Sweden has made serious efforts to eliminate gender discrimination, and in some schools the most popular toys for both boys and girls is a set of naked dolls with no signs of gender. There is also use of a gender neutral pronoun, des, so no ‘him’ or ‘her’. What effect will this have on their current and later behaviour?
11
Language
Men and women belong to different species and communication between them is still in its infancy.
Bill Cosby
A widely held belief is that language and communication are more important to women than to men, and that women also talk more than men and are better with words. It is also claimed that whereas women talk more about people, relationships and feelings, men talk about things and facts. Such ideas have repercussions on our beliefs and our actions, but they are essentially myths for which there is relatively little evidence. Research has shown that the overall difference between men and women with relation to language is usually small or close to zero. The myths of ‘Mars and Venus’ provide no exception to that rule. The idea that men are no good at talking seems somewhat amusing when viewed as a useful myth that might exempt men from something they would rather leave to women.
The two chief areas of the human brain responsible for language are Broca’s area, which is partly responsible for the production of language, for example when putting together sentences, and Wernicke’s area, which is partly responsible for processing other people’s sentences. Both regions are claimed to be proportionately larger in women. Similarly the hippocampus, a structure involved in learning, memory and emotion and in translating memories into words, is said to be larger and more active in women. It is also oestrogen-sensitive. There is, however, one report of a test on verbal fluency from the Université de Montpellier in which men showed greater activation than women in these classical language regions of the brain, which shows that the significance of these claims is far from clear.
Women’s brains have been reported to be more bilaterally organised for language, whereas men show greater left-hemisphere dominance, but this is no longer generally accepted. A recent large, multi-task investigation of sex differences both in structural asymmetries and in the lateralisation of function in reading found little evidence for sex differences on any behavioural measure. Sex differences in the brain in relation to language accounted for two per cent or less of the individual variation in asymmetry. But it has been widely held that language is more left-lateralised in males.
In contrast to maths and mental rotation, where men have the advantage, women are widely claimed to have an advantage over them in verbal skills, such as vocabulary use, reading, comprehension, essay-writing, verbal fluency, verbal learning and memory–but the evidence is mixed. Some research has shown a greater prevalence of pre-verbal skills among small girls, with female dominance in adults in language ability including grammar, spelling, and remembering lists of unrelated words. But the literature on sex differences in language can be no less confusing than that related to maths and science. In 1988 a review of numerous studies showed that female superiority was so slight as to be meaningless. There was no evidence of significant differences between the sexes in any component of verbal processing. However, a study of 165 papers showed that the gender of the author did have significance on the findings. If the first author was female, the article was significantly more likely to report that females had a language advantage than if the first author was male.
The background for much research on this topic is an evolutionary explanation based again on the hunter-gatherer hypothesis. This proposes, as we have already seen, that sex differences in cognitive abilities derive from the way that obtaining food was divided between the sexes in prehistoric humans. Men did most of the hunting, while women did most of the gathering of food such as wild berries. Since men explored larger territories during hunting than women did when gathering, this led to the evolution of better navigational skills in men. On the other hand, women staying at home in social groups would have interacted socially to a greater degree and used language more. Thus evolutionary theory predicts that women would have become better than men in the use of language. The hunter-gatherer hypothesis also suggests that their different roles forced men to be more aggressive and self-assertive in speech, and women to be more nurturing and empathetic in their use of language.
The auditory system, closely linked to language, shows sex differences which are probably dependent on exposure to male hormones during prenatal development. A specific sound, considered to be related to the amplification function of the cochlea, is generated from within the inner ear of newborn male infants. Their cochleas are weaker than those of newborn females, and these differences persist throughout life.
Significant language differences have been found in children. Female infants from two to twelve months old have been found to cry more in response to pain, and at a higher pitch, despite there being no evident sex differences in pain thresholds. Girls from a very early age tend to develop language more quickly than boys and acquire a larger vocabulary from as early as sixteen months. Significant differences in vocabulary have been found in both one- and two-year-olds, both in understanding language and speaking it. But although girls scored higher than boys, the differences were quite small, only about two per cent. A study of more than 3,000 two-year-old twins found that girls scored more highly than boys on both verbal and non-verbal cognitive ability, but once again the gap was tiny, a mere three per cent of the overall range. Nevertheless language performance is generally better among girls than among boys as young as two or three, though the difference largely disappears by the time they are six. There is evidence that girls have consistently outperformed boys in written work at school, though these differences become less apparent in adults. Acquiring language early seems to be part of a general, early developmental gap between the sexes, shown also in non-verbal performance.
