Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (23 page)

B: Words

For a long time there has been a general assumption that women talk more than men and are better at talking than men are. As Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan joked on their popular daytime television show: ‘Women may talk more than men,’ Judy announced, ‘but they’ve got twice as big a vocabulary.’ Richard
retorted, ‘I don’t know what you, erm, what you, erm …’ ‘Mean, Richard?’ cooed Judy.
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John Gray rests much of his case about the vast differences between men and women on the apparent differences in the way that they talk. One chapter in his classic book,
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
, is called, ‘Men go into their caves and women talk’. Here he puts forward the example: ‘When Tom comes home, he wants to relax and unwind by quietly reading the news. He is stressed by the unsolved problems of the day and finds relief through forgetting them. His wife, Mary, also wants to relax from her stressful day. She, however, wants to find relief by talking about the problems of her day.’
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This assumption that femininity is based on a greater ease with language is often presented as fact in the media, as when the
Daily Mail
stated categorically in a headline, ‘Women talk three times as much as men, says study.’
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This article was based on statements made by Louann Brizendine in her book
The Female Brain
. In this book, Brizendine stated that girls speak two to three times more words per day than boys, and that on average girls speak twice as fast as boys.
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One expert in particular was nonplussed by her claims. Mark Liberman is a professor of phonetics who contributes to a wry, witty blog (the Language Log). When Brizendine’s book was first published, he saw a copy in a bookshop. ‘The impressive list of bullet points on the dust jacket caught my attention,’ he told me. One of these bullet points was: ‘A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000.’ Liberman was intrigued, as he had never heard of such a figure. ‘I figured that this must refer to a new study that I hadn’t heard about. I read the book and checked the references. I was surprised – the book has copious references to the scientific literature, and yet in the cases that I checked, the cited references offered little or no support for the controversial claims in the text.’ The citation that she gave for this claim for women speaking more than men was to a self-help
book,
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rather than to any research evidence. In an article in the
Boston Globe
, Liberman commented, ‘Unfortunately, this is just one of several cases in recent books on sex and neuroscience where striking numbers turn out to be without apparent empirical support.’
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Scientists at Arizona University then decided to try to prove or disprove the claim by studying the daily utterances of nearly four hundred people. Matthias Mehl, the lead researcher, commented that the claims that women speak three times as much as men appeared to have achieved the status of a cultural myth, having been so widely reported in so many different media. Yet this study showed conclusively that there was no statistically significant difference between men and women in the amount they talked. Women used a little more than 16,000 words a day, on average, and men a little less, but the difference was insignificant.
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Mark Liberman also investigated Brizendine’s claim that girls speak more quickly than boys. He found that the only evidence she cited in support of the claim that girls speak at 250 words per minute as against 125 words per minute for boys was a paper that had no findings in it at all about speech rates broken down by gender. The only research that has been carried out into different speech rates among men and women has found small differences in the opposite direction, finding that men speak slightly faster than women. One paper that Liberman and his colleagues presented in 2006 found that: ‘Males tend to speak faster than females … The difference between them is, however, very small, only about 4 to 5 words or characters per minute (2%), though it is statistically significant.’
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The idea has also taken hold that the typical woman does not only talk more, and more quickly, than men do, but she is simply better at talking than the men around her. This assumption is seen throughout our culture, particularly tellingly among those involved in children’s education and upbringing. For instance,
the Girls’ Schools Association explains the importance of single-sex education because of: ‘The tendencies of girls to be more contemplative, collaborative, intuitive and verbal, and boys to be more physically active, aggressive, and independent in their learning style.’
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On the Supernanny website, which is a spinoff from an extremely popular television programme both in the UK and the US, advice on how to discipline your child tells parents they will need to use different strategies for their boys, ‘Because boys aren’t as good at expressing themselves verbally.’
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Funnily enough, there is no solid evidence for the idea that women’s verbal skills are so much better than men’s, although it has become such a touchstone of our current culture. On average, girls do develop language skills slightly earlier than boys, and so differences can be seen within age cohorts at school, but boys can catch up. Even if boys do not, on average, now perform as well as girls in some exams in the UK, there is no evidence that this is a biological and unchanging difference rather than one produced by a particular culture at a particular time when many boys are encouraged to believe that reading and homework are not cool.

