Cozy Corner: The myth of sexual superiority

Mark Liberman has a nice takedown of a popular myth in today's Globe:

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.
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."

So far, so good, right? Nothing we haven't been hearing day in, day out. But which one of thse authors is right? It turns out, none of them:

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.

So the next time someone whips out some odd statistic like this, feel free to point out that the authors might just be making them up. (Of course, it's funny, because if they made up the statistic in the other direction - that men were more communicative than women - they'd be denounced as sexist in no time. Gotta love that double standard.)