Talkers and Touchers

People loved Louanne Brizendine's book, The Female Brain, because it used scientific studies and Brizendine's experiences as a clinician treating symptoms of menopause and other hormonal imbalances to say things we feel are true: Women are more connected to others, better at communicating.

These things make sense, because women's brains are more susceptible to the bonding effects of oxytocin.

Except ... one of Brizendine's statements, one that was repeated in every news story, has been proven false. Brizendine claimed that studies showed that women speak an average of 20,000 words a day, while men speak a mere 7,000. There's nothing to back that up, while plenty of studies found men gabbing as much or more than women.

The idea that gender differences are based in biology continues to make people uncomfortable and to incite denial.

The Guardian has an excerpt from a new book by Deborah Cameron called "The Myth of Mars and Venus." She makes a good case for the extreme variability between individuals. Cameron argues that sex differences are fairly meaningless, because any individual may be very different from any other, and more like someone of the opposite sex.

She writes,

Chambers' reference to individual men and women points to another problem with generalisations such as "men interrupt more than women" or "women are more talkative than men". As well as underplaying their similarities, statements of the form "women do this and men do that" disguise the extent of the variation that exists within each gender group. Explaining why he had reacted with instant scepticism to the claim that women talk three times as much as men, Liberman predicted: "Whatever the average female versus male difference turns out to be, it will be small compared with the variation among women and among men." Focusing on the differences between men and women while ignoring the differences within them is extremely misleading but, unfortunately, all too common.

As someone in the 1970s who insisted that all gender differences were cultural, I'm bemused by what science has shown: that the endocrine system profoundly affects brain structure and behavior. Still, I think that, rather than insisting that anyone behave more femininely or masculinely, I think the information can be used to give ourselves and each other a break when we don't behave according to cultural expectations.

Comments

[Ed Yong]

Brizendine's 'statistic' was most thoroughly debunked a few months ago - I've blogged about it here: http://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpress.com/2007/07/05/are-women-more-talkative-than-men/

[Liveavatar]

It's pulled-out-of-the-air statistics like that that make me raise an eyebrow at other portions of the book. That and other things.

Agreed about the variation between individuals being greater than the variation between genders.

As far as differences between men and women in general, I'll start giving more credence to the idea that a particular trait is "universal" when I see evidence that a particular hypothesis was tested across several cultures in several different areas of the world. Enough with the studies of 100 Psychology 101 students at, say, Northwestern.

E.g., one of the few things I've heard was tested that way was the way women flirt: apparently looking at one's desire object, then looking down, away, and back to the object, is pretty much standard worldwide.

[Susan Kuchinskas]

I agree that cross-cultural research is really important. On that note, Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love (which looks at romantic love, not oxytocin-based committed love), found similar results among U.S. students and Japanese. Peter Gray, of the University of Las Vegas, is studying testosterone fluctuations in married and unmarried men, and he's looking at Chinese men as well as Americans.