How do men communicate? Badly, so goes the cliche, but is it really justified?
“The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense: a widespread but false belief.”
The 2006 book The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine famously stated that women utter around 20,000 words a day while men only say around 7,000. Based on little more than anecdotal evidence, it’s a statistic that has been widely debunked (to the point where it’s been removed from newer editions of the book) yet remains ingrained – or at least the gist of it does – in the collective psyche.
Published more than a decade earlier, Gender and Conversational Interaction, by Deborah Tannen, included more than 50 actual scientific studies, of which only two concluded that women speak more than men (34 of them found males to be more verbose, while the rest were inconclusive), and a 2007 study in the journal Science that spanned Mexico and the US found women to utter just over 16,000 words per day, men just a few hundred less.
Here in New Zealand, a Victoria University analysis of 100 public meetings discovered blokes asked 75% of the questions while accounting for around 65% of the audience, and even when there was 50-50 split, the men still asked way more. Similarly, studies of work and higher educational environments have found men more likely to dominate meetings and conversations.
Of course, more men speaking more in public or professional settings may very well, for obvious reasons of power imbalance through inequality, boil down to greater confidence (or arrogance or entitlement) rather than a natural predisposition to pipe up, but when it comes to relationships and social settings, men are generally considered more reticent. The reason traditionally given is that women and men are just wired differently, but even in those informal environments where there is an equal balance of power studies show both sexes contribute pretty much equally. (The Australian feminist scholar, teacher, and author Dale Spader quips we tend to overestimate how much women speak because in our patriarchal world we wished they wouldn’t speak at all.)
“If we examine the findings of more than 30 years of research on language, communication and the sexes, we will discover that they tell a different, and more complicated, story,” writes Deborah Cameron in The Myth of Mars and Venus. “The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense: a widespread but false belief.”
“It is individual people, not categories of male and female, who share their perceptions, feelings, thoughts, hopes, and dreams – creating their own shared relationship reality.”
Cameron goes on to describe the accepted view of the cliched, sullen, uncommunicative male as “patronising”, and questions why a book called If Men Could Talk is allowed to exist when a book titled If Women Could Think “would be instantly denounced”. As a society, we’ve become programmed to search for gender differences and embrace and accept them to the point where a “study that finds no significant differences is less likely to be published”.
Cameron suggests men have maybe realised it’s sometimes advantageous to be considered conversationally incompetent to exempt them from doing something they don’t want to, “like the idea they are no good at housework”.
“Adhering to gender stereotypes gets in the way of looking at one’s partner as an individual,” says clinical psychologist Dr Catherin Aponte, for Psychology Today. “It is individual people, not categories of male and female, who share their perceptions, feelings, thoughts, hopes, and dreams – creating their own shared relationship reality.”
In terms of the context of conversation, men certainly must improve in opening up about their emotions and mental health, but the widely held belief that males are fundamentally incapable of doing so is as dangerous as it is wrong. The US award-winning writer and clinical psychologist Dr Jacqueline Simon Gunn says that differences between genders is a result of socialisation. “Boys are socialized to be less emotional,” she writes for Lifetime Daily. “That doesn’t mean they don’t feel emotions deeply. Rather, they tend to learn early on not to be overly expressive.”
Men, she continues, are “reared to be less vulnerable” while for women, it’s not only acceptable for them to be more expressive and emotional, it’s expected.
It’s not our brains that need rewiring, rather what is expected – and accepted – from men.
