naturally” are better with children or men “naturally” succeed in math and science fields — you know, the ones that don’t take culture or discrimination into account.
It also sounds a bit like that bit from the Newsweek story claiming that women had a greater chance of getting killed by a terrorist than of getting married after age 35. After a great hue and cry and numerous debunkings of that story, it still circulated, and it took Newsweek 20 years to own up to the fact that someone just slipped that into the story because it “sounded right.”
There are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing — Catharine MacKinnon saying all sex is rape, or Al Gore claiming to have invented the Internet — things that are false, but are repeated over and over without anyone bothering to fact-check them, passing into the realm of truthiness.
But now the Boston Globe has fact-checked a recent book making the claim that women just naturally talk more than men and use a far larger number of words per day than men do. And — surprise! — it’s pretty much unsubstantiated bullshit taken from another source that’s unsubstantiated bullshit.
The most recent to join the chorus is Dr. Louann Brizendine, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. In her current best-seller, “The Female Brain” (Morgan Road), Brizendine tells us that “A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000.”
“The Female Brain” has made quite a splash since its publication last month, and this word-count claim is one of the most striking facts supporting her argument that the female brain is “a lean, mean communicating machine.” The 20,000 vs. 7,000 numbers have been cited in reviews all over the world, from The New York Times to the Mumbai Mirror.
Since Brizendine is the director of a clinic at UCSF, one of the world’s most important biomedical research institutions, and her book provides 90 pages of endnotes and references to back up 180 pages of text, I hoped it would finally give me a reliable source for this statistic.
The book’s endnotes appear to attribute the numbers to a 1997 self-help book by Allan Pease and Allan Garner, “Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure.” But Pease himself has presented several different word count numbers in other sources. In 2000, he published “Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps” (with Barbara Pease), which attributes to women “6,000-8,000 words,” while men get “just 2,000-4,000 words.” (They also offer daily counts for women’s and men’s “vocal sounds” and “facial expressions, head movements, and other body language signals”-but don’t provide a source for any of the counts.) In a 2004 CNN interview, Allan Pease said that “women can speak 20,000 to 24,000 words a day versus a man’s top end of 7,000 to 10,000.”
Somebody’s got an agenda:
Allan Pease is a prolific writer, and a sampling of his other recent titles gives a sense of his men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus philosophy: “Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes”; “Why Men Lie and Women Cry”; “Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking.”
It just never fails to amaze me that more men don’t get outraged when people like this joker characterize them as grunting, lying, peabrained primitives. Is it just that women come off looking worse because they’re portrayed as greedy, acquisitive, hyperemotional chatterboxes?
You’ll note, as did Mark Liberman, a professor of phonetics and the writer of the Globe piece, that Pease’s word counts varied widely from published work to published work. Better studies over time might be one answer to that particular puzzle, but Liberman couldn’t find any cites to specific studies.
IOW, Pease pulled it out of his ass, and nobody questioned it because it confirmed the popular impression of women as too damn talkative and men as stoic and taciturn.
But, as Liberman points out, one’s ass is not the best place to look for accurate data:
As it happens, there are many scientific studies that count the words used by females and males in a variety of same-sex and mixed-sex interactions: phone conversations, interviews, group discussions, and so on. These are always time-limited situations-a few minutes to a few hours of talking-not recordings across the whole range of people’s daily activities. But together, these studies involve thousands of speakers of many ages, regions, languages, and cultures.
The findings? 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.
I haven’t been able to find any scientific studies that reliably count the entire daily word usage of a reasonable sample of men and women. But based on the research I’ve read and conducted, I’m willing to make a bet about what such a study would show. Whatever the average female vs. male difference turns out to be, it will be small compared to the variation among women and among men; and there will also be big differences, for any given individual, from one social setting to another.
Similarly, a claim by Brizendine that females use 250 words a minute and males 150 is wholly unsupported by the actual study she cites, which makes no such claim. Indeed, other studies of word rates have found that men speak slightly — and by “slightly,” I mean in the neighborhood of 2% — faster than women, on average. And that’s not even counting situational factors, such as speaking faster among family members than with strangers, or speaking faster when you’re nervous (or, for that matter, regional variances in speech patterns and rates. I grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut and speak faster when I’m nervous. There were any number of opportunities for speaking while nervous during law school, where I was surrounded by slower-talking Midwesterners who had a hell of a time understanding me when I got going).
Fact-checking standards for polemics and self-help books are pretty loose, but even when there’s a peer-reviewed study, journalists are pretty dreadful at conveying the actual facts of the study to the public.
The authors of self-help works, as a group, don’t seem to have any particular standards of accuracy. Journalists, meanwhile, generally take them at their word in reviews and interviews, and publishers are happy as long as the books sell well.
It’s a shame to see this approach to the facts spreading into the growing genre of books about the neuroscience of sex differences, where the facts can have real consequences.
This approach was described perfectly by Stephen Colbert in an out-of-character interview with the Onion A.V. Club in which he discussed truthiness:
It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the President because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…
Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.