By CAROL SARLER

Last updated at 23:17 29 November 2006

Men, it would appear, have been right all along: when it comes to the motor-mouth stakes, women beat them into a cocked hat.

The average woman clocks up 20,000 spoken words every day, against the paltry male score of 7,000; she speaks more quickly than he does, devotes more of her brainpower to doing so and actually gets a buzz from the sound

of her own voice.

According to one American researcher, Dr Louann Brizendine, the reason for our garrulousness can be found in scientific study. The male hormone

testosterone, she says, shrinks the area of the brain responsible for communication, leaving women with relatively more cells available for it.

Impressive sounding stuff. But with all due respect to Dr Brizendine and her Bunsen burners, I don’t believe a word of it.

For I have been conducting my own lengthy and probing research into the matter - watching I’m A Celebrity . . . every night - and I can vouch for the fact that when the chips are down and all things are absolutely equal, men and women chit-chat exactly the same amount.

The good doctor says it’s science; I say it’s sociology. Tucked away in the jungle, with identical patterns to their days and identical concerns - appetites and fears — you can scarcely put a syllable between David and Jan or Dean and Myleene.

But in the less rarefied social climate of the real world, there is no such even playing field. Traditional male lifestyles do not require perpetual motion of the mouth, be they working with heavy, noisy machinery or in the

hushed halls of commerce, struggling with profit, loss and spreadsheets.

It would be entirely possible for some men to drive to work, sit at a desk, bark a few scant orders, go home, turn on the television and make ‘good night’ the first meaningful phrase of the day.

Traditional women’s lifestyles, by contrast, could not function like that. You cannot raise children in companionable silence, nor skip on a chat with the elderly.

You can’t shop without telling somebody what you want, nor yell at the gas company without parting your lips. And when it comes to work, it is

noticeable that the ‘caring professions’, which demand a deal of soothing talk, have always been dominated by women.

So there we have it. We are programmed to talk more because we must, and because we must, we can’t be blamed. Men can write rude rabbit-rabbit songs about us all they like, it is not our fault.

What is our fault, however - and for this we do only have ourselves to blame - is the growing vogue for making a virtue out of necessity.

Where there used to be at least an awareness that you can have too much of a good thing, where a woman would once scold herself, "Oooh, listen to me, chattering away; I really must get on" - many of today’s women actually take pride in their excesses of verbal dribbling: "We are," they will boast to any who will listen, "so much better than men at communicating."

And I am not sure that there really is that much to be smug about. There is, for a start, a difference between communicating and wittering on.

It is no accident that ‘chatterbox’ is only a term of endearment when applied to children; among grown-ups a conversation is, or should be, a

two-way street.

Instead, contemporary development allows for hours of intrusive speech designed to be of use or benefit only to the person doing the speaking, a progress of selfishness that women abuse much more than men. And it is getting worse.

Listen, for instance, to a man using that most hideously misused tool of our times, the mobile telephone. Yes, he will announce rather too loudly

that he is on the train; however, once he has ascertained that the train will indeed be met at the other end, he’s done.

Now listen, as if you have any choice in the matter, to a woman on the same train. She will add in the crowding at the station, the queue for the loo, the ladder in her tights and, if there’s still time, the livery of the interior of the carriage. For all the world as if the poor sap on the other end either needed or wanted to know.

She may call that communication if she wishes; I call it a damnably ill-mannered hi-jacking of an innocent person’s time and attention. Not to

mention that the rest of us are also forced to listen in.

The modern technology that permits such outrages is reinforced by a similarly modern attachment to the sub-Californian New Age philosophy that

promotes ‘sharing with the group’. For this read dumping your entire life into somebody else’s lap, thus coercing them into providing the ‘therapy’ that would cost you good money anywhere else.

I do not, of course, mind when a friend seeks to talk through his or her problems; I hope I am, as the saying goes, there for them as I know they

are there for me (even if I am always mindful of Graham Norton’s caution that, "A problem shared is . . . gossip!").

I do mind, however, when a total stranger seeks to do likewise; when I am expected to hear, then comment upon the domestic and other emotional

turbulence in the life of a person I do not know and almost certainly would not like if I did.

And the reason I try whenever possible to sit beside a man on a long-haul flight is that, I am sorry to say, it is far, far rarer for a man so to

presume.

The third obvious culprit to blame for the current explosion of needless chatter, especially that concerning what is intimate and should properly stay that way, is the grotesque cult of

everybody-has-their-15-minutes-of-celebrity, as demonstrated so horribly on those Oprah/ Trisha/Jeremy Kyle shows whose audience is, guess what, not only overwhelmingly women, but women who are visibly proud of themselves; proud, again, of their pre-eminence in what they like to think is communication.

It’s not. It’s meaningless, it’s cheap and it’s ghastly. I do not suggest for a moment that we chuck out the baby with the bathwater. The survival of our species has owed much to the facility of the nurturing woman not only to empathise with the troubled young, old or sick

but also to express her understanding in such a way that brings comfort.

Nevertheless, there is a whale of a difference between judicious use of that facility and the babbling of fools tripping over their tongues too

wildly to recognise that speech is precious and that, as such, it deserves respect.

When we say of a man that he is the ‘strong and silent type’ we usually mean it as a compliment. Every now and again it might be wise, if not

womanly, to borrow a quiet leaf from his book.