A post on X from the account @raphousetv2 reignited an old debate:
“Study Says Women Speak Over 13,000 More Words A Day Than Men Do.”
The claim quickly racked up thousands of likes and shares. It plays neatly into one of the oldest stereotypes in the book that women are naturally more talkative than men. But how much truth is there?
A tweet from X.
The Roots of the “13,000 Words” Myth
The number comes from an antiquated legend claiming to inform us as to how much women chat, 20,000 words per day, in contrast to men’s 7,000 an purported 13,000-word gap. The number’s been used in bestseller pop psych volumes like The Female Brain by Dr. Louann Brizendine, but, ironically, she also admitted in later life there wasn’t great proof to support it.
The catchy but unnamed statistic found its way, over time, into news articles, self-help volumes, and today, social media posts gone viral.
In January 2025, researchers at the University of Arizona published one of the largest studies to date in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Led by Matthias Mehl and Colin Tidwell, the research team assessed 631,030 pieces of real-world speech based on observations made from 2,197 participants who were between 10 and 94 years old and came from four countries. The participants wore Electronically Activated Recorders (EARs) to capture small snippets of day-by-day speech.
On average, women spoke 13,349 words per day and men 11,950, a gap of about 1,073 words much less than the claimed 13,000. The difference was largest in adults 25–64, with women speaking roughly 3,275 more words. Among teens and older adults, the gap was minimal, and in some seniors, men spoke slightly more. Individual variation was huge, ranging from fewer than 100 words to over 120,000 per day.
As Mehl put it in the university’s press release:
“We human beings are more different as persons than both men and women systematically.”
This duplicates his earlier 2007 studies, in which he found men and women both to average 16,000 words daily no marked difference at all.
While there were certain preliminary hypotheses including biological dimensions like FOXP2 protein or the estradiol hormone, the majority of evidence indicates social and cultural roles as broader drives. As in, females in their 30s and 40s can talk more in family and caregiving contexts.
There was another astonishing trend, too people are talking less in general. Between 2005 and 2018, people uttered an average of 300 fewer words per day, most likely as people spend more time staring at screens and texting instead of having face-to-face conversations.
The idea that women are “chattier” than men has been around for centuries. It fuels tired stereotypes, affects how women are perceived in workplaces, and is often exaggerated by the media.
The real takeaway? Gender is not destiny when it comes to talkativeness. As one researcher put it,
“individual differences matter far more than gender averages.”
