Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Way back in the day, John Gray released a book
called Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Now,
I can't remember the exact stats, but I'm pretty sure
he said something along these lines. Men say about two
thousand words a day. Women say about ten thousand words
a day. We are absolutely different species when it comes
to how much we communicate. Is it true? Is it
(00:28):
not true? Is there real research? Because what he said
was pretty flawed. Today we answer that question in a
slightly fun and unusual doctor's desk episode. Gooday, and thanks
so much for being here on the Happy Families podcast
Real Parenting Solutions. Every day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast,
(00:49):
we are Justin and Kylie Coulson. If you had to
guess who talks more each day out.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Of you and I, Kylie, I was just thinking that
I think you came from Venus.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
As well, which is kind of funny.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Competition in our hours.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
I think because just the other day we were talking
about my masculine energy and now you're saying maybe not.
I don't know what's going on here, Okay, So there's
this common assumption that women are more talkative than men.
I want to talk today about some research that's just
been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
(01:24):
This is a high fluten really well regarded journal has
been for a long time. But to talk about this,
I have to go back to two thousand and seven.
So if we go back to two thousand and seven,
some researchers found that men and women say about the
same number of words every single day. They came in
at sixteen thousand words, which I reckon is a lot
(01:46):
of talking. You worked that out across. Let's say you're
awake for sixteen hours a day eight hours of sleep.
That's a thousand words an hour. That thousand words an hour.
If I do some quick maths, a thousand divide by
sixty minutes means that we're speaking on average around about
seventeen words a minute, all day, every day. Seventeen words
(02:09):
a minute isn't heaps, but that's every single minute you're
saying something, and there are long periods of our days
where we don't say anything at all. Right, So anyway,
the two thousand and seven study basically said men and
women same amount of words sixteen thousand a day or
seventeen per minute. But these findings have been called into question.
There are all sorts of methodological limitations. It was UNI
(02:30):
students and as a small sample, and they were not
representative of the general population. Shaky study changed the conversation,
but shaky study. So here's where we are. A guy
called Colin Tidwell. He's at the University of Arizona. He
and his colleagues have replicated this study, but on five
times as many participants. We've got twenty two hundred participants
(02:52):
in this study, varying ages from childhood right up to
the age of sixty five. And they found that, oh
and from forty diferent countries as well, and they found
that there are actually some gender differences, but only for
certain age groups.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So I want to preface this with I'm wondering whether
in John Gray's time, we didn't have the Internet, we
didn't have any other form of connection outside of slow
mail and our.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Slow mail's snail.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Male.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah, I know what you mean, Okay, yeah, but you
still talk to people at work, you still talk to
your family, Like, I don't think that the Internet has
been a game changer in how many words we're saying,
And certainly I don't have any really, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Have any you really don't think that, No, okay.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Because our face to face interactions with the people who
are around us.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah, but we're having less and less of those well
as a result.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Maybe even so sixteen thousand words, I mean John Gray's
daughter was two thousand for men and ten thousand for women,
So it's.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
That low for men.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
I used to teach this stuff years ago and argue
against it really strongly. Anyway, let me let me tell
you how they did this, because how do you count
the number of words a person saying in a day?
They did this protocol that was called the EAR protocol.
Ear AR stands for electronically activated recording, So essentially, the
person who's wearing the monitor does not know when the
(04:08):
recorder is recording and when it's not. It just randomly
records short bursts of ambient sound intimately throughout the day,
and then the recordings are transcribed. The team essentially uses
software to count the number of the words that are
uttered in each recording. Then they extrapolate from this figure
to arrive at a daily estimate for each person.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Do they count arms?
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Ime is not a word? Is not? I mean, it's
a vocalization, but it's not technically a word big limitation
with this study. I mean, they're looking at adults here,
but they could not get ethical approval to have it
record while the people were at work, So we don't
have any sense of how much people are speaking at work. Okay,
so I think that's a really big problem anyway, With
that caveat acknowledged, after the break, I'll tell you what
(04:52):
they found and what it means for us as parents.
All Right, your vocalizations are being recorded in short bursts
throughout the day, then extrapolated so that we can work
out how many words a day you're speaking. Here's what
our doctor's desk experiment found in terms of who speaks
(05:15):
more males or females, Kylie. The results showed that people
in our age group that is, early adulthood and middle adulthood.
Just in case you thought that I was taking a
few years off us, that is, if your age between
twenty four and sixty five, men spoke an average of
just under twelve thousand words a day eleven thousand, nine
hundred and fifty for the average bloke age twenty four
(05:38):
to sixty five, twelve thousand words, the average woman thirteen
and a half thousand, words thirteen thousand, three hundred and
forty nine. So you look like there's something on the
tip of your tongue, and being a female, you do
need to get some words out, So off you go.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
I just look at the evolution of relationships in general,
and I think that screens do play a huge part
of it. But I remember an acronym that was really
building traction when I was younger, the snag the sensitive
new age guy.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
In touch with this feeling.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
He's in touch with this feelings and he's a great communicator. Yes,
previous to that, men didn't in general have those kinds
of conversations.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
The strong, silent type, the stoic man. Is that what
you're getting out? Yeah, I think that's a stereotype. I mean,
I think about my dad and he was so relational.
He was wonderful to talk to. We would sit in
the car or sit in the truck he drove trucks
for a living, and we would talk for hour after
hour after our play games, engaging conversation. His masculinity was relational.
