„Women's tongues are like lamb tails- they are never still".
This is only one of many well-known proverbs that express the wide-spread and firmly believed stereotype that women talk too much. By definition of the WH Smith Oxford Dictionary for School, a proverb is a "short, well known saying that states a truth".
So it seems officially to be acknowledged that women talk all the time while men are fighting to get some words in.
Sex differences in amount of talk have been a field of research for many years. In 1951 the first research was published and till 1991 another sixty- two followed. However, the results of the studies did not give ground to this prejudice. The results are far from being consistent. Some studies found out that women talk more than men, some found no difference in amount of talk, and a third result was that men do most of the talking.
In order to make sense of these findings it is necessary to describe the context and the structure of social interaction within which gender differences are observed. Most of these studies were American, observing middle –class English speaking Americans, so that the results are only valid for this specific group.
Of fifty-six studies, dealing with mixed-sex interaction, males were found to talk more than females in 42.9% of the studies. Sixteen studies (28.6%) found no difference between the sexes overall in amount of talk and only two studies (3.6%) found females to talk more overall.
So why does this stereotype exist? Some linguists suggest that "the talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than a silent woman".
Another suggestion brings up the explanation that women and men tend to discuss different types of topics, along with the fact that men tend to judge
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