The Myth of Mars and Venus

One linguist, Deborah Cameron (2009), interprets Hyde’s (2005) findings as meaning that women and men, in truth, have more in common than pop psychologists’ books might have us believe. She writes to a popular audience and tries to convince laypeople that “evolutionary biology” is mere conjecture, and that writers like Tannen (1991) and Brizendine (2006), who emphasize the differences, are doing more harm than good. However, Cameron (2009) relies heavily on James & Drakich’s (1993) findings on amount of talk and on Hyde’s (2005) finding that the overall effect of gender on differences in communication is small. While Cameron is not fabricating numbers ala Brizendine (2006), she conveniently ignores all of Leaper’s studies that found significant differences in male and female styles of speech.

With the publication of Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus (2009) as a popular/linguistic rival to Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand (1991), two camps were created. They use different sets of data to justify different conclusions about gender’s effect on amount of talk. Only time will tell which school of thought will fade into history and which will prove lasting, or if, like Universal Grammar, one camp digs in, establishes its own universities, and refuses to listen to others in the field.