Language and sex
Talkative women; silent men. The stereotypes permeate our culture. Think of the flighty wives and cranky husbands in Jane Austen. Think, too, of those Coronation Street couples – the Ogdens, the Duckworths – in which the woman is forever chattering while the man is buried in the racing form. Or a thousand mother-in-law jokes. The only part of her that’s thin is her tongue; it gets so much exercise.
Now the stereotypes have been given scientific substance by a bestselling book in the US, The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco. Her hypothesis – one which has hit a national nerve, shipped a lot of books and seen her hopping from one talk show to another this autumn – is that men and women are different, because their brains function differently.
“The female brain has tremendous unique aptitudes,” argues Brizendine. “Outstanding verbal agility, the ability to connect deeply in friendship, a nearly psychic capacity to read faces and tone of voice for emotions and states of mind, and the ability to defuse conflict. All of this is hardwired into the brains of women. These are the talents women are born with that many men, frankly, are not.”
According to Brizendine’s book, women are emotionally aware; men aren’t; men are obsessed by sex; women aren’t; women talk more – 20,000 words a day compared with 7,000 for the average man – and they talk twice as fast. No wonder Stan Ogden and Jack Duckworth preferred to concentrate on the 3.30 from Uttoxeter: even if they’d had anything to say, they couldn’t have got a word in. As for sex, just mentioning it was likely to end in a row.
Brizendine’s thesis is attractive. It fits in with our perception that women are more emotionally literate than men and happier to talk about their feelings; that teenage girls develop faster than boys and communicate better; that women are better than men at “multi-tasking” – because, as mothers and home-makers, they have to be. Men are myopic, guilty of control freakery, bottled up emotionally. We know it to be true. Brizendine has done us a service by explaining the neuroscience that underpins all this.
Or has she? The book has not been well received by some of her fellow scientists. Under the headline “Psychoneuroindoctrinology”, the joint reviewers in the scientific magazine Nature declared: “Human sex differences are elevated almost to the point of creating different species, yet virtually all differences in brain structure, and most differences in behaviour, are characterised by small average differences and a great deal of male-female overlap at the individual level … Despite the author’s extensive academic credentials, The Female Brain disappointingly fails to meet even the most basic standards of scientific accuracy and balance … The text is rife with ‘facts’ that do not exist in the supporting references.”
Mark Liberman, professor of phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania, has turned the demolition of one of Brizendine’s facts into a personal crusade – the idea that women speak up to three times as much as men. He analysed the contention first on his blog, and then in the Boston Globe, where he attempts to trace the source for the contention that women speak more (and much faster) than men, and specifically the claim on the jacket of the book that “a woman uses about 20,000 words per day, while a man uses about 7,000.” Those numbers, he says, “have been cited in reviews all over the world, from the New York Times to the Mumbai Mirror.” They are rapidly hardening into fact, but where do they come from?
Brizendine’s book runs to 280 pages, of which almost a third are notes. Liberman was sure he would find “a reliable source for this statistic” among this battery of supporting data. Instead, what he says in the Boston Globe he found was an apparent attribution to a self-help book – Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure by Allan Pease and Allan Garner. He was not impressed.
“Pease himself has presented several different word count numbers in other sources,” he complained. “In 2000, he published [with his wife Barbara] Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, which attributes to women ‘6,000-8,000 words’, while men get ‘just 2,000-4,000 words’ … 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 … Why do the word counts vary so widely among Pease’s various words and interviews?”
Answering his own question, Liberman raised two possibilities – that new scientific studies had produced different data, or it was all guesswork. He plumped for the latter, likening the argument that women talk more than men to the often stated “fact” that eskimos have 17 words for snow. Both, he said, were myths. Eskimos have one word for snow; and research shows only minute differences between the amount men and women talk. “Whatever the average female vs male difference turns out to be,” he concluded, “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.”
I ring Liberman and ask him whether Dr Brizendine has published a counterblast. Nothing directly from the author, he says, though the publisher, Morgan Road, produced a clarification saying that the endnotes were there as further reading, not as a set of academic sources. Liberman, however, is sticking by his criticism. The notion that women talk more than men is, he insists, an “urban myth” – one of many that “arose in the genre of pop psychology or self-help books”.
