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Comment by zephyrfalcon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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