(06:48):
It was not the stoic, strong silent type. I know
that we call the silent generation, that is grandparents and
great grandparents. We call them that, but it's not because
they didn't speak. I think about Kevin Arnold's father in
the Wonder Years, and he was that dad that you're
referring to. He'd sit there at the dining table with
a frown on his face and eat his meat and
three vege and not say a word. I mean, I
(07:12):
don't have any evidence for it, but certainly, anecdotally my
experience and the experience that I had with all of
the dads of my mates growing up, they were communicative.
They loved an opportunity to get in and mix it
up with the young bucks and play around.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
But age again, like I look at my grandparents and they.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Your parents, Your grandparents didn't talk, and they were they
were the silent generation. I'm talking about boomers. So maybe
there's something with a silent generation. Even so, today we've
got thirty and a half thousand words being udded by women,
twelve thousand by men. Here's where it gets interesting. Among
adolescents ten to seventeen, almost exactly the same girls spoke
(07:57):
about five hundred words per day more than boys. I mean,
that's that's nothing, nothing, yeah, absolutely not. And for young adults, well,
that's an essay that Hage grew a very very short essay,
but maybe for young adults eighteen to twenty four, So
we're talking about university students here. The results telling pretty
well with the findings from the students in the original
two thousand and seven study. The girls were a bit
(08:18):
higher eight eight hundred and fifty words more per day. Again,
not much in it. Here's one thing that I find
interesting over sixty fives. Over sixty fives, the gender difference
is reversed. The women speak less than the men by
about one thousand words a day.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
And I would believe that. I feel like as I'm
getting older, I have less energy for it.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Right, But then again, you caught up with a girlfriend
that you haven't seen for a while about a month ago,
and I think that you said that you spoke for
five hours NonStop. Didn't even realize that. So you've got
it in you. The words are there.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
I can't believe you brought that up.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Happy to have a Maybe we should call you that
have a chat. That's what they used to call me
when I worked in radio all those years ago. That
was my nickname Hachat. So essentially what we've got here
is that there is a reasonable conclusion that can be
drawn that in general, women do speak a bit more
than men, but probably not that much. There's a couple
of hypotheses around it. I'm just not buying it. I mean,
(09:18):
about a month month and a half ago, we had
a new fence, a new boundary fence put along our
property with our neighbors next door. And the three blokes,
four blokes that were in charge of looking after that fence,
My goodness, they spoke more than the stereotypical old women
that used to stand and the fence. And I'm cautious
using that phrase, but the stereotype exists for a reason. Right.
(09:40):
Those guys natted away all day and they were talking
completely rubbish. They weren't talking about anything important. They had
a couple of arguments about Donald Trumpy. But it was
just fascinating to hear these guys, these men, if they
had this ear transpond to working on their heads, they
would have just talked. Well, they talked to each other's
is off? What does it mean in terms of our parenting?
(10:03):
I mean, we're talking about real parenting solutions every day
on our podcast. I've only got one take home message
and that is communication to be human is to communicate.
To be human is to communicate. And it's good for
our children to see us being relational, to see us
being communicative. It's what we do, it's how we relate.
(10:24):
It's important and I think that we can. We can
dump the men from Mars, women are from Venus trope
from the way we talk. Let's just make sure that
we're talking.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
So, just to put a spanner in the works, there
are plenty of parents who are dealing with the teenage
boy specifically who grunts.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Well, we've got a we've got a teenage girl who
does that affair, but as well, I honestly, can can
you just acknowledge that I said something to you? Please?
Speaker 2 (10:52):
So for the parent who's dealing with the teenage grunter
in their living room lound room.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
We have like table right now, male or female?
Speaker 2 (11:05):
How do we encourage positive communication with a child like that?
Speaker 1 (11:09):
So there are two things here related to the study.
One of them is that your child is speaking. It's
just that they're not really speaking at home, not really
speaking to you. Which brings me to the practical element
that is, we've got to teach our children consideration, empathy, kindness.
That means that we might sit down with our child
and say, we consistently are trying to talk with you,
and we're getting grants, so we're getting non responses. That
(11:32):
is not considerate. That's not how we do things in
our family. We'd like to work with you on finding
a way that if you don't have anything to say,
that you can communicate that really simply, or if you
if you are going to ignore us, let us know
that you just want to have a bit of space
just now. So we want to improve the quality of
the communication through being considerate of the people who are
(11:52):
around us. That's pretty much the conversation that I'd be
having with a teenager if they're not communicating with you.
The second thing I'd be doing, practically is I'd be
finding ways to invite them back into my world or
trying to fight a way to inject myself into theirs.
And so it might mean that we go for a
bike ride, or we go down to the park and
we buy some gelato and sit there and have some
(12:13):
ice cream. We don't even have to chat, there's no agenda.
We're just spending time together. Or we invite them to
play a board game at the table with the rest
of the family. It's about having zero agenda conversations with
the kids that help them feel inclined to share their
lives when it feels good for them. Anyway, I've used
(12:35):
up all of my words. I have nothing left to say.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I believe you.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
The Happy Families podcast is produced by Justin Rouland from
Bridge Media. We will link to the study in the
show notes. Hope you enjoyed that one. If you'd like
more information and more resources about helping your kids to communicate,
please let us know by visiting us at happyfamilies dot
com dot a u