A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that the long-standing stereotype of women being significantly more talkative than men is largely overstated. By analyzing the daily word use of thousands of participants across a diverse range of contexts, researchers found that while women spoke slightly more words per day than men the difference was relatively small and highly variable across individuals.
The perception that women talk more than men is a widely held belief, reinforced by media, literature, and cultural narratives. A study published in 2007, which examined data from 396 participants who wore a voice recorder, challenged this notion, finding that men and women spoke roughly the same number of words per day—about 16,000.
While the 2007 study attracted significant attention, critics argued that its sample was too small and lacked diversity. Additionally, new research since then has suggested that talkativeness might vary by age and social context. Given these concerns and the persistence of the stereotype in public discourse, the researchers aimed to conduct a large-scale replication to provide a more robust and generalizable estimate of gender differences in daily word use.
This study is based on an earlier study (Mehl et al., 2007), which demonstrated that there was no significant difference in talkativeness between men and woman at the level of words spoken per day. However, that study received criticism for relying on a sample of primarily college-aged adults,” explained corresponding author Colin Tidwell, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona.
“Those criticisms came at the time of the replication discussion in the field of psychology and as such made for an important discussion in our lab about the importance of replicating previous findings using the method employed. Finally, the stereotype that women talk more than men is still societally pervasive yet there is little empirical evidence to support the stereotype; this replication study gave us a great opportunity to further investigate the stereotype with far more data (five times more data than the original, in fact).”
To improve upon past research, the new study used data from 22 different samples collected over 14 years (2005–2019) across four countries: the United States, Switzerland, Serbia, and Australia. The dataset included a total of 2,197 individuals. The researchers used the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), a device that intermittently recorded short snippets of ambient sound throughout participants’ waking hours. This method allowed them to capture natural speech patterns in real-world settings without relying on self-reported estimates, which can be biased by personal perceptions or societal expectations.
Participants in the study ranged in age from 10 to 94 years old, with subgroups representing adolescence (10–17 years), emerging adulthood (18–24 years), early and middle adulthood (25–64 years), and older adulthood (65+ years). The researchers aimed to explore whether word use varied across these different life stages. Additionally, they examined whether stress levels influenced talkativeness, as some theories suggest that women may use speech as a coping mechanism in response to stress.
After collecting 631,030 ambient audio recordings, human transcribers counted the number of words spoken by each participant. The data was then processed using linguistic analysis software to estimate the total number of words spoken per day. The researchers also accounted for factors such as the duration of recording periods and the estimated number of waking hours per day to ensure a consistent comparison across participants.
At the broadest level, the study confirmed that women spoke slightly more words per day than men, but the difference was small—about 1,073 words on average. Given the high variability in individual talkativeness, the researchers concluded that there was not enough statistical certainty to determine whether this difference was meaningful. In other words, while the data suggested a small gap, it was not strong enough to confidently state that women are significantly more talkative than men.
“At the level of descriptive statistics, our study found that women tend to talk about 13,349 words per day compared to 11,950 for men—but the difference is pretty small and varies a lot from person to person,” Tidwell told PsyPost. “Some people spoke fewer than 100 words a day, while others talked over 120,000! However, our analyses show that there wasn’t enough statistical certainty to confidently determine whether women speak significantly more words per day than men or if the two genders are practically equivalent in their daily word use.”
One of the most interesting findings emerged when examining word use by age group. While the gender difference was relatively small among adolescents (513 words) and emerging adults (841 words), it was much larger among early and middle adults, where women spoke approximately 3,275 more words per day than men. This was the only group for which the researchers could confidently conclude a meaningful difference. In contrast, among older adults (65+ years), the difference reversed slightly, with men speaking about 788 more words per day than women, though this finding was less statistically robust.
“The gap was a bit bigger for adults in their early and middle adulthood, but overall, our findings indicate that the stereotype of women being way more talkative than men is overstated and is likely contextually-dependent,” Tidwell said. “At this moment in time, we can only make informed speculations about why it is that the early and middle adulthood group’s amount of words spoken per day might be consistent with the stereotype.”
The researchers also investigated whether stress played a role in the gender difference. Based on previous theories suggesting that women might use speech as a coping mechanism, they expected to see a stronger gender gap in talkativeness among individuals experiencing high levels of stress. However, the data did not support this idea. The results showed that stress had no meaningful impact on the number of words spoken per day for either gender.
In addition to examining actual word use, the study also looked at participants’ self-perceptions of their talkativeness. Women generally rated themselves as more talkative than men, but this self-assessment did not always align with the recorded data. Among emerging adults, for example, the gender difference in self-reported talkativeness was three times larger than the actual difference in words spoken per day. This suggests that societal stereotypes may shape people’s beliefs about how talkative they are, even if those beliefs do not match their actual behavior.
The study also raised an intriguing question about whether overall daily spoken word use has declined over time. “Were quite surprised to find that, as we say in the study, ‘One unexpected aspect of the preliminary descriptive analyses that caught our interest was that the present study estimated the number of words spoken per day at about 3,000 words lower than the original study,’” Tidwell explained. “This would suggest a decrease of 3,000 words spoken per day over the course of a decade. That’s a lot of words lost!”
Despite its large sample size and diverse data sources, the study has some limitations. Tidwell highlighted the key concerns: “the Bayesian ROPE analyses showed large statistical uncertainty, that our sample was relatively homogenous in terms of a variety of diversity variables (thus reducing its generalizability), and that our method did not investigate the potential for difference in words per day based on social contexts. Also, our study was limited to binary gender categories, which doesn’t account for how nonbinary or gender-diverse individuals might experience or express talkativeness.”
The study, “Are Women Really (Not) More Talkative Than Men? A Registered Report of Binary Gender Similarities/Differences in Daily Word Use,” was authored by Colin A. Tidwell, Alexander F. Danvers, Valeria A. Pfeifer, Danielle B. Abel, Eva Alisic, Andrew Beer, Sabrina J. Bierstetel, Kathryn L. Bollich-Ziegler, Michelle Bruni, William R. Calabrese, Christine Chiarello, Burcu Demiray, Sona Dimidjian, Karen L. Fingerman, Maximilian Haas, Deanna M. Kaplan, Yijung K. Kim, Goran Knezevic, Ljiljana B. Lazarevic, Minxia Luo, Alessandra Macbeth, Joseph H. Manson, Jennifer S. Mascaro, Christina Metcalf, Kyle S. Minor, Suzanne Moseley, Angelina J. Polsinelli, Charles L. Raison, James K. Rilling, Megan L. Robbins, David Sbarra, Richard B. Slatcher, Jessie Sun, Mira Vasileva, Simine Vazire, and Matthias R. Mehl.
