- Women talk more than men, so women read and write more.
- Women are more empathetic than men, so women read more fiction.
The Guardian has published three lengthy excerpts from the book, and an excellent review by Steven Poole.
The current mythology
- In social science, You Just Don't Understand and Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
- In the "it's how our brains are wired" camp, Brain Sex, Sex on the Brain, The Essential Difference, and Why Men Don't Iron.
The NPR article relied heavily on The Female Brain, which claimed that women talk three times as much as men. The science community slammed the book (here's my summary), and the author admits that the statistic is rubbish. Nonetheless, it continues to make headlines.
Cameron debunks The Female Brain still further, citing Hyde's 2005 analysis of a number of previous studies. Overall, these studies found little difference between men's and women's use of language:
- "Close to zero" or "small" differences in:
- Reading comprehension, vocabulary, verbal reasoning, speech production, conversational interruption, talkativeness, assertive speech, affiliative speech, and self disclosure.
- "Moderate" differences in:
- Spelling and smiling.
The anti-headline: "Men and women pretty similar, research finds"
I don't doubt that the sexes can be different, nor that differences should be studied. The problem lies in the tendency to extrapolate immutable biological differences from casual social observations. Poole's review explicates the danger of this approach:Aspects of the way our society is currently structured are taken to be clues to some basic difference in the nature of men and women, which always turns out to be... a "natural" reason to keep them in lower-status roles.... The Essential Difference... concludes that "people with the female brain", supposedly more empathetic, are better at jobs such as nursing... and the male-brained, supposedly more analytical, make better lawyers. Cameron comments aptly that nurses also need to be analytical and lawyers need people skills: "These categorisations are not based on a dispassionate analysis of the demands made by the two jobs. They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men."In fact, as we discussed a few weeks ago, the femininity of empathy is up for dispute. Recent studies indicate that while empathy is related to physical structures in the brain, those structures develop through social conditioning, rather than some innate gender-based attribute.
Gender-based cultural assumptions have proven to be wrong in more measurable spheres. It was once "known" that women weren't physically strong enough to run long distances. But in the 1970s U.S. marathons were officially opened to women, and Title IX required that schools provide men and women with equal access to sports. Since then, the gap between women's and men's marathon times has shrunk dramatically. The point isn't whether women's times will ever be the same as men's. These changes in sports provides great examples of cultural assumptions exaggerating natural differences.
When Mars is Venus
Here's an amusing counter-example from the Times Online review:In the village of Gapun in Papua New Guinea, when a woman is annoyed with her husband, she swears at him for 45 minutes, at the top of her voice....
"You’re a ****ing rubbish man. You hear? Your ****ing ***** is full of maggots. You’re a big ****ing semen *****. Stone balls! ...****ing black *****! You *****ing mother’s ****!"
When the flowers of English womanhood carry on like this... they’re thought to be behaving laddishly. When the housewives of Gapun turn the air blue, however, they are only doing what comes naturally to a woman.... If [the village men] need to get a grievance off their chests, they get their wives to do it for them. In Gapun, women are from Mars, men are from Venus.
Good reads
Excerpts:
- "What language barrier?", 1 Oct 2007. The Guardian.
- "Speak up, I can't hear you", 2 Oct 2007. The Guardian.
- "Back down to Earth", 3 Oct 2007. The Guardian.
Janet Shibley Hyde, 2005, "The Gender Similarities Hypothesis". American Psychologist.
Steven Poole, 2006, Unspeak: How words become weapons, how weapons become a message, and how that message becomes reality. Grove Press.
5 Comments:
I heard her on Woman's Hour (BBC radio 4 show in the UK) a few weeks ago and thought she was very good. What I particularly liked was what she said about language and consent: men and women rarely say an outright 'no' in their noraml social interactions (e.g. when invited out for a drink they might claim fatigue, a prior engagement or offer a raincheck)and yet men often (and disingenuously?) claim ambiguity in rape cases.
Also, women in Parliament were more likely to follow rules in debates and felt like interlopers and yet there was no such inhibition for women in the Scottish Parliament, which is relatively new and has never been barred to them.
Her logic was very persuasive AND she had a great voice.
Oh, thanks--I just found the interview online. I like her voice too.
It's interesting that in the Parliamentary example, the women actually had a good reason to follow the rules. They were more likely than men to be censured for breaking rules.
Cameron talks quite a bit about rape cases in the 2nd excerpt in The Guardian. She points out that the advice to firmly say "NO" (and the subsequent question, "Did you make it clear?") can be counter to what safety classes teach (don't antagonize; stay alive).
Good post. I read about that 'women talk three times as much as men' statistic being debunked recently. I never was convinced.
I remember studying English language at college a few years ago when this was the general consensus (women being 'better' at talking). I much prefer Cameron's thesis. I get pretty tired of this whole Mars/Venus divide and the way it can justify some pretty shoddy behaviour. I love what she says about the misuse of the word "communication" and why it might be appealing to some:
"If someone does not respond in the way we want them to, it means they cannot have understood us - the problem is "failure to communicate", and the solution is better communication...
It is comforting to be told that nobody needs to "feel awful": that there are no real conflicts, only misunderstandings, and no disagreements of substance, only differences of style."
I read the excerpts and she is very funny.
Tumperkin, at least you read about it. Most people probably heard the "three times more" part but not the debunking. I was disheartened to see NPR pushing the "three times more" idea last month. I emailed them about it, but they're still pushing the original article--I heard them mention it last week.
Meriam, I liked that quote too, distinguishing between communication and real conflict. And I agree, even if the gender/language gap were true, it's been used to rationalize some poor behavior by both sexes.
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