“Urban legends come about because they concern things that resonate with people’s experiences in some way,” he says. “They are factually untrue but mythically resonant. Often they express in a very exaggerated and pointed way some sort of general feeling people have.” There may also, he thinks, be an element of misogyny in the belief that women talk more – “always gab, gab, gab”.
Liberman sees political dangers in the argument that the two sexes are fundamentally different. He links Brizendine’s book to Leonard Sax’s Why Gender Matters, published last year, which argued that the differences between the sexes were so great they should be educated separately. Sax’s argument has gained support in Republican circles and produced a drive to increase funding for single-sex schools. These are not merely academic arguments. “Bad science can produce bad politics,” says Liberman.
Liberman, though he may not know it yet, appears to have won his linguistic battle. When I reach Dr Brizendine, just as she is crossing the Golden Gate bridge, she tells me that she has accepted the criticism of the numbers quoted in the book – on both volume of words and rate of speech – and will be deleting them from future editions. Nor will they appear in the UK edition, to be published by Bantam in April. “I understand Mark Liberman’s point and I am grateful to him,” she says. “He felt I was passing on data that was not nailed down, and thus perpetuating a myth, so it will be taken out in future editions.” She admits language is not her specialism, and she had been reliant on the advice of others.
But she stands by her point that women do speak much more in certain contexts.”Women speak a lot more in areas of social comfort,” she says. In other words, in the home and in domestic relationships, it is women who will do most of the talking. Coronation Street’s scriptwriters are spot on. Men will hold forth in other forums. She says it is always male students who ask the first questions at her lectures, and that men will talk so much during courtship that women will barely get a word in.
She is also sticking to her central argument that male and female brains have evolved differently, but says Nature has caricatured her views. “There are big differences in some areas, small differences in other areas, but lots of overlap, too. There is much more alike about the male and female brain, but at the same time they have evolved in different evolutionary niches. Females have the babies and have to help infants survive for the first two years of their lives. That makes them different, and has made their behaviour different. But it’s way overboard to describe men and women as different species.”
It sounds measured and reasonable, so why have her critics been so virulent? “It [her hypothesis] upsets people because they don’t want to believe there’s any intrinsic difference between people. But the truth of the matter is we do have different talents. Women are better at picking up non-verbal emotional cues.” And men? “They do targeting better – that’s why they’re good at darts.”
She thinks she has been attacked in part because she has dared to write a populist bok, but also because she has been politically incorrect in pointing up differences between the sexes. ‘It’s very politically incorrect to say that there are any gender differences. Look what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard. But the pendulum is swinging in society, because people realise that political correctness has been pushed to an absurd level.”
The degree to which this biological and linguistic battle is also a cultural and political one is striking. Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch professor of language and communication at Oxford, is sceptical about the claim that men and women are inherently different in the way they use language, and thinks such arguments find a receptive audience because people are scared of the growing similarities between the sexes.
“People want to believe there are clear-cut differences between men and women,” she explains, “because they are men and women. They don’t want to think about the similarities, which outweigh the differences. The other thing they don’t want to think about – which for a linguist like me is the most interesting thing – is the extent of variation within each gender group, which statistically is as great or greater than the variation between the two. Women are as different from each other as they are from men, and gender is about those differences, too. The way you think about yourself as a woman is not only about comparing yourself to the available men; it’s about thinking about the kinds of women you are not.”
Cameron is working on her own book, The Myth of Mars and Venus, to be published by Oxford Unversity Press next autumn. Despite the lively title, playing on John Gray’s hugely successful Men Are from Mars, Women Are From Venus, it will not, she insists, be a self-help book. It will be an academic book written in a clear and accessible style. If it’s as good as the hour-long tutorial she gives me in her smoky room at Worcester College, it will be very good: her ideas dazzle, her connections really do connect.
“I can point to the historical origins of the idea that women are better at multi-tasking,” she exclaims. “There is a moment in the history of educational theory when the Victorians are considering what should be taught in boys’ schools and in girls’ schools, and they come up with this notion that girls’ minds are quick but shallow; boys need to think more deeply about a smaller number of things. These ideas have histories.”
