Amanda Marcotte is responding with a hearty "bullshit" to the study by Dr. Louann Brizendine — a study which concluded that women talk three times more than men. Amanda points to Exhibit A — a New York Times interview with Dr. Brizendine, which features the following exchange:
NYT: Your book cites a study claiming that women use about 20,000 words a day, while men use about 7,000.
Dr. Brizendine: The real phraseology of that should have been that a woman has many more communication events a day — gestures, words, raising of your eyebrows.
So apparently "talking" isn’t really "talking" in the good doctor’s study. For example, a woman who nods all day without actually vocalizing, is apparently "talking" for purposes of the study.
Amanda concludes that by twisting the data in this manner, the doctor is out there reinforcing a stereotype, simply to sell more books:
Brizendine is out there pushing the “women are more verbal” line because the dominant culture wants men to be better at “important” fields like math and science, but I wonder what she’d think if confronted from the stereotypes of prior times that held that women were feeble in all intellectual fields.