I say that in half-jest, but these are non-trivial differences, peeps: (From Hannah Holmes’s The Well-Dressed Ape)
One of the clearest studies showed that 90 percent of mature female brains can identify an expression of sadness on an actor’s face, while only 40 percent of males can. Scientists also know that females analyze facial expressions faster than males. And some scientists believe that females alter breathing rate and posture to match the humans they’re communicating with, and that these physical adjustments bring about a matching emotional state called “emotional contagion.” A flock of studies has indeed found that the female cheek muscles do subconsciously crinkle in response to a happy face and produce a microfrown at an angry face—much more strongly than males’.
The gist: Females, on average, are biologically and objectively better social creatures. (Yeah, but can they pee standing up?) I am perfectly sincere when I say that a hiring manager evaluating two otherwise equal candidates would be stupid not to hire a female over a male. Evidence.
There is at least one area where the differences between the sexes have been overblown, and that is in talkativeness:
Investigations based on automated recorders worn on the human body found no statistical difference at all between the word count of males and females. Individual males did, however, claim the word titles of most taciturn (about 500 words per day) and most verbose (47,000). But on average both sexes put forth about 16,000 words a day.
My back of the envelope calculation says that that’s about 1.7 hours of speaking per day (with males ranging from 3 minutes to 5 hours), or about one full-blown novel worth of words every 3 days (with males ranging from 96 days/novel to 1 day/novel).
Although the word count is roughly the same, the average female has a small advantage in the ability to reel up words from memory, and then there is a clear split in what we talk about:
The trend from a few hundred studies is that females broadcast more information about themselves and other humans than males do. Male communication more often concerns objects.
Unlike elephants (and some primates such as diana monkeys, I later learned), at least we speak the same language, right?
Not all of us(!). A handful of human tribes around the world maintain separate male and female dialects of their language.
The males and females of the Yanyuwa of northern Australia share the roots of their words, but then tack on all manner of prefixes and suffixes particular to each sex. The Yana Indians of California flip around whole chunks of verbiage, depending on their sex: From the mouth of a female, a grizzly bear is a t’et. But a male would call the same animal a t’en’na. The Yana females speak the female dialect to one another and to males; males speak female-ese to females and male-ese to other males.
Hannah Holmes echoes my feelings beautifully:
Given the obstacles already confronting the human pair-bond—the differing brains, the perishable love chemistry, the conflicting reproductive agendas—it seems an unnecessary cruelty to ask the two sexes also to speak different tongues. Really, isn’t it hard enough already?
Yes, Hannah / the Universe, it is.