Take foreign languages, at which girls are allegedly better than boys. “It’s now said that men are crap at learning foreign languages,” says Cameron, “but before 1800 it was taken for granted that any gentleman would be fluent in French and probably learn Italian, too. But that gradually died out and speaking foreign languages became a ladies’ accomplishment, whereas boys switched to studying the grammar of dead languages that couldn’t be spoken. They’d always studied Latin, but modern languages came off the curriculum for them. This was even going strong when I was at school in the 1970s – the idea that training the tongue was for girls, training the mind was for boys – so that at my school, a girls’ grammar school, the top stream was allowed to do Latin because we were like boys; we were going to go to university and into the professions. We didn’t need to be able to speak fiddly foreign languages; we needed to have our minds trained. Latin wasn’t really a language at all; it was more like brain gym. That was the result of a boy-girl split in the 19th century.”
In Cameron’s view, it is not biological differences that determine linguistic differences but social conditioning. She laughs at evolutionary psychologists who argue that men talk less because they were the “hunters” who had to stand for hours without making a sound, waiting to spear a bison, while the female “gatherers” happily chatted as they plucked berries off bushes. There is little evidence, she argues, and what there is suggests hunting was relatively rare, and gathering was the responsibility of both sexes. The evolutionary argument is neat – but “bullshit”.
Professor Cameron, who does not beat about the academic bush, is very keen on the word bullshit. Take self-help books, the source of the myth that women talk more than men. “I’ve been watching the growth of this bullshit for some considerable time,” she says. “There’s even a self-help book called If Men Could Talk. When I first saw it in a bookshop, I thought this has to be a joke. It’s so patronising to men. I’d like to write a spoof one, and see how seriously people take it – Why Men Eat Turnips and Women Can’t Wink.
Cameron says recent studies have shown only minor differences in the amount men and women talk. According to an analysis published last year by Janet Hyde that brought together a large number of surveys, women were 0.11% more talkative than men – “statistician-speak for a gnat’s fart”, according to Cameron. “The myth that women talk better has only got around recently,” she says. “It’s like our consolation prize. We’re not very good at anything that actually counts, but we can certainly talk. It’s supposed to be a sign of our caring, sharing, kinder, nicer personalities.”
There are, she accepts, some differences between men and women, but language isn’t one of them. “Hyde’s analysis shows large differences in aggression and in some visual/spatial things such as throwing, and there might be a slight developmental advantage [for men] in mathematical skills, but verbal communication – gnat’s fart. Yet that’s the one that has become a huge urban myth; that’s the one that is the bestseller – men and women can’t communicate, they speak different languages, men are shit at it whereas women are much better. That’s the one that’s entered into the culture, and it’s the one there’s no evidence for.” (She supposes that a book about the differences between men’s and women’s throwing abilities would sell fewer copies.) Men are from earth, women are from earth – deal with it! is her advice.
She thinks it is possible that women do talk more in well-established heterosexual relationships – because women often see themselves as verbal facilitators in such partnerships – but that does not mean the men in those relationships are necessarily silent. “There are stretches of conversation where the man isn’t interested and the woman’s doing most of the talking,” she says, “but when she lights on something he does want to talk about, he’ll then take over and be the dominant one. It’s about roles, and the same man may go to work and be doing the same facilitation job because the relationships in his work context are completely different. He just thinks – or they just agree – that in the home it’s her job, like sending out the Christmas cards. It’s one of those keeping-things-going domestic functions that have traditionally been left to women.”
“There’s no single, clear-cut, context-free, one-size-fits-all generalisation about who talks more,” Cameron concludes. “It really depends what they’re doing, and what their roles and relationships are. Somebody who lives on their own and is very socially isolated would hardly say anything. But a City trader, say, will probably have a very high output of words.” Context, context, context.
Happily, Cameron does not dismiss our experiment in wiring up a man and a woman – Tim Dowling and Hannah Pool – as bullshit. She even says it “has the potential to be quite interesting”, though she cautions that the findings will be far from representative. This is one man and one woman sampled on one not necessarily typical day. Moreover, our man admits he is naturally taciturn, while our woman is noted for her effervescence and says she always feels the need to act as a facilitator in conversations. They might almost have been chosen to act out the urban myth of viscous man and verbose woman. Now we will find out if they do.
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