Men Speak 20K Words Per Day and Females 7K - Fact Checking "The Female Brain" | Hacker News Reader

Men Speak 20K Words Per Day and Females 7K - Fact Checking "The Female Brain"

boston.com

31 pointsjseliger13 comments

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.

No, none of this (so far as I can tell) has anything to do with the number of different words spoken in a day by either men or women. What it's about is simply the fact that some popular science authors and journalists are throwing about totally bogus claims about sex differences, and falsely claiming that they are supported by scientific research.

I'm sorry, of the articles I've managed to read making this bogus claim most attribute it to women's nature to chit-chat and gossip. However I highly doubt women would manage a larger vocabulary by consistently repeating themselves.

The articles themselves are frequently hypocritical, offering one bogus claim to back up another despite them being contradictory when looked at closely.

* 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?

I think the point of "it's fairly well-established" is that there have been studies. And that is definitely consistent with reality: are their more female novelists, poets, or cryptographers? Your sample size of one is interesting, but not enough. (I, too, am a guy who did better on the verbal portion of the SAT.)

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Article reminds me of this quote:

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

Yet they only listen to 3K.

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