A wise man was once said to: Do men really prefer women to talk to others? He said: What other things ?!
There are many variations on this “saying” among Arab social media circles, and although it is usually used for purposes of mockery and laughter, it finds its place as a fixed belief in our minds that says that women are naturally gossip, which in turn provokes a kind of “public opinion”. ", In which women participate as men, it puts women in the mold of more lies and gossip compared to men.
Strangely enough, this type of conviction about women is cross-cultural, meaning that it does not belong to a specific community. Rather, Luan Brizenden, founder of the Women and Hormones Clinic at the University of California, published in 2006 her book "The Female Brain" in which she referred Without clear scientific evidence, that women speak three times more words per day than men, but is this claim true?
Some research aspects have already been concerned with the differences between men and women in the nature of daily speech. These studies benefit mainly in the fields of research for gender differences, which may in turn be useful in various fields starting from medicine and up to marketing, meaning that companies can improve their sales through understanding The best for the natures of their customers.
In 2004, a team affiliated with the American Psychological Association published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Psychology (1) that examined the results of 73 previous studies in this area, focusing mainly on children speaking three different languages.
The examination found that girls spoke of "affiliation", that is, a tendency to form bonds with others with a degree of affection, more than boys who spoke with "firmness", and on average girls spoke more than boys, but only by a slight difference could not be considered influential from the point of view. Statistical consideration, add to this that this little difference was apparent only when boys and girls spoke to a parent, and was not noticed when they were talking to their friends.
Meta-analysis is a research mechanism that examines the results of several studies that may be compatible or inconsistent, in order to set a clear trend or tendency for those results, or to find a possible joint relationship between them, usually useful in clinical and psychological trials, because These domains contain many variables that do not make a single study a source of determination in a given issue.
In 2007, the same team (2) searched for differences related to "chatter" between men and women of youth and older age. This time, the analysis showed that men were the ones who spoke the most on average, but the difference was again small, so that it could not be expressed. About a reality, but the differences remained more apparent in the nature of speech, so men spoke firmly, and women with affiliation.
But because the conditions for experiments in this range of psychological studies can cause participants to become anxious and distort the results, James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology from the University of Texas, had designed a different experiment published (3) in the journal Science in 2007 as well. Voice recording devices in normal life for some people pick up sounds from their surroundings for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes, after 17 hours of examination, it was found that the women spoke an average of 16,215 words, while the men spoke 15,669.
A similar experiment, the results of which were published in 2014 in the journal Scientific Reports (4) of the prestigious Nature Foundation, found that there was a difference in the number of words in favor of women, but this appeared primarily in a collaborative context, where women were more likely to be, In the presence of other women, more physically closer and more talkative, especially in small groups.
In contrast, there were no differences between the sexes in a non-cooperative environment. This study used mobile-sized devices that volunteers carried daily in their normal lives.
As it turns out, then, there are no clear differences between men and women in the number of words each of them speaks per day, and although these studies are not conclusive, they show a tendency at least that there are slight, negligible differences between the sexes.
Even in other areas, such as gossip, some research findings have stood against this accusation usually directed at women.
A study (5) was released from the University of California, in 2019, according to which, after examining a sample of about five hundred participants, that men and women have nearly similar rates of negative (harmful) gossip, but the rates of neutral gossip (gossip in general) were inclined towards women.
But it is interesting that this study also worked to break another famous myth that says that the poor practice gossip more than the rich, the study also reported that young people were more inclined towards negative gossip than the elderly.
Overall, however, the study showed people practicing gossip equal to about 14% of daily speech, but fortunately three-quarters of the time gossip was neutral (said and said) that didn't hurt.
Another study (6), published five years ago in the Journal of Gender Studies, showed in a poll of nearly 2,000 volunteers that women tend to gossip more than men, especially when it comes to social relationships and physical appearance, but the main feature of this type of gossip is And it was said that he was more positive than men, meaning that he was not more like sarcasm or sarcasm, but praise.
As for lying, you will also find the same types of differences between men and women, which may or may not appear depending on the nature of the study and its variables, but they are usually small.
But at that point you might ask: Why is this happening?
If, on average, women and men have the same rates of speaking, and the things that follow from gossip or lying, why are women accused of being gossiping with a "huge" difference compared to men?
The answer here is what it means to become talkative, because this word is usually used to express superficiality and insignificance, and unfortunately there is still a global image, not just Arab, of women being more superficial, and this line extends to its integrity to deal with women as less intelligent .
Although the scientists' consensus in the range of intelligence and cognitive abilities indicates that there are no clear differences between men and women, and that it is fundamentally not possible to classify the human brain as male or female, this image of women still exists in any case. Your little five-year-old daughter is less intelligent than her classmate while she is making more of a study effort than him, at that point let's get to know the concept of stereotype threat.
This concept refers to the tendency of a group of people to achieve the image of society about them, so if a girl is surrounded, at home, at work and in the university, with people who say she is superficial, for example, she will act in this way, not because she is already more superficial or less intelligent than the man, but because the circumstance Social puts her in a state of constant tension, as she is unable to move forward in her life in a normal way, and from time to time fails to meet society's expectations about her behavior.
On social media, girls are usually attacked in a way "to the kitchen", especially when they achieve achievements in areas where men usually accomplish, but this is nothing but a more extreme and clear manifestation of a deeper, penetrating and quiet societal image, which bears all our women tremendous pressure that cannot even be Imagine its size.
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Sources
A Meta-Analytic Review of Gender Variations in Children's Language Use: Talkativeness, Affiliative Speech, and Assertive Speech.
A Meta-Analytic Review of Gender Variations in Adults' Language Use: Talkativeness, Affiliative Speech, and Assertive Speech
Gender Jabber: Do Women Talk More than Men?
Using sociometers to quantify social interaction patterns
Who Gossips and How in Everyday Life?
Gossip and gender differences: a content analysis approach