Dr Janet Shibley Hyde is a psychologist who has specialised in meta-analysis – a way of combining results from many published studies – of gender differences in cognition. She started doing massive meta-analyses of studies of language skills in the 1980s and has consistently found that the differences are far smaller than are usually believed. In 1988 Dr Hyde carried out a meta-analysis of 165 studies that assessed differences in verbal abilities between girls and boys, including abilities in vocabulary, analogies, reading comprehension, essay writing, anagrams and general verbal ability. All the differences did favour girls – boys did a little better on analogies, but otherwise the girls came out better. But the telling point of her analyses is the size of the differences. They were tiny. There is a huge range in the verbal abilities within each sex, but hardly any difference between each
sex.
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Overall, she concluded that ‘gender differences accounted for only about one per cent of the variance in verbal ability’. So you are just as likely, as a woman, to bump into a woman who is very different from you in verbal skills as you are to find a man who is very different from you. This means that to talk of a ‘female brain’ that is ‘wired for communication’, as some writers do, is nonsense, since male brains seem to be working in exactly the same way.
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Why is it, then, that we seem to return so frequently to the idea that women are better at talking than men are? In an interview with the
Guardian
, Liberman said that Louann Brizendine’s claim about women speaking more than men was simply an urban myth, and commented that: ‘Urban legends come about because they concern things that resonate with people’s experiences in some way. They are factually untrue but mythically resonant.’
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It is hard not to agree with Liberman’s assessment here, and although this legend is often characterised by a nod towards female superiority – as with the Richard and Judy joke at the beginning of this section – it can also feel very constraining. The idea that women talk so much more than men seems to grow from the idea that women talk too much, that their words are surplus to requirements. Even when this myth is voiced positively, it can be restrictive. It has long been a tradition of Western culture that women like to gossip with friends at home, while men are out working, often in a solitary and single-minded way. Although men and women are now beginning to cross into each other’s roles at work and at home, it is clearly highly reassuring for many people to believe that there is one sex-based division of labour, the work that women do to preserve relationships through their greater verbal skills, which will continue. And so even when this assumption is clothed in rhetoric about women’s superiority, it still reinforces traditional stereotypes about a woman’s place in society.

Even if we could shrug off the myths that women talk better
than men or talk more than men, we are likely to be left with the persistent view that women talk differently from men. This is the most recalcitrant belief of all when it comes to words: that women are good at cooperative, supportive talk, while men are good at point-scoring and logical argument. For instance, Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics, writes bestselling books that promote this view of how men and women differ. In her world, a typical man engages with the world, ‘as an individual in a hierarchical social order in which he was either one-up or one-down. In this world, conversations are negotiations in which people try to achieve and maintain the upper hand if they can.’ A typical woman, on the other hand, approaches the world ‘as an individual in a network of connections. In this world, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus.’
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This view of the differences between men and women does not just assume that women have a superior ability to talk, it also assumes a superior ability to empathise, and these skills are commonly seen as inextricably linked. ‘The safest conclusion at this point is that females are
both
better empathisers and better in many aspects of language use,’ says Simon Baron-Cohen in
The Essential Difference
.
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When the new supporters of biological explanations for sex differences have argued that women are characteristically ‘empathisers’, they have received powerful support from the media. The questionnaires developed by Simon Baron-Cohen and his team at Cambridge University, which are supposed to test whether you have an empathetic or systemising brain, can be found on the
Guardian’s
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website, and a related version is on the BBC’s website.
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Most people could probably agree that anecdotally we can all call to mind situations that back up the observation that women are more empathetic communicators than men, situations in which women do the work of preserving and extending relationships through their words, while men don’t bother to talk
unless they want something specific communicated or discovered. Most of us have experienced these situations, both at work and at home, in our friendships and professional relationships.

However, it is a big step from observing a difference to assuming that it is rooted in biological factors that are necessarily resistant to change. The arguments of the biological determinists take the observed differences between men and women and link them to genetic and hormonal differences which were laid down for us aeons ago by evolutionary pressures, and which cannot be wiped away by social change. If you are sceptical about the narrative of biological determinism, you need not disregard the differences you can often see in the ways that men and women communicate in our society. But you could look at the way these current differences may be produced not just by innate drives but by the expectations around us. Some fascinating research has shown that our expectations about the way men and women differ will even influence our apparent ability to empathise. So women do tend to score more highly than men in many studies of adults’ empathy, whether those entail judging how people are feeling from looking at photographs of their eyes, or simply reporting how much they care about those close to them. Yet two psychologists who reviewed these studies found this striking truth: that this apparent superiority in empathising was clearly linked to the expectations that individuals knew they should be living up to. They found, looking at a number of studies, that it was only when women and men were aware of what was being assessed that significant differences were found between male and female responses. They concluded: ‘There was a large sex difference favouring women when the measure of empathy was self-report scales; moderate differences (favouring females) were found for reflexive crying and self-report measures in laboratory situations; and no sex differences were evident when the measure of empathy was either physiological or unobtrusive observations of nonverbal reactions to another’s emotional state.’ In
other words, when people are aware of what they are being asked to do and can control their responses, they live up to the stereotypes about how men and women should behave. But when reactions are being observed that are less controllable or when the subjects are not sure what is being assessed, men and women are much more variable.
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This suggests that much so-called research on this subject is not actually testing innate differences, because it fails to screen out the way we try, maybe without even consciously knowing we are doing so, to conform to social norms.

If the way we communicate is not just influenced by our innate aptitudes but also by the situation around us, it is absolutely vital to remember that when we look at men and women talking, we are still not always looking at communication between equals. The effects of an imbalance of power on the way we communicate have been revealed in some telling research. For instance, Sara Snodgrass of Florida Atlantic University created studies in which she put thirty-six pairs of people together and gave one a dominant, teacher-like role and one a subordinate role for their first task, before giving them games to play. Their responsiveness to the other’s emotions and feelings was then assessed. It became clear that those given the subordinate role were more sensitive to the other person than those given the leader’s role – whatever their sex. ‘“Women’s intuition” would perhaps more accurately be referred to as “subordinate’s intuition”,’ Snodgrass concluded.
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