Ozçalişkan and Goldin-Meadow made an investigation into possible sex differences in children’s gestures as their language developed, and observed girls and boys every four months as they progressed from one-word to multiword speech. Boys not only produced speech combinations like ‘drink juice’ three months later than girls, they were also three months later in producing gestures together with speech, such as saying ‘eat’ while pointing at a biscuit. This was evidence that boys are likely also to lag behind girls in sentence construction; and boys were typically found to produce their first multiword sentences later than girls.
Certain language-related problems show clearer sex differences, including disorders such as stuttering, dyslexia and autism. The incidence of dyslexia and reading difficulties is higher in boys, which may be related to the greater variance in their reading performance. Men stutter more than women and there are differences in their brains related to stuttering.
Burman, Bitan and Booth found gender differences in the brain in relation to language. Girls aged nine to fifteen showed stronger responses in the language areas of the brain than did boys of the same age. The information content of some tasks was found to activate girls’ language areas associated with abstract thinking, and for some of these areas the degree of activation correlated positively with performance accuracy. But reliable performance by boys when reading depended on how hard their visual areas worked. Only when hearing words, rather than reading them, did boys’ performance improve. So boys have a more sensory approach than girls, but this difference may vanish by adulthood.
There are very few reports of sex differences in language-related activity in the brain based on adults matched for age and performance. Allendorfer and her co-authors showed that men and women exhibit similar brain activation during verb-generation testing. In this task the subject hears a noun and is visually instructed to think of verbs associated with the noun and then to say them. This observation is consistent with previous studies showing similar language-related activation in both sexes. Taken together these results suggested that men and wome
n activate a similar network of brain regions during language processing, but may differ somewhat in the emotional and cognitive control strategies they employ.
In general, then, language differences due to sex are very small in almost every study. In spelling, however, there is a greater difference although it is still only moderate. Spelling scores have been correlated with grey-matter volume in the right superior frontal gyrus in women to a larger degree than in men, and they are generally better at it. Girls consistently outperform boys on tests of reading comprehension. They like to read more than boys, and more girls than boys rate themselves as confident readers. When learning similar-sounding new words, women consistently do better than men. We have already seen that women have a more efficient declarative memory system–that is, they treat memories like facts which can be consciously recalled. When subjects were asked to recall word lists in one study, girls consistently outperformed boys and the way boys and girls approached the list-learning task was found to be significantly different. Girls were more likely than boys to organise the list actively on the basis of the meanings of the words, while boys tended to recall the words in the same order in which they were presented. Accuracy of performance for boys was affected by how the words were presented, as visual presentation allowed greater recall than just hearing the word spoken. Sex differences in brain-behaviour correlations must reflect differences in the nature of the processing required.
Women have also been shown in some studies to outperform men in semantic tasks such as tests of verbal fluency or finding synonyms. But it has also been claimed that sex is not a significant predictor in larger samples, appropriately controlled for age and education. Girls are claimed to show greater fluency as measured by the number of words spoken in a fixed time. Tests of verbal fluency involve asking subjects to come up with as many words as they can in a minute. Sometimes these words all have to begin with the same letter or sometimes they are words from within a specific category, for instance ‘animals’. In these verbal tests women tend to perform at a very slightly higher level than men on most of them, but the sex difference is so small that it is virtually zero. A number of studies have looked at verbal skills in subjects with CAH, and included verbal fluency tests, but found no differences between them and non-CAH controls. However, there is evidence that at eighteen and twenty- four months, testosterone in the embryo does affect the size of vocabulary a child has; the less testosterone, the better the language skills. This may help to explain the early advantage that girls possess in acquiring speech.
Differences in language use are a complex subject. One early theory was that different ways of using or understanding language are actually displays of different power in society and that women tend to use language that echoes and helps to reinforce their subordinate role. But another more recent study found only small gender differences when it compared the use of language by men and women in both spoken and written texts. Thoughts and emotions figured higher in the list of words women used, and they were more likely to discuss people and what they were doing. For men language was more likely to be used as something to describe more concrete external events and subjects, such as jobs, money and sports, and to include numbers and swear words. Women are more expressive than men in both positive and negative emotions. It has been found that they do tend to talk about themselves and are more likely than men to include relationships in their descriptions of their ideal self and what they don’t like about themselves. Men are more likely to describe themselves in terms of differences from others, rather than their connections with them.
There are no real differences between men and women when they speak about sexuality, anger or time, and in their use of ‘we’. Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor, observed that females use conversation to negotiate closeness and intimacy, so being ‘best friends’ means sitting and talking. For males conversation is the way you negotiate your status in the group and talk is used to preserve your independence. Whereas women may get together to chat and pursue friendships, for men undertaking activities together is the most important thing.
