
Men Speak 20K Words Per Day and Females 7K - Fact Checking "The Female Brain" - jseliger
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/24/sex_on_the_brain/
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araneae
I wonder if some of this confusion has to do with the way you count words; do
you count duplicates or don't you?

One of the studies cited found that men and women talk about the same _amount_
(it was a review, and some of the papers in review found that men talked
more.)

However, it's fairly established that women tend to have bigger vocabularies
than men; they do better on the verbal portions of the SATs and GREs, for
instance.

It's possible that men talk the same amount but are more likely to duplicate
words and therefore use fewer words in a day.

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sabat
* it's fairly established that women tend to have bigger vocabularies than men; they do better on the verbal portions of the SATs and GREs, for instance.*

The only true generalization is that there are no true generalizations.

Example: I'm a male. My SAT score breakdown (taken in the 1980s): math 610,
language 680. My four-year-old son recently took an IQ test and his language
score was 145. Maybe we're not typical, but I'm not even sure the idea that
most women have larger vocabularies than most men works. Why are so many of
the world's greatest writers and speakers men?

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araneae
Point 1: It's perfectly possible for the average woman to do better than the
average male on the verbal portion of the SAT and for the average male to do
better on his verbal portion of the SAT than on his math score. Not that
that's true.

Point 2: When will you guys stop clinging to anecdotal evidence? Just because
most computer scientists are male doesn't mean that there are no female
computer scientists, which is a claim analogous to the one you made.

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zephyrfalcon
Um, the article starts with "Women use 20,000 words a day, men only 7,000"...

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csarva
Seems to be a play on the fact that the article basically goes on to explain
that these numbers have no basis in reality.

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keefe
It sure was a good thing I read this article telling me about how that fact I
never knew has no basis in reality.

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archgoon
About 4 years ago (when this article was written), a book called _The Female
Brain_ , by Louaan Brizendine, was published that caused a couple of media
outlets to blindly parrot he book's numerous claims of female stereotypes
having a scientific basis. The links title is a reference to the stereotype
"Women talk more than men", which was 'scientificized' by Brizendine as 'Women
talk 20k words to men's 7K'. Mark Lieberman showed that the claim had no basis
in the literature, including the paper which Brizendine cited in her book.

More recently, the author has published a sequel _The Male Brain_ , which does
the same for males.

Mark Liebermann, the author of the linked article, has recently been featured
in a different thread today on Hacker News refuting the claim "There is a
scientific basis for why men don't listen (which is also a scientific fact)".
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240307>

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electromagnetic
IIRC the article cited in her book was actually a study of a dyslexic disorder
believed to be inherited on the Y chromosome. The figure comes from the
'males' (the test subjects) and the 'females' (the control) and has no
relevance in reality. The reason the researches used females as a control so
that there wasn't a risk of contamination in the control (IE an undiagnosed
case of the disease).

At least that's the extent of the research I remember doing, my sociology
teacher in college made every student track down the citation (which I believe
itself was a study citing another's research) to show us the fallacies created
when people have a political motive behind their 'scientific' statements.

I'm a writer and I admit I rarely talk, but when I do I'll blow anyone out of
the water with quantity of words and vocabulary.

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aresant
Article reminds me of this quote:

"42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot." - Steven Wright

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toddh
Yet they only listen to 3K.

