"You talk too much!"

I just can't believe what some people say out loud!  I wasn't necessarily planning on posting on this topic so soon again, but clearly I am justified in doing so.  Recent news has confirmed some of the points that I made in a few of my recent posts (see "COVID-19 and women" and "Do we need a National Women Physicians Day - 2021 version").  Apparently, the top official on the Tokyo Olympic Planning Committee complained that the women on the committee talked too much during meetings.  

Yoshiro Mori, a former Prime Minister of Japan and the current president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, reportedly said, "board meetings with lots of women take longer" because "women are competitive -- if one member raises their hand to speak, others might think they need to talk too."  He later added, "If you want to increase female membership, you would be in trouble unless you put time limits in place."

Wow.  Mori of course apologized the next day, claiming that he would like to withdraw the comments he made to those who were offended.  As the CNN writers reporting on this story said, "...women regularly face gender discrimination in the workplace and when seeking positions of power."  I would argue that the statistics show that it's not just women in Japan!

Here's the goofy part to this whole story.  Mori's perceptions are actually wrong.  The available evidence suggests that the opposite is true - men actually talk more than women in meetings.  For example, in a systematic review of 56 studies by the investigators Deborah James and Janice Drakich, only two of the studies revealed women talked more than men. To the contrary, they found that 34 of the studies showed that men talked more than women!  

A widely cited study on this topic by Barbara and Gene Eakins observed 7 university faculty meetings and found that men spoke far more often and far longer than the women.  The longest comment by one of the female faculty in all seven meetings was shorter, in fact, than the shortest comment by a male faculty member.

The facts support that men talk more than women in professional settings.  Even more surprising (though maybe not so surprising to women), a study by Susan Herring found that online messages written by men were twice as long as those written by women.  

Men talk more.  Men write more.  Women talk less.  Women write less.  At the risk of writing too long, I will end with that.