Psychologists have revisited the comparison of talkativeness between men and women.

The original article titled “Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?” was published in the summer of 2007 in the journal Science. In this study, researchers analyzed audio data collected through a series of experiments. The core of these experiments involved recording snippets of conversations among people in everyday settings over several days, throughout their waking hours. Psychologists later calculated that individuals of both genders spoke approximately the same number of words each day — around 16,000.

The recordings, made using periodically activated dictaphones, were conducted over different years at universities in the USA and Mexico. Five groups of American students and one group of Mexican students participated, totaling 210 females and 186 males. Critics pointed out that the statistics might have been different with a larger and more diverse sample.

Meanwhile, the stereotype of women's tendency to chatter has not faded over the years, even though empirical evidence supporting this common belief has not been provided. Therefore, a group of researchers, including the author of the previous study — psychology professor Matthias Mehl from the University of Arizona (USA), deemed it necessary to replicate the study using the same methods but expanding the original sample more than fivefold.

In the new series of experiments, everyday conversations among various groups of people were recorded from 2005 to 2019 in four countries: the USA, Switzerland, Serbia, and Australia. The total number of participants was 2,197, with ages ranging from 10 to 94 years.

The psychologists collected over 631,000 audio recordings, after which they counted the number of words spoken by each participant. Then, using linguistic analysis software, they assessed the total number of words spoken in a day. To ensure uniformity in comparison, the specialists adjusted for the duration of the recording periods and the estimated time awake.

The counts revealed a slight advantage for women: on average, they uttered 13,349 words compared to 11,950 for men. Although the difference of just over 1,000 words was nearly double that recorded in the initial study, the researchers noted that the gap remained relatively small. Furthermore, the figures varied significantly from person to person, depending on individual characteristics. For instance, some individuals spoke fewer than a hundred words a day, while others exceeded 120,000.

Examining different life stages, the researchers found that among teenagers (ages 10-17) and young adults (ages 18-24), the difference in daily word usage between men and women was much smaller than in young and middle-aged adults (ages 25-64), where the advantage for women reached 3,275 words.

Separately, the specialists assessed the impact of stress, as there are hypotheses suggesting that speech may help women cope with tension. In such cases, under stress, female participants should have significantly outpaced men in the number of words spoken. However, in reality, researchers discovered that stress did not significantly affect this difference.

In conclusion, the authors noted that the considerable variability in individual results does not allow for a definitive determination of whether women speak significantly more than men, or if both genders are nearly equal in this regard. The article on the new scientific study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.