Deborah Tannen

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Deborah Tannen teaches linguistics at Georgetown University and has been awarded five honorary doctorates for her work in linguistic studies. She has written many articles and books on the politics of language, including her bestseller You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (2001), which has been translated into thirty-one languages. The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words (1999) earned the Common Ground Book Award, and I Only Say This Because I Love You: Talking to Your Parents, Partner, Sibs, and Kids When You’re All Adults (2002) received a Books for a Better Life Award. In the following article, first published in the Washington Post in 2007, Tannen examines the stereotype that women talk more than men. After reading the article, respond to the critical reading questions that follow.

AS YOU READ: Identify when, according to Tannen, each group talks the most.

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It’s no surprise that a one-page article published this month in the journal Science inspired innumerable newspaper columns and articles. The study, by Matthias Mehl and four colleagues, claims to lay to rest, once and for all, the stereotype that women talk more than men, by proving—scientifically—that women and men talk equally.

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The notion that women talk more was reinforced last year when Louann Brizendine’s “The Female Brain” cited the finding that women utter, on average, 20,000 words a day, men 7,000. (Brizendine later disavowed the statistic, as there was no study to back it up.) Mehl and his colleagues outfitted 396 college students with devices that recorded their speech. The female subjects spoke an average of 16,215 words a day, the men 15,669. The difference is insignificant. Case closed.

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Or is it? Can we learn who talks more by counting words? No, according to a forthcoming article surveying 70 studies of gender differences in talkativeness. (Imagine—70 studies published in scientific journals, and we’re still asking the question.) In their survey, Campbell Leaper and Melanie Ayres found that counting words yielded no consistent differences, though number of words per speaking turn did (men, on average, used more). This doesn’t surprise me. In my own research on gender and language, I quickly surmised that to understand who talks more, you have to ask: What’s the situation? What are the speakers using words for?

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The following experience conveys the importance of situation. I was addressing a small group in a suburban Virginia living room. One man stood out because he talked a lot, while his wife, who was sitting beside him, said nothing at all. I described to the group a complaint common among women about men they live with: At the end of a day she tells him what happened, what she thought and how she felt about it. Then she asks, “How was your day?”—and is disappointed when he replies. “Fine,” “Nothing much” or “Same old rat race.” The loquacious man spoke up. “You’re right,” he said. Pointing to his wife, he added, “She’s the talker in our family.” Everyone laughed. But he explained, “It’s true. When we come home, she does all the talking. If she didn’t, we’d spend the evening in silence.”

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The “how was your day?” conversation typifies the kind of talk women tend to do more of: spoken to intimates and focusing on personal experience, your own or others’. I call this “rapport-talk.” It contrasts with “report-talk”—giving or exchanging information about impersonal topics, which men tend to do more. Studies that find men talking more are usually carried out in formal experiments or public contexts such as meetings. For example, Marjorie Swacker observed an academic conference where women presented 40 percent of the papers and were 42 percent of the audience but asked only 27 percent of the questions; their questions were, on average, also shorter by half than the men’s questions. And David and Myra Sadker showed that boys talk more in mixed-sex classrooms—a context common among college students, a factor skewing the results of Mehl’s new study.

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Many men’s comfort with “public talking” explains why a man who tells his wife he has nothing to report about his day might later find a funny story to tell at dinner with two other couples (leaving his wife wondering, “Why didn’t he tell me first?”). In addition to situation, you have to consider what speakers are doing with words. Campbell and Ayres note that many studies find women doing more “affiliative speech” such as showing support, agreeing or acknowledging others’ comments. Drawing on studies of children at play as well as my own research of adults talking, I often put it this way: For women and girls, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together. Their best friend is the one they tell everything to. Spending an evening at home with a spouse is when this kind of talk comes into its own. Since this situation is uncommon among college students, it’s another factor skewing the new study’s results.

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Women’s rapport-talk probably explains why many people think women talk more. A man wants to read the paper, his wife wants to talk; his girlfriend or sister spends hours on the phone with her friend or her mother. He concludes: Women talk more. Yet Leaper and Ayres observed an overall pattern of men speaking more. That’s a conclusion women often come to when men hold forth at meetings, in social groups or when delivering one-on-one lectures. All of us—women and men—tend to notice others talking more in situations where we talk less. Counting may be a start—or a stop along the way—to understanding gender differences. But it’s understanding when we tend to talk and what we’re doing with words that yields insights we can count on.

The Washington Post, July 15, 2007. Copyright Deborah Tannen. Adapted from You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, HarperCollins. Reprinted with Permission.