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“Women have been socialized to be receptive, polite and connective,” said Kaye Jensen Nubel, associate professor of speech and communications at Saddleback College in California. Nubel has over 20 years of experience teaching interpersonal communication at all different levels.

Women see speech as a means to forging connections, and developing and maintaining relationships. They will try to keep a conversation going, and often attempt to encourage the speaker to keep talking by chiming in with, “uh-huh” and other related statements that mean, “I am listening to what you say.”

Men, on the other hand, view speech as a way to bolster their esteem or as the tool to engage in competitive debate. As a result, men often interrupt more, choose the topics, and talk more.

Steele saw many examples of this in the classroom. One very stark instance occurred during her Structure and History of the English Language course last semester. The class was small, approximately only 16 students total. However, only two of them were males. During one exercise, Steele told the male students that they could not talk at all during class.

“When I told Ben and Nick that they couldn’t talk, we saw that Ben was talking about 60 percent of the time in class,” she said.

This contradicts the familiar notion, or stereotype that women talk more. In actual studies and observations, depending on the circumstance, it was actually determined that men talk longer and hold the floor for longer.

Marjorie Swacker, a linguist who published her results online, conducted an experiment to determine whether women or men talked more. She held up three pictures by a 15th century Flemish artist, Albrecht Durer, and then asked individual men and women to comment on them. She told each person that they had as much time as they wanted to talk. The results: Men spoke an average of 13 minutes and women spoke only 3.17 minutes.

Steele supports this claim as well.

“I have been attending big faculty meetings on the curriculum revisions. All of the public negotiations and online negotiations are dominated by men. Five male voices yap and yap and yap even above the high ranking woman who is dominating the discourse,” she said.

Men even serve to dictate the choice of topics, avoid conversations that they do not want to talk about, or steer them in the direction where they are more interested. There is also the problem of interruption.

Nubel said that in conversation among women, there is more turn-taking and less interruption. Both parties serve to share ideas and topic choice. When men talk to men, there is much more interruption, with each party trying to talk over and dominate the other. When women and men are talking, the men continue to dominate and interrupt the women more. However, Deborah Tannen, professor at Georgetown University and author of many books on gender and linguistics, said these generalizations do no apply to everyone. There are exceptions.

One for instance, is the romantic, intimate setting.

“When a man and a woman are speaking in an intimate context, like friendship or romantic relationship, women speak equally or more. But in the majority of professional settings one-on-one, men dominate in the majority of cases,” said Nubel.

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