Who speaks more, women or men? Well, there’s the myth then there’s the science. And the science is pretty convincing: both. Well, neither.
A sophisticated major study into how much people talk during the day used a wearable device to record 30-second segments of subjects’ speech every 12.5 minutes. Researchers then tallied up the audio data to calculate the differences between genders. The result: women speak an average of 16,215 words daily while men speak 15,669 words. Just a 3% difference.
There are nuances, however. Men tend to show a wider variability in words, and included both the least talkative and most talkative test subjects. Topics of discussion differ too, with women more likely to talk about people while men are more likely to talk about things.
And just how much talking is 16,000 daily words? Well, it equates to 35 printed pages. And is the same number of words in Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.
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