Sticky stereotypes

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Today's Zits:

Not at all the first time: "When stereotypes hang out", 11/16/2006; "Zits communication", 8/18/2008; "Clouds of chatter", 9/17/2998; "Teenspeak, genderspeak", 4/18/2010; "Skim listening", 3/14/2014.

Some other relevant posts:

"Sex-linked lexical budgets", 8/6/2006
"Yet another sex-n-wordcount sighting", 8/14/2006
"Stereotypes and facts", 9/4/2006
"Gabby guys: The effect size", 9/23/2006
"Regression to the mean in British journalism", 11/28/2006
"Contagious misinformation", 12/1/2006
"Femail again", 12/2/2006
"Sex differences in 'communication events' per day", 12/11/2006
"A lesson in the sweet science", 1/29/2007
"Offenses and apologies", 10/10/2010
"How powerful is sisterhood?", 10/27/2010
"'Like' youth and sex", 6/28/2011
"Sexual accommodation", 12/30/2011
"An invented statistic returns", 2/22/2013
"Sex and FOXP2: Preservation of endangered stereotypes", 2/28/2013

For some other links, see "David Brooks, Neuroendocrinologist", 9/27/2006.



6 Comments

  1. the other Mark P said,

    June 15, 2014 @ 11:59 pm

    Adults see the amount girls speak to them compared to how boys speak to them, and think it applies to anyone else.

    Anyone with a teenage boy who grunts to adults but talks incessantly to his friends will know the difference.

  2. Marek said,

    June 16, 2014 @ 5:50 am

    To be fair, I see it less as 'gender differences' in this case and more as an accurate portrayal of what it feels like to listen to people talking to you immediately after you've woken up… but that might just be me.

  3. BlueLoom said,

    June 16, 2014 @ 5:51 am

    As a female morning-person, I saw this as a lark vs owl strip.

    [(myl) Makes sense. I wonder whether there are valid sex/gender associations with differences in biorhythms? But given the strip's history (and the broader cultural pattern), it's not an accident that the lark/owl distinction gets mapped onto the female/male distinction this way. ]

  4. Rubrick said,

    June 17, 2014 @ 4:41 pm

    Does anyone know if there's a transcription of her outpouring anywhere? I'm kind of impressed that Scott (I'm guessing) took the time to fill it with from what I can tell is fairly realistic conversational text.

  5. Alan said,

    June 22, 2014 @ 2:50 am

    Any man who says he has never experienced that is either a very young man or a very old man with a bad memory.

  6. Klaus said,

    June 23, 2014 @ 5:08 am

    Somewhat off topic, and not sure if it's been mentioned before, but regarding spoken word quantity per gender, I remember hearing about a study measuring the number of words spoken by male and female (high school?) students in the classroom, and it turns out that not only did the boys speak more, but in those rare instances both genders spoke equally, both girls and boys reported that they believed the girls were speaking more, whereas when the boys were speaking more, both genders felt they were given equal airtime.
    If these results hold in other contexts (and I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were studies in other settings to back this up), it would seem that the basis for this stereotype lies less in actual speech behaviour, but in our (unconscious) attitudes towards male and female speech.

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