Do women really talk more than men?

Are women more talkative than men? It's a common assumption, note the authors of a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. A prominent study from 2007, however, reached a different conclusion, finding that men and women utter about the same number of words every day — an average of about 16,000.

But these findings have been called into question — methodological limitations, such as the fact that it was conducted on a small sample of university students, who are not representative of the general population, left the finding on somewhat shaky ground.

Colin Tidwell at the University of Arizona and colleagues have now essentially replicated this study, but using data on five times as many participants (a total of 2,197), of varying ages, and from four different countries. Their results suggest that there are actually some gender differences in how many words we speak — but only for certain age groups.

The participants all wore an 'EAR', an electronically activated recorder that records short bursts of ambient sound intermittently throughout the day. They weren't aware of exactly when it was recording.

Using the same protocol as in the 2007 study, these recordings were transcribed. The team then used software to count the number of words uttered in each recording. They extrapolated from this figure to arrive at a daily estimate for each person.

The results showed that among people in early and middle adulthood — aged between 24 and 65 — the men spoke on average 11,950 words per day, compared with 13,349 for the women. "This is consistent with the social stereotype that women talk more than men," the team writes.

Among adolescents, aged 10 to 17, there was a small gender difference, with girls speaking an average of 513 words more than boys per day. For young adults, aged 18 to 24, the difference was only slightly higher, at 841 per day. In fact, these results tally quite well with the findings from the students in the original 2007 study, the researchers write.

For participants aged over 65, though, the slight gender difference was reversed — with women speaking less than men, by an average of 788 words per day.

However, the team stresses that "large" statistical uncertainty means that their study provides mostly "inconclusive evidence" for gender differences. In fact, the only finding that they regard as conclusive was the gender difference in early- to middle-aged adults.

Still, given the results overall, they think it's reasonable to conclude that women, in general, do speak more than men. This prompts the question of why this might be — and why it might be clear in middle-age?

The team suggests that biological factors may play a role. Some research has linked the sex hormone estradiol, which is at higher levels in women, to better verbal fluency, for example. 

But other factors could also be at work. Ethical and legal considerations meant that the participants did not wear the EARs while they were at work. As a result, the speech database critically underrepresents workplace conversations, the researchers write, while over-representing conversations with friends and family. Women tend to spend more time looking after children, they note. "It seems plausible that the gender differences could partly be explained by women talking to their children and other care dependents more than men do," they write. 

The team acknowledges that though they used a much broader range of participants than in the 2007 study, they still only studied people from four countries, and there was a lack of diversity in sociocultural background, sexual orientation and gender identity in their sample. But in expanding the range and number of participants, this work contributes to what will no doubt be an ongoing topic for debate and investigation.

Read the paper in full:
Tidwell, C. A., et al. (2025). Are women really (not) more talkative than men? A registered report of binary gender similarities/differences in daily word use. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 128(2), 367–391. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000534

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