Women Are Chattier Than Men, Speaking 3,000 More Words Every Day, But They’re Only This Talkative During A Certain Period In Life
You’ve probably heard it a million times—women are way more talkative than men. The stereotype is pervasive across many cultures, but is it actually true, or is it just another case of society getting it wrong?
In 2007, a widely reported study by researchers from the University of Arizona debunked the claim, finding that men and women speak about the same number of words per day—around 16,000.
A new follow-up study has laid out a more detailed picture, suggesting that women are chattier but only during a certain period of life.
“There is a strong cross-cultural assumption that women talk a lot more than men,” said Colin Tidwell, the co-lead author of the study and a clinical psychology doctoral candidate at the U of A. “We wanted to see whether or not this assumption holds when empirically tested.”
The research team discovered that women between the ages of 25 and 65 spoke an average of 3,000 more words per day than their male counterparts. This period of time consists of the life stages of early and middle adulthood.
There were no significant gender differences in the other age groups: adolescence (ages 10 to 17), emerging adulthood (18 to 24), and older adulthood (65 and up).
For the new study, the team analyzed 630,000 recordings from 22 different studies conducted in four countries, with participants who were between the ages of 10 and 94.
The study included 2,197 individuals, which is four times the amount of people involved in the original 2007 study.
The only age group that saw a pronounced gender difference was the 25 to 64 group. This age range was missing from the original study.
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Women in the early to middle adulthood stage spoke an average of 21,845 words a day, while men spoke 18,570.
It is unclear why women are the more talkative gender between 25 and 64, but one explanation could be that this era contains the child-rearing years.
Women are often the primary caregivers, so they might be speaking more to their children than men do during that time.
“Gender-linked differences in child rearing and family care are one possibility that could account for this difference,” said Matthias Mehl, the senior author of the study and a professor in the Department of Psychology at U of A.
“If biological factors like hormones were to be the main cause, a sizable gender difference should have also been present among emerging adults. If societal generational changes were to be the driving force, there should have been a gradually increasing gender difference among older participants. Neither, though, was the case.”
The researchers also noted that people might be becoming less talkative in general due to a growing dependence on digital communication, such as texting and social media.
From 2005 to 2018, the average number of words spoken per day decreased from about 16,000 to 13,000.
More research is needed to better understand the role that talkativeness and socialization play in human health and well-being. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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