What Are You Talking About?
The Difference in How We Talk
We’ve just learned that women hear and process what they hear better than men do. But the ease with which women understand language extends to producing it as well. Women find verbal communication easier and have richer vocabularies than men. The vast majority of studies show that women outperform men in language tasks and produce speech more easily and fluently. To put it simply, we’re better talkers.
This love of conversation and our ability to use it to strengthen relationships, is one of the great joys of female friendship. My friends don’t make points; they tell stories and the ease with which we share conversation makes dinner or a drink together very enjoyable indeed. In the hands of women, a simple piece of parenting advice can turn into an extended and hilarious riff, while a report on office politics can make a corporate boardroom seem as shadowy intrigue-filled as the court at Versailles.
Men, on the other hand, stick to the facts and often groan or roll their eyes when their wives launch into a long anecdote. One husband I know actually mutters. “Here we go with another story!” as his wife begins one of her tales — no matter how amazing it seems to me.
Men classify the sort of talk that women are so good at as gossip, which connotes frivolity at best and malice at worst. This trivialization may comfort men when they are the targets of our municate. In fact, the stories women tell are an important way for vantage, because it helps us to plota safe and successful course through our lives—including the male-dominated workplace—just as it did when we were protecting our offspring from predators roaming the plains.
As much as I love the way my female friends talk, I’m also a fan of the way men handle spoken information. Unlike most women, they speak with terrific efficiency. I like my questions answered succinctly and directly, and when it’s appropriate, I enjoy using that economy of expression myself. My poor secretary, who loves to repeat every detail of a message, finds this distressing and worries that I’ve missed something if I don’t listen to every detail of what she has to tell me. When I’m really rushed, I interrupt her, which she ignores, simply increasing the volume until she’s finished. I’ve learned to simply hear her out!
Of course, there are men who love a good gossip and women who don’t, and I have certainly known men whose verbal facility was extraordinary. But either way, there is room for improvement in the way men and women talk to one another. Both parties have a great deal to gain form examining the differences in the way the two sexes talk, and in adapting the best that both have to offer. We can learn from one another, and in this particular area, we must.
Marianne J. Legato, MD, Ph. D. (hon. c.), FACP is an internationally renowned academic, physician, author, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of gender-specific medicine. She is a Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Legato is also the Director of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, which she founded in 2006 as a continuation of her work with The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University. She received an honorary PhD from the University of Panama in 2015 for her work on the differences between men and women.
At its core, gender-specific medicine is the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. Dr. Legato’s discoveries and those of her colleagues have led to a personalization of medicine that assists doctors worldwide in understanding the difference in normal function of men and women and in their sex-specific experiences of the same diseases.
She began her work in gender-specific medicine by authoring the first book on women and heart disease, The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Coronary Artery Disease, which won the Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association in 1992. Because of this research, the cardiovascular community began to include women in clinical trials affirming the fact that the risk factors, symptoms, