The set-up

Talkative women; silent men. The stereotypes permeate our culture. Think of the flighty wives and cranky husbands in Jane Austen. Think, too, of those Coronation Street couples - the Ogdens, the Duckworths - in which the woman is forever chattering while the man is buried in the racing form.

Now the stereotypes have been given scientific substance, of a sort, by a bestselling book in the US, The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco. In her book, Brizendine claims that men and women are different because their brains function differently, and one of the most interesting examples she comes up with is that women talk more - 20,000 words a day compared with 7,000 for the average man - and they talk twice as fast. No wonder Stan Ogden and Jack Duckworth preferred to concentrate on the 3.30 from Uttoxeter: even if they'd had anything to say, they couldn't have got a word in.

Brizendine's thesis is attractive. It fits in with our perception that women are more emotionally literate than men and happier to talk about their feelings; that men are more bottled up emotionally. We know it to be true. Brizendine has done us a service by explaining the neuroscience that underpins all this. Or has she?

The book has not been well received by some of her fellow scientists. The joint reviewers in the scientific magazine Nature declared: "Despite the author's extensive academic credentials, The Female Brain disappointingly fails to meet even the most basic standards of scientific accuracy and balance ... The text is rife with 'facts' that do not exist in the supporting references."

Mark Liberman, professor of phonetics at the University of Pennsylvania, has turned the demolition of the women-talk-threetimes-as-much-as-men fact into a personal crusade. The 20,000 v 7,000 numbers that appear on the book jacket, he says, "have been cited in reviews all over the world, from the New York Times to the Mumbai Mirror". They are rapidly hardening into fact, but where do they come from?

Brizendine's book runs to 280 pages, of which almost a third are notes. Liberman was sure he would find "a reliable source for this statistic" among this battery of supporting data. Instead, according to a piece he wrote in the Boston Globe, all he found was an apparent attribution to a self-help book - Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure by Allan Pease and Alan Garner. He was not impressed.

In the end, he concluded that the figures were probably based on guesswork, likening the "fact" that women talk more than men to the often stated "fact" that the Inuit have 17 words for snow. Both, he said, were myths. The Inuit actually have only one word for snow; and research shows only minute differences between the amount that men and women talk. "Whatever the average female v male difference turns out to be," he concluded, "it will be small compared to the variation among women and among men; and there will also be big differences, for any given individual, from one social setting to another."

I ring Liberman and ask him whether Brizendine has published a counterblast. Nothing directly from the author, he says, though the publisher, Morgan Road, produced a clarification saying that the endnotes were there as further reading, not as a set of academic sources. Liberman, however, is sticking by his criticism. The notion that women talk more than men is, he insists, an urban myth - one of many that "arose in the genre of pop psychology or selfhelp books".

"Urban legends come about because they concern things that resonate with people's experiences in some way," he says. "They are factually untrue but mythically resonant. Often they express in a very exaggerated and pointed way some sort of general feeling people have." There may also, he thinks, be an element of misogyny in the belief that women talk more - "always gab, gab, gab".

Liberman, though he may not know it yet, appears to have won his linguistic battle. When I reach Brizendine, just as she is crossing the Golden Gate bridge, she tells me that she has accepted the criticism of the numbers quoted in the book - on both volume of words and rate of speech - and will be deleting them from future editions. Nor will they appear in the UK edition, to be published by Bantam in April. "I understand Mark Liberman's point and I am grateful to him," she says. "He felt I was passing on data that was not nailed down, and thus perpetuating a myth, so it will be taken out in future editions." She admits language is not her specialism, and she had been reliant on the advice of others.

But she stands by her point that women do speak much more in certain contexts. "Women speak a lot more in areas of social comfort," she says. In other words, in the home and in domestic relationships, it is women who will do most of the talking. Coronation Street's scriptwriters are spot on. Men will hold forth in other forums. She says it is always male students who ask the first questions at her lectures, and says that men will talk so much during courtship that women will barely get a word in.

She thinks she has been attacked in part because she has dared to write a populist book, but also because "it's very politically incorrect to say that there are any gender differences ".

The degree to which this biological and linguistic battle is also a cultural and political one is striking. Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch professor of language and communication at Oxford University, is sceptical about the claim that men and women are inherently different in the way they use language, and thinks such arguments find a receptive audience because people are scared of the growing similarities between the sexes.

"People want to believe there are clear-cut differences between men and women," she says, "because they are men and women. They don't want to think about the similarities, which outweigh the differences. The other thing they don't want to think about - which for a linguist like me is the most interesting thing - is the extent of variation within each gender group, which statistically is as great, or greater than, the variation between the two. Women are as different from each other as they are from men, and gender is about those differences, too. The way you think about yourself as a woman is not only about comparing yourself to the available men; it's about thinking about the kinds of women you are not."

Cameron is working on her own book, The Myth of Mars and Venus, to be published by Oxford University Press next autumn. In Cameron's view, it is not biological differences that determine linguistic differences but social conditioning. She laughs at evolutionary psychologists who argue that men talk less because they were the "hunters" who had to stand for hours without making a sound, waiting to spear a bison, while the female "gatherers" happily chatted as they plucked berries off bushes. There is little evidence, she argues, and what there is suggests hunting was relatively rare, and gathering was the responsibility of both sexes. The evolutionary argument is neat - but "bullshit".

Cameron, who does not beat about the academic bush, is very keen on the word bullshit. Take self-help books, the source of the myth that women talk more than men. "I've been watching the growth of this bullshit for some considerable time," she says. "There's even a self-help book called If Men Could Talk. When I first saw it in a bookshop, I thought this has to be a joke. It's so patronising to men. I'd like to write a spoof one, and see how seriously people take it - Why Men Eat Turnips and Women Can't Wink."

Cameron says recent studies have shown only minor differences in the amount men and women talk. According to an analysis published last year by Janet Hyde that brought together a large number of surveys, women were 0.11% more talkative than men - "statistician-speak for a gnat's fart", according to Cameron. "The myth that women talk better has only got around recently," she says. "It's like our consolation prize. We're not very good at anything that actually counts, but we can certainly talk. "

"There's no single, clear-cut, context-free, one-size-fits-all generalisation about who talks more," Cameron concludes. "It really depends what they're doing, and what their roles and relationships are. Somebody who lives on their own and is very socially isolated would hardly say anything. But a City trader, say, will probably have a very high output of words." Context, context, context.

Happily, Cameron does not dismiss as "bullshit" G2's plans to test the theory by wiring up a man and a woman - Tim Dowling and Hannah Pool - for a day. She even says it "has the potential to be quite interesting", though she cautions that the findings will be far from representative. This is one man and one woman sampled on one, not necessarily, typical day. Moreover, our man admits that he is naturally reserved, while our woman is noted for her effervescence and says she always feels the need to act as a facilitator in conversations. They might almost have been chosen to act out the urban myth of taciturn man and talkative woman. Now we will find out if they do.

These are heavily edited extracts from Hannah Pool's transcripts

Yeah. La la la ... Here I am now in my kitchen just doing a test. Good morning.

Have you seen my glasses? See you later.

Oh God, I do remember, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do remember, I totally remember, yeah, yeah, yeah. (Laughs.) Right. Hang on a second Jen, sorry ... I'm just getting my breakfast ... (Laughs.) I should also warn you that I'm being taped as we speak. Yeah, I'm miked up all day, for this bloody ... for this story. Hello. I'll walk outside. Any better?

Well, I mean what I was going to say actually, if I can do Saturday, is, is, um, have you been to Broadway market yet? It's absolutely lovely. It's just really chilled.

So she's the sister of the guy that's going to be the first black president of the United States of America.

I bought a pair of shoes, um, and I said, "I don't need the box, I don't need all the stuff," and, and then they said, they said, "Well if you don't take the box, you can't bring it back."

Instead of, instead of being in Brighton, everyone'll live in Lille. (Laughs.)

Do Russian gangsters get the 63?

I don't really, I don't think he's hot, no. No. Did you see, um, I'm A Celeb?

But you forget. I'm not good in the countryside.

No they're not very happy with me. Yeah. No, no, really. Deeply unhappy about the whole thing. That was just before I got kicked out.

Yeah. Yeah that's fine. Sushi? You want quick don't you? Canteen's fine. I'd rather go over the road.

Oh, are you talking to me? Hi. Can I get, um, the, some lettuce and the Greek salad please? And I can get the, can I get the um ... the bean sprouts as well? Yeah. I get two things. I get accused of being really talkative, and, and also talking too quickly. Yeah. But then, Sam was saying it about me. And then Patrick said a really nice thing ... that I was a communicator. He says that I involved people in conversation, I don't just rant. That was quite sweet.

I can do silence, I can do silence a lot.

Well, I just zone out really.

Yeah, yeah, I was telling you from the point of view of somebody who basically spends her money on shoes. So that's slightly different.

I've got you a cake. For no reason. I thought that would be nice.

Do you want some hand cream? Because you always want some hand cream don't you?

Yeah, exactly. I mean poor, poor children and they never see him! [Laughs.] They don't even know their own dad! [Laughs.]

Don't go beating yourself up, it's called the minimum wage for a reason. [Laughs.]

And fifty quid at Christmas? That's nice of you. [Laughs.]

Hey, I've not drunk since Thursday. Yeah. Quite impressive.

Hey, do you know how to cook aubergine? Yeah. But do you know what to do to stop it being bitter?

I do now. You see I do support the Turkish grocers as well ... up the Hackney Turks, man, they're brilliant. So I go there. They get all my wages.

You shouldn't put sugar in the soup.

Brilliant. Aubergine. Aubergine pancakes.

Oh why not? I know, but I was going to go for a drink anyway tomorrow with Mel. [Laughs.] I've had quite a stressful day liberating vegetables.

I think it's sort of mystery, pretend olde worlde mystery. Yeah, exactly. Ah, wake yourself up! It's utterly compulsive gothic adventure story featuring a host of wicked outlandish characters. Exactly.

Say that again? Your cheque book? Yes, I think it's on your - underneath your coffee table in the sitting room. I think it's there. The side nearest to the long sofa.

I've just finished, but I'm going to go for a little drink, um, to try and get some kind of - yeah, I've still got my, this wire thing obviously as well. If you order a pizza can you get me one and I'll have it cold? Could I have what I had last time? Yeah, go on.

I'm only staying for one drink then I'll go home. [Laughs.]

I was going to say Berkshire but I don't really know where I mean! [Laughs.]

Yeah, he is actually really creepy to the point where you look at him and think ...

Right, I think I'm going to go! See you.

I'm still wired up by the way. Kitchen looks nice. Do you mind if I turn the heating down a notch?

Shall we have a quick look at I'm A Celeb?

Hello love. Er, no, I've just put the television on. I'm watching Gordon now. Is it David - David Gest doing his thing isn't it? It's gross.

Wow!

Will you make me that one night, chocolate prawns?

No, it's my dad ringing back. Hello. I know! [Laughs.] Good grief! It's shocking! [Laughs.] Oh, it's very funny though. David Gest. [Laughs.] Yeah, he quite likes him as well.

That's wonderful. God, that's brilliant! I'm really proud. Really proud of you. Yeah, that's brilliant.

That's funny! [Laughs.] That's really good. Right, I'm going to bed. Good night.

I'm going to bed. Good night! Say good night to the tape.

Night. [Laughs.] Thanks. [Laughs.] Night again.

(The tape ends.)

These are heavily edited extracts from Tim Dowling's transcripts

OK. Mmm. That's going to record everything I say for a whole day. So I'm just not going to say anything. It's for the Guardian. Yeah. I'm going to try and say about 700 words.

Mmm. Just going to look out for the newspapers. Because I'm late as it is. I'm meant to be at the Guardian in 20 minutes. The bus is crap.

Morning. Desert Orchid. It's a fucking horse. Do you want the sports? Oh, there's a bit of coffee.

Everything I say is fake. Didn't you know? Shoes. Shoes. Not my shoes, go and put your shoes on. OK, bye family.

I'm here to see Emily Wilson. Second floor. OK thanks. I'm wired for sound, I should tell you.

Could you show me how to work this computer? I haven't got a log-on for anything. I shouldn't really be here. OK, I just hate sitting here like a moron. I could just have a slate and some charcoal if that would help.

Guess what the average age of the panellists on the Iraq Study Group is? Average. There's 10 of them.

74.

No. Does anyone ever say yes to that? Yeah. Oh no. Oh no. Yeah. No.

Oh, I'd love a coffee. White coffee, please.

Do people know what juche is? Do you know what juche is? J. U. C. H. E. Some people might. It's North Korea's official policy of self-reliance. Some people will know.

I went to Middlebury College in Vermont.

Yes, we've met haven't we? Many times. Just let me get my coat.

It's just spattering.

I haven't said much at all today.

Three salads? Two's enough I think. Could I have the one with the bean sprouts. And the chickpea salad, please. The chickpea one. Yeah.

It's quite weird, when their agenda sort of outweighs yours. You know, they say, "three salads". "But I only want two." "No, but our rules say ..." And I thought, well ... if that'll make you happy, that's fine. I guess that's who we're all trying to please here. I didn't say that. I didn't say anything. I just nodded.

You talk to authors and they go, "Oh, I could never change a character name halfway through because it's like their name." You'd do it if your publisher made you do it. I think you can't be very sentimental about, really, otherwise you'd never get anything done.

But I guess the characters ... you have to have, you have to apply some rule of consistency. But it's amazing that you can just, you can actually just make them do things that don't sound like them at all. And then it's fine because you just made them up! From now on, this is a new part of their personality.

I spent a long time parking cars before, yeah. I'd spent three or four years standing outside a restaurant with a little bow tie on, parking cars. Mmm, I was a valet. Valet Tim they called me. We called each other that. Valet Dave. No. No, she wouldn't. She always refused. "I'm a valet now, mum. You have to call me ..."

I couldn't finish my extra salad that I didn't want.

Thank, thank you. When you get a degree from Cambridge, what's the verb for that? Do you take it, do you earn it, do you just get it?

Surely some Oxbridge-educated person will spot my mistake before it goes to print.

It's beautiful. Even my wife will be able to read it.

This is the busiest day I've had in about nine years. Do this, do that, write this.

I answered the phone is how it came about.

We're practically touching noses.

Show a little professionalism. OK.

That's kind of scary.

Bugger.

Apple K?

Cancel?

Well I was just thinking, well I mean maybe if we, uh, cos, I mean if you look at some, taking a survey of lots of different blogs, and they're all sort of laid out in a way that kind of, I guess the object is to put the comment, at the centre of things and then everything else, is like, sort of subordinate to that, and you can read it, I was think, maybe putting, you know sometimes, they put the information about the person, I don't want to do too much, because you don't want to read the same thing over and over again.

This is going to prevent me getting incredibly drunk tonight isn't it?

Hi, it's me, I emailed you something this morning, to print it out, and I forgot to print, can you, when you get that email, can you just email straight back to me, and then I'll pick it up here, and print it out here ... is that OK? I'm almost out of battery on my phone, sorry.

Hello. Oh, you emailed it back to me? What so you just replied, [laughs] OK, that's fine, OK, all right, just trying to what? No I'm trying not to talk, I have to wear this thing until I go to bed, all right then, where, where?

Because the whole of New Zealand is angry with me.

See you later. Take care. Bye.

Hello. How is everyone? Well done. I'm still wired for sound by the way. So yes, don't say anything to me. They said, "Will you be talking to your wife?" I said: "If it's for the good of the piece I will do it."

Let the record show that my wife refused to speak to me.

Let the tape show that she's giving me two V fingers.

Not all night. I'll just do it for a bit. You've not got anything to say to me now, have you? Well then, it doesn't really matter.

Would you like to have 15 minutes' pause?

(The tape ends.)

The results

Hannah said 12,329* words

Tim said 11,279 words

*Hannah accidentally turned off her recorder for two hours, however, so her real total could be 14,000.

The analysis

Our linguist, Dr Jane Sunderland, is far from surprised that the word totals are so close.

What is it like being "wired for sound" for a day so that your every conversation, along with everything muttered under your breath, is recorded? Will you speak naturally, given that you know you are carrying a microphone? And are the results very different if you are a man or a woman?

Hannah Pool and Tim Dowling, both professional writers, were fitted with microphones to wear all day at home, at work and when going out - ordering food in restaurants, while on public transport etc. Unsurprisingly, some of the transcripts of their day's talk make no sense at all. Others, though, do.

Hannah, who at one point on the transcript says she gets told off for being talkative, managed to remain cool, even amused. Tim was rather less so: "You have to think about what you're going to say before you say it," he said at one point, and in the morning told his wife that he planned "to try and say about 700 words". Some people they spoke to were put off by the microphone. Hannah's lunch date cancelled, and Tim's wife complained (when he came back in the evening still miked up): "I can't bear it any longer. Take that thing off ... It's like Big Brother."

More than a little of the day's talk (of both) was about the microphones themselves - having them fitted, getting the batteries and memory cards replaced, wondering whether they were recording or not, what to do when going to the toilet, explaining to people they met that their words might be recorded. And there were numerous variations on "testing, testing, one two three" as well as a lot of playing to the microphone: when Hannah says to a male colleague "somebody whose job it is to do that sort of thing will transcribe it", the colleague responds with: "Hello, that person." But, like all research involving audio-recordings, it is impossible for people to be continually aware that their words are being recorded and much of what was said was clearly uninfluenced by the microphone.

While not trying to be a "representative" woman and man, Hannah and Tim provide a useful reminder that things are complex and, indeed, that similarities (not differences) abound. They both get involved in discussion of their cleaning arrangements. Unsurprisingly, language use (finding the right word, the "drivel" of everyday talk, what it is to be a communicator, the role of silence) also came up as a common, and frequent topic. Tim at one point claims that what people say is "almost completely unnecessary ... but you have to say things to sort of show people that you don't hate them". In the evening he plays Scrabble with his children, with more talk about words. And much of the talk is about work: Tim's article about David Frost, Hannah's foray into direct action that day for the Guardian (finding out what would happen if you do actually remove packaging at the supermarket checkout, as recommended by the environment minister).

Profession may be a more important determiner of talk than gender. And though men are often thought to swear more than women (seen by some as a desirable situation), Tim and Hannah both swear (though neither frequently) - and Hannah is unrestrained when it comes to talking about cystitis and blow jobs (although, interestingly, with both these topics she is quoting someone else's words).

The amount of talk is also comparable. Discourse analysts know that counting words is not as straightforward a task as it might seem: is a hesitation sound such as "er" a word? What about incomplete words? Are contractions such as "can't" one or two words? And the complications start before this. Before you count you have to transcribe, and transcribing talk is not straightforward either: what exactly do you include? How do you punctuate, if at all? What do you do about overlapping speech?

Bearing in mind, then, that the figures will be approximate, the word count for the day was as follows: Tim, 11,279; Hannah, 12,329. And Hannah recorded herself for some two hours less than Tim. Averaging things out, Hannah may have, theoretically, said more like 14,000 words. So, does this make Hannah a "typical" talkative woman? Hardly. First, the difference between these figures (even adjusted for words per hour) is nothing like 7,000 versus 20,000. Second, where were Tim and Hannah and what were they doing? Tim spent the first part of his recording at home, watching television, not talking to his family, and made two 40-minute tube journeys alone. He spent the day in the Guardian offices - which he doesn't usually - surrounded by people he did not know particularly well, and with his head down. (Hannah was also in the office, but she works there every day and is very relaxed in the environment.) Despite this (and despite at one point describing himself as "a man of few words"), Tim produced more than 11,000 words over 14 hours. This may be explained in part by the fact that when in "mixed company" Tim's topics seem to last longer: he, Hannah and a second woman manage to produce 34 speaking turns (a technical term meaning that the conversation consisted of 34 separate contributions) when talking about Tim's writing, and a discussion of a previous job Tim had, valet-parking in New York, lasts even longer.

In contrast to Tim, Hannah was with people most of the day (the exception being shopping in Sainsbury's). When you are with people you usually talk to them. (Incidentally, Hannah's figure suggests that for anyone to produce 20,000 words in a day would be difficult.)

Some topics and conversation types do correspond to gender stereotypes. Tim (unlike Hannah) spends a lot of time on his IT requirements, and Hannah (unlike Tim) talks more about people, and devotes a substantial amount of talk to the topic of food and details of cooking. But this again reminds us of the importance of context: Hannah needs to take home or give away the food she bought during her anti-packaging mission. And Tim is working at an unfamiliar desk with an unfamiliar computer and needs to call in IT help.

Hannah does become involved in a very personal "what should I do?" conversation with another woman, being positioned as confidante, reassurer and dispenser of advice. She responds to "It's difficult 'cause I feel I've strung her along ..." with "But you haven't strung her along" and so on. There is nothing like this in Tim's conversation - although we must remember that this is just one, not necessarily typical day.

Empirical studies of talk between women and men in the 70s and 80s found women producing more well-timed "minimal responses" such as "mm" and "oh", and asking more questions, ie they were doing what one researcher, Pamela Fishman, called the "shitwork" of conversation. And there are suggestions of such tendencies in these transcripts. In one extract, Tim is indeed asked a whole series of information-seeking questions by Hannah and another woman (about his son's school, and working at home). Tim follows up with just a couple of questions of his own. There is, though, no suggestion that the women are performing any sort of social conversational "duty" by asking one question after another: rather, they are genuinely curious about Tim and uninhibited in finding out.

Hannah and Tim's day, like most people's days, has its own special characteristics. Their talk may not provide evidence for differences and similarities in the way women and men use language. But what we can be sure of is that the allegedly "talkative" Hannah did not say 20,000 words, or anything approaching that, whereas Tim clearly talked more than he expected to. Both offer a challenge to the stereotypes of the female chatterbox and the strong, silent man. Dr Jane Sunderland is a senior lecturer in the department of linguistics and English language at Lancaster University.

· Dr Jane Sunderland is a senior lecturer in the department of linguistics and English language at Lancaster University