"Women talk more than men" debunked.

I attend hospital rounds with the healthcare team and on one memorable day as I approach the group a gentleman of long acquaintance was holding forth, at length, about how much more women talk compared to men. He gleefully included me in this ramble. More team members approach...he's still going. We are waiting on the doc before we begin rounds....dude is still going. As the doc walks up, dude draws a breath and I take the opportunity...

"I just read three studies that say quite the opposite. Particularly in class rooms and in the professional setting, women are PERCEIVED to speak more than they actually do. If women speak more than 30% of the total conversation, it is PERCEIVED as monopolizing the conversation. "

That's it. 3 sentences.

Dude draws a deep breath and launches into a detailed explanation of how I misunderstood the studies, the studies were biased or wrong, why I would have difficulty supporting this patently false information....

And I timed him. Didn't say a word. The team is glancing back and forth between us. I am smiling quietly...It's getting awkward....dude finally wound down.

I said "7 minutes, 18 seconds. Thank you for proving my point."

The team erupted in laughter.

TL;DR: dude spends almost 20 minutes explaining how women talk more than men.

I’ve had two workmen “pop round briefly” this week to fix stuff in my house... both managed to stay for an additional 45-50 minutes telling me their life stories. They were those kinds of conversations where you just know that the person isn’t listening to what you say and they’re just waiting for you to finish so they can keep going. So yeah, in my experience conversations with other women are 50/50 whereas with some men it’s 80/20. Same here! The second day I worked with a guy he even told me about being molested by his friend's father as a kid. (And he said he'd never told anyone about it before, dude was in his fifties) I should get extra pay for being everybody's damn therapist. I started a factory job maybe 8 mo the ago, and I offhandedly mentioned to my mother that there were a surprising number of women working there. For some reason her response was, "Wow. That's gonna be miserable working with other women like that. Get ready for angry gossip." I'm glad I rolled my eyes. In the entire time I've worked there, I haven't heard a woman gossip once yet. The dudes though, my god. Whenever anyone is out of work for a day or more, I am immediately bombarded with make coworkers trying to brag about how smart they are for knowing that so-and-so is out for their kid's birthday or whatever else.

Ugh this is the worst. I’m in a male dominated hobby and have lost my will to be nice after 9 years of this shit. I have no problem cutting someone off and asking what their point is if they’re too long winded. Most of the times it’s just something stupid, they just like the sound of their own voice and there’s a woman who will stand here and be my audience! Not me. I’ve got shit to do and I did not pencil in “listen to loser ramble on and on” today.

I have such a comment saved JUST IN CASE so I'll just quote it for you:

"A review of 56 studies conducted by linguistics researcher Deborah James and social psychologist Janice Drakich found only two studies showing that women talked more than men, while 34 studies found men talked more than women.[6] Sixteen of the studies found they talked the same and four showed no clear pattern."

(James, Deborah and Janice Drakich. “Understanding Gender Differences in Amount of Talk: Critical Review of Research,” In Gender and Conversational Interaction, ed. Deborah Tannen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).) The prevalence of men bitterly complaining about the sound of women's voices in public life - weather it's politics or broadcasting - is so depressing to me. I don't know why so many men long for female companionship and all of its benefits while simultaneously wishing we would all just shut up and be sex robots. Makes me want to leave the planet sometimes.

This story reminds me of a similar event I had with a guy during secondary school. We had were in the computer room & had to prepare a presentation in pairs. The guy I was working with...well, how to describe him...he was a very calm guy, who always got startled by my extroverted nature. He'd always end up treating me like I was an infant and talk to me in this "Okay sweetie, let me explain" tone.

Anyway, we sit down and agree to first work on the presentation seperatley & then add what we're missing from the other person.

Throughout the whole session he talked to me. Explained me stuff that was so fking simple, like "that's how you download images" and "that's how you use X in PowerPoint". At the end, he had like 3 topics, while I basically completed a nearly perfect PowerPoint on my own. He still took 10min to talk about what he wrote, but his face at that moment when he realised that I was more competent than him....

...it was glorious! A study (some time ago, and I don't have the source any more) showed that women were over-counted in crowds too. In a room of 100 people, anything more than 18 women was perceived as women being in the majority. 18! I used to take it as a compliment, but now I'm not so sure. Years ago we had a guy come make a new fence for our back garden. The man...would not...stop talking. If you went out to offer him tea? 20 minute chat. Peeked between the blinds to see how he was getting on and he saw you? 30 minute chat. Go out when he says he’s done for the day? 1 hour > chat. We ended up having to come up with a system where if anyone was out talking to him for more than five minutes, someone else in the house would phone them to pull them away. Never in my life have I met someone who had so much to say and refused to take hints or flat out saying ‘well I have to go’. Walking him from the garden to the front door would take a half hour. Always had a story to tell and he’d lure you in with what would have been a really interesting story had it been 2 minutes long but then drags it out for 45 minutes. HOW???

Completely unrelated but he kind of disappeared one day and I saw in the local news that he’d been arrested for arson so...yeah. We had drainage pipes put in our yard last year and the contractor was exactly like this. Like to the point that I avoided the windows so he wouldn't see me and try to strike up a conversation. When he wrote up the estimate he spent almost TWO HOURS sitting at my dinner table yapping while I cooked an entire dinner and fed my children at that same table. Shut uuuuuup.