The Media Interview

I heard a tantalizing headline on CNN today: a new book says women talk almost three times as much as men. Oh, I could have some fun with that on my blog, I said, and immediately began googling for more details. Turns out I have something very different to blog about: don’t twist the facts to get headlines.

The book is called The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco, and it’s been causing quite a stir since its publication this past August. Here are some provocative blurbs from the cover of the book:

Brizendine reveals the neurological explanations behind why

• A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000

• A woman remembers fights that a man insists never happened

• A teen girl is so obsessed with her looks and talking on the phone

• Thoughts about sex enter a woman’s brain once every couple of days but enter a man’s brain about once every minute

These are ready-made headlines which have been jumped on by the media world-wide, no doubt in part because they seem to confirm perceptions we have about men and women. But what more and more people are asking is: where’s the proof?

Mark Liberman, professor of phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania, has blogged a good deal about his and others’ efforts to answer that question. In two articles here and here, he can find no evidence for the claim that women use almost three times as many words per day. And even following up the sources cited in Brizendine’s book for the claim that “Girls speak faster on average — 250 words per minute versus 125 for typical males,” he found that those sources didn’t actually support the claim.

So it was no surprise when Steven Moss of The Guardian called Brizendine about such discrepancies, she told him

that she has accepted the criticism of the numbers quoted in the book - on both volume of words and rate of speech - and will be deleting them from future editions.

The cautionary tale here is that in the rush to be heard, to be noticed, to be quoted, there’s a danger in over-stating things, getting facts wrong, or even pulling things out of thin air to try and bolster your case. The squeaky wheel generally gets the media grease and the bigger the squeak the better.

Which is not to say that the media is at fault for causing the squeaks, only for reporting them uncritically - it took me 30 seconds online to find out that some of the claims in The Female Brain were flimsy at best. Your job is to make sure your squeaks are valid and don’t over-state the case.