Study: No yap gap

NEW YORK – A bunch of scientists in Arizona have two words for psychologists who claim it’s proven that women talk more than men: Shut up.

Setting out to blow up a stereotype, the researchers miked 396 college students with a gizmo they call an EAR (electronically activated recorder) and counted up how many words the students said in a day.

The result? Both genders use about 16,000 words a day.

“The data fail to reveal a reliable sex difference in daily word use,” wrote Dr. Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona in an article appearing today in Science magazine.

“The widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness and male reticence is unfounded.”

Mehl, who is about a medium on the chattiness scale, said in an interview that he had long known men and women talk about the same amount.

But he decided to prove it last year when a splashy book proclaimed that women say 20,000 words per day versus 7,000 words for men.

That statistic has been deleted from more recent editions of “In The Female Mind” by Dr. Louann Brizendine, but it’s too late: The figures keep getting repeated as gospel.

“People love gender differences,” Mehl said. “But it wasn’t true.”

Brizendine was thrilled to see the persistent stereotype go down.

“What it really means is not that she talks too much,” said Brizendine, who directs the Women’s Mood & Hormone Clinic at University of California, San Francisco. “It’s that he doesn’t listen enough.”

Mehl said the differences between individuals were far more dramatic than between the sexes. One motormouth, a man, spoke a whopping 47,000 words a day. The quietest, also a man, used just 700.

And yet, the notion that women gab too much transcends human culture.

The Scots have a saying, “There is nothing so unnatural as a talkative man or a quiet woman.” The Chinese say, “The tongue is the sword of a woman and she never lets it become rusty.”

Mehl speculated that “the stereotype evolved out of conflict behavior: Women want to talk and men withdraw verbally. Then we overgeneralized to apply that everywhere.”

Indeed, plenty of studies have shown that men talk much more than women when it comes to classrooms and boardrooms.

But Mehl’s study wasn’t about to explode all the stereotypes.

“We did find men talk more about money, sports and technology and women talk more about relationships,” he allowed, knowing that revelation wasn’t going to render anyone speechless.