Question 1.91

1.91 Do women talk more?

Conventional wisdom suggests that women are more talkative than men. One study designed to examine this stereotype collected data on the speech of 42 women and 37 men in the United States.30

  1. The mean number of words spoken per day by the women was 14,297 with a standard deviation of 9065. Use the 68-95-99.7 rule to describe this distribution.
  2. Do you think that applying the rule in this situation is reasonable? Explain your answer.
  3. The men averaged 14,060 words per day with a standard deviation of 9056. Answer the questions in parts (a) and (b) for the men.
  4. Do you think that the data support the conventional wisdom? Explain your answer. Note that in Section 7.2, we will learn formal statistical methods to answer this type of question.

1.91

(a) According to the rule, 68% of women speak between 5232 and 23,362 words per day, 95% of women speak between -3833 and 32,427 words per day, and 99.7% of women speak between -12,898 and 41,492 words per day. (b) This rule doesn—t seem to fit because you can—t speak a negative amount of words per day; therefore, the percentages don—t make sense. (c) According to the rule, 68% of men speak between 5004 and 23,116 words per day, 95% of men speak between -4052 and 32,172 words per day, and 99.7% of men speak between -13,108 and 41,228 words per day. Similar to the women, the rule doesn—t seem to fit because, again, you can—t speak a negative amount of words per day, so the percentages don—t make sense. (d) The data do show that the mean number of words spoken per day is higher for women than for men, but it is very close; in addition, the standard deviations are nearly the same, making the intervals very close. To put it in perspective, the women only speak about 1-2% more words per day on average. That small of a difference could just be due to chance.