Verbal battle of the sexes all hot air, study finds

Women aren't chattier than men after all, say psychologists who recorded 400 students of both genders over a seven-year period.

The professors from Texas and Arizona strapped voice recorders onto student volunteers, taping for 30-second intervals every few minutes. Students never knew when the machines were recording. Seven years of data beginning in 1998 show men have almost as much to say as women, falling just a few sentences short each day.

There was one big difference, but it lay within each gender: men spoke as few as 500 words a day, or as many as 47,000. If you sleep eight hours a day, that's 49 words per minute the rest of the time — nearly one per second, all day.

That works out to the English edition of War and Peace (560,000 words) every 12 days.

And women varied by a similar amount, found a team of researchers from the University of Arizona, University of Texas at Austin and Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Estimates in psychology books say women may average 20,000 words in daily conversation, while men use only 7,000. This figure has circulated widely and become "a cultural myth," the team reported yesterday in the journal Science. Yet it was never tested, until now.

Their main finding: Women in the study spoke a daily average of 16,215 words, versus an average of 15,669 words for men. The difference is considered insignificant, especially because individuals showed a huge variation — often 8,000 to 10,000 words above or below the average.

But is there more to the story of men and women than simply counting words?

You bet, says Linda Duxbury, a Carleton University professor at the Sprott School of Business. She studies gender differences in communication.

"Men-to-men conversations are not voluminous. Women-to-women conversations are hugely voluminous," she said. But when sexes mix, there are huge shifts in who does how much of the talking.

Women talk about feelings and relationships, use more adjectives and colour, and talk less about facts than men do, she says. "The kind of things women talk about, men don't want to listen to." ...

•	Verbal battle of the sexes all hot air, study finds Despite 'cultural myth,' men talk just as much as women, researchers say The Ottawa Citizen (Canada), Friday, July 6, 2007 Byline: Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen

	Story also ran in 3 others:  CanWest News Service, Regina Leader-Post (Canada) and Windsor Star (Ontario Canada)