A surprising finding is that distinctive words, syntax, being colloquial, repetition, subordination and other features of written text can expose the gender of an author. Confirmation of the gender of a writer emerges readily from definite clues. An analysis of 14,000 text files from seventy separate studies found that while men referred more to the properties of objects and impersonal topics, women used more words related to psychological and social topics. A study revealed numerous ‘psycholinguistic’ factors in written material are gender-specific. A computer algorithm has been developed which can detect gender quite reliably from written texts. It makes some basic assumptions as outlined above, such as that men talk more about objects and women more about relationships. It found that women tend to use more pronouns, words like ‘I’ ‘you’ and ‘we,’ while men use articles that qualify nouns such as ‘a’ ‘the’ or ‘that’, or quantify them by using numbers.
Women currently enjoy less success than men in creative writing. In the United States eighty-three per cent of the authors reviewed in recent issues of the New York Review of Books were male, and the same statistic was true of reviewers. The great majority of theatre productions are written by men. In the 2008–9 Broadway season only about thirteen per cent of the plays were written by women although there are many distinguished female novelists. It is possible that these differences have a social basis, but the lack of empathy involved in writing plays may make it less attractive to women.
Over the years studies have been carried out in the United States and the United Kingdom as to how boys and girls differ in the way they use language. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have found that the language that boys use in conversation is often more aggressive and that they interrupt more often than girls. Male contradiction starts early! On the other hand, girls are more co-operative in speech, more friendly in approach, and tend to interrupt more positively. These finding are in line with the genetic finding of greater empathy in women, and aggression in men. Tenenbaum, Ford and Alkhedairy studied girls and boys describing a wordless picture book in mixed or same-gender pairs. In mixed as well as same-gender pairs, girls used more emotional explanations than did boys, and they also used more emotional labels. In same-gender pairs girls used a higher proportion of speech that promoted collaboration than did boys, but they performed similarly when in mixed-gender pairs. The findings support contextual models of gender and suggest that speaker as well as partner gender can influence emotion expression and conversational style. Findings of Barnes, Zimmerman, West and others showed that women often use minimal responses and encouraging noises such as ‘mm-hm’ and ‘yeah’ showing that they are collaborating in a conversation. Men use these responses less often, and when they do it is usually to show that they agree. But women will often ask a question rhetorically or as a means of drawing the other person into conversation or of getting attention.
Women use questions more frequently, while men tend to change the subject more often. It appears that women may be better listeners than men because they find listening more important than men do and because it gives them added status as a confidante. The importance women give to listening is reflected by their making fewer interruptions that disrupt conversation with unrelated topics, and by their more frequent use of minimal responses. Men interrupt far more frequently by introducing non-related topics. The interpretation of what someone is saying is, of course, influenced by its social context, such as the speaker’s identity, according to van den Brink’s team. If their ideas about the character of a speaker conflict with what the speaker is saying, women are much more likely than men to show specific brain reactivity. This sex difference in social information processing can be explained by a specific cognitive trait, women’s ability to empathise. Individuals, mainly women, who empathise a lot show larger effects in the brain’s normal response to words and other meaningful socially relevant information.
There are some linguistic skills in which girls and women have been found to be superior, such as how they pronounce words, grammar and the use of longer and more complex sentences. Havy, Bertoncini and Nazzi have reported differences in word learning, with girls being better learners than boys, as well as being less sensitive to the difficulties involved in learning. Girls seem to be capable of maintaining attention throughout a word-learning task, whereas boys display evidence of tiredness, which suggests that it is a more demanding process for them.
There is also a quite common view that women like to talk but men prefer action to words. One wisecrack is, ‘I haven’t spoken to my wife for three months. I don’t like to interrupt her.’ It is widely believed that women talk far more than men and that men tend to be generally less communicative. There is also the belief that men and women communicate differently; these stereotypes have become quite generally accepted in clichés such as ‘Men never listen’ and ‘Women find it easier to talk about their feelings’. The idea that men and women ‘speak different languages’ has become deeply ingrained in our culture and is exemplified by books such as the one by Deborah Cameron about ‘Mars and Venus’ which accept it as an article of faith. On the contrary, that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth, albeit a myth from which we seem to derive some amusement. In 2006, Louann Brizendine claimed in her book The Female Brain that women on average utter 20,000 words a day, while men on average utter only 7,000. This confirmed the popular belief that women are not only more talkative, but almost three times more so. One person who found this impossible to believe was a professor of phonetics, Mark Liberman. He concluded that no one had ever done a study counting the words produced by a sample of men and women in the course of a single day. The figures were part of the myth. Fortunately a scientific study by Mehl and his group then found that women and men both spoke about 16,000 words per day. How many words are used does depend on the subject being talked about. The number of words used by male and female subjects during the free recall of emotional and neutral stimuli showed that women used more words compared to men in the recollection of emotional stimuli, and in describing both emotional and neutral stories.
Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman? Page 13