It’s been long believed that an uncontroversial difference between men and women is how much they talk: women say many more words in a day than men, and they do it by a huge margin. This nugget crops up all over the place, from gender studies to sociolinguistics, and even language evolution theories have considered it important… did women choose to breed with men who had better language skills? It’s always nice when someone does the boring work of trawling through a few years of conversation and word-counting to find that what we think is a given is just not true. Women do talk more, but not by a significant amount. ABCnews, NPR, Science.
