Do Women Really Talk More Than Men? Social Setting is Key

Do women really talk more than men? It depends on exactly what's being talked about, according to a new study. Scientists have found that context plays a large role in whether or not women talk more than men.

It's difficult to determine the rate of speech for women versus the rate of speech for men. Yet scientists in this study found a way to quantify how much a person was talking. They used "sociometers," which are wearable devices roughly the size of smartphones that collect real-time data about the user's social interactions. This allowed the researchers to paint a more accurate picture of how much women tend to talk.

The scientists provided a group of men and women with sociometers and then split them into two different social settings for a total of 12 hours. In the first setting, master's degree candidates were asked to complete an individual project, about which they were free to converse with one another. In the second setting, employees at a call-center in a major U.S. banking firm wore the sociometers during 12 one-hour lunch breaks.

In the end, the researchers found that women were only slightly more likely than men to engage in conversations during the lunch-break setting in both long- and short-duration talks. In the project setting, women were much more likely to engage in long conversations than men; this was also true for shorter conversations, but to a lesser degree. In addition, these findings were limited to small groups of talkers; when the groups consisted of six or more participants, it was men who did most of the talking.

The findings reveal that setting plays a large role in whether women or men talk more. This, in particular, reveals that it's not always women doing the talking. Instead, social interactions depend on what social setting men and women happen to be in at the time.

The findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.