Interesting story today on NPR about research done at the University of Arizona that used an audio recorder carried by volunteers programmed to record for 30 seconds every 12 minutes.  One of the things they investigated with the data collected was the volume of speech of men versus women.  Turns out it’s not the case that women speak dramatically more than men (as the urban myth has it):  “Both men and women speak around 17,000 words a day, give or take a few hundred.”  This is something that Deborah Cameron pointed out in her book, The Myth of Mars and Venus (2008).

Another finding (the main one reported on in the story) is that female scientists talk differently to male and female colleagues: they had “male and female scientists at a research university wear the audio recorders and go about their work. When the scientists analyzed the audio samples, they found there was a pattern in the way the male and female professors talked to one another.”  They found that the women scientists talked about their work in a quite different, and less confident, way to men than to other women.  However, “when the male and female scientists weren’t talking about work, the women reported feeling more engaged.”  The investigators concluded that the women were (likely unconsciously) responding (through hesitation, unassertiveness, self-doubts) to the wide-spread belief that women aren’t as competent as men in science.

This is a phenomenon known as “stereotype threat”, well-known in social psychology.  Experiments have shown that stereotype threat affects performance in a wide variety of domains.  The lead scientist, a German, reported that he experienced it himself when going dancing with his wife (a Mexican) and other Latinos:  everyone knows German can’t hold a candle to Mexicans in salsa dancing and registering that thought in the act of dancing likely negatively affected his performance.