Deborah Cameron, an Oxford language professor, analyzes the stereotypes regarding communication betweem men and women. She denounces the idea that men and women communicate differently according to pop culture; for example, women are more empathetic and emotional, while men are more direct and spatial communicators. Also, when it comes to conversations, it's generally agreed that women tend to dominate; but according to a meta-analysis of 56 research studies, 60% had males talking more, 4% had females talking more, and 29% were about equal (7% had no clear pattern.)
To me, I really don't think it's a matter of male vs. female, but rather higher status vs. lower status speakers (this was talked about in the article.) If there is someone who is recognizably more knowledgeable in a subject, they tend to dominate the conversation. Common scenarios that get stereotyped are women being more conversational about household duties, and males more knowledgeable about politics/business/engineering/etc. I believe this is not a matter of gender, but rather expertise/experience.
I will concede that there are still problems with sexism in the workplace and specific fields (engineering for example), and it's great that we're working to eliminate those discrepancies, but even though they exist doesn't mean we can assume they are the only or major reason why conversation domination is necessarily specific to males or females. Instead, we should look past a person's gender and look at his or her qualifications in regards to the subject matter being discussed. If it's a conversation between those that are equally knowledgeable, I would expect to see the conversations virtually equal. One other thought to throw out is that it wasn't even analyzed whether the individuals were introverts or extroverts.
Original Article: http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,2181069,00.html
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I just thought I'd comment because I today in my psych section I learned a random little tid bit, that is slightly relevant to this article. We did a true/false-ish game in which we were read different sheets of paper which were relavant to the psychology, and one of them said that women talk more than men. About 90% of the class agreed that this statement was true. And 90% of the class was wrong. There is actually no "statistically significant" difference in the amount that men and wome talk. The other thing we learned was that when information is repeated over and over again, we are more likely to believe it, no matter how unreliable the source. So maybe the reason everyone seems to think that women talk more has to do with the fact that it seems to be spread around in all of those books? men are from venus, women are from mars.. whatever the cliche is..
At the end of your post you suggest that personality factors (such as introversion vs. extroversion) might influence who talks more in a given interaction. How might these factors interact with your previous assertion that “expertise” or “experience” governs talking time? That is, how often do you think expertise really accounts for differences in talking as compared to these other factors like outgoingness, confidence, etc. Think back to your classes in high school and now in college: do the people who talk most in class usually know the most, or are other factors more important? Can you think of how to design an experiment to test this?
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