Are women really more talkative than men?

The stereotype that 'women like to talk more than men' is a persistent one in many cultures, regardless of country or region. Researchers at the University of Arizona conducted a large-scale study on talkiness that provides a more detailed view than previous studies on how much women and men talk.

Are women really (not) more talkative than men? A registered report of binary gender similarities/differences in daily word use.

https://www.earth.com/news/do-women-really-talk-more-than-men-a-new-look-at-the-debate/

In a paper published in 2007 by Matthias R. Mehl and others from the University of Arizona Department of Psychology, 396 participants were fitted with voice recorders for several days and the number of words spoken by women and men was analyzed by sampling the sounds around them. As a result, it was estimated that 'both women and men speak about 16,000 words per day,' and no significant difference due to gender was confirmed in the analysis results.

Therefore, the study concluded that the stereotype that women are more talkative than men is incorrect. However, some critics of the study pointed out that the diversity of the study was limited because most of the participants were college students and all of the participants lived in Austin, Texas.

In 2024, about 20 years after the previous study, Mail collaborated with University of Arizona researcher Colin Tidwell and University of Alberta researcher Valeria Pfeiffer to conduct a study to revisit the topic of chatter. The study used 630,000 electronic recorder records from 22 individual studies across four countries: the United States, Switzerland, Serbia, and Australia, and a total of 2,197 conversation records from people aged 10 to 94. Tidwell said, 'There is a common assumption across countries and cultures that women talk more than men. We wanted to see if this assumption holds true when tested experimentally.'

The results showed that the difference in the number of words spoken by women and men depended on the age group: while there were no significant gender differences in daily word counts during adolescence (ages 10-17), adulthood (ages 18-24), or old age (ages 65 and over), women aged 25-65 were found to speak, on average, about 3,000 more words per day than men in the same age group.

The graph below shows the gender difference in average word count by age group, as shown in the paper. From the top, the data shows the overall population, adolescents, adults, adults aged 25 to 65, and seniors aged 65 and over. The left side of the red area in the middle indicates that men have more words, and the right side indicates that women have more words.

If the main cause of the gender difference in talkativeness is biological factors such as hormones, the difference should be seen regardless of age, but the survey results show the difference only in some age groups. Also, if we assume that the reason for the disappearance of gender differences in the number of words spoken is due to women's advancement in society, the gender difference should be more noticeable in older people than in younger people, but the analysis results did not fit this trend. Therefore, 'gender differences in child-rearing and family caregiving are one possibility that could explain this difference,' says Mail.

Another interesting finding was a significant drop in the average number of words spoken per day across participants, from about 16,000 in the 2007 study to 13,000 in the 2024 study. The researchers believe that an increased reliance on digital communication could mean that people are overall chatting less than they used to.

'We are well aware of how much sleep and exercise we need, and activities that measure the amount of sleep and exercise we get are commonplace,' said Mehl, explaining the importance of research into communication. 'The impact of the amount of chatter and social interactions on health is likely to be as relevant to health as exercise and sleep, and further research is needed.'