GENDER AND SPECIES DIFFERENCESafter his parents took the advice of a psychologist, John Money, who
believed that gender identity results from the way a child is raised. To
help with the reassignment, Reimer’s testicles were removed and he was
given female hormones. Money originally claimed the outcome was a
success, but the truth, as revealed by Reimer in a book by John Colapinto
Do women talk more than men?
What about the popular belief that women talk much more than men?
Triumphant headlines in 2006 declared this to be scientific fact. “Women
talk three times as much as men, says study” was how the British Daily
Mail put it. The source of this claim turned out to be the just-released
book The Female Brain by neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine. Women
average twenty thousand words per day, the book claimed, whereas
men manage an average of only seven thousand. Thanks to the inves-
tigations of Boston Globe journalist Mark Liberman, it’s since been
revealed that Brizendine borrowed these figures from a self-help book,
not from a proper scientific study. Such a study was, however, published
in the prestigious journal Science in 2007. Matthias Mehl at the University
of Arizona asked hundreds of participants to wear a recording device
that captured thirty-second snippets of their daily speech every twelve
and a half minutes. Extrapolating from several days’ worth of these
snippets, Mehl’s team estimated that men and women alike averaged
around 1600 words per day. In North America at least, it seems the idea
that women are more verbose than men is little more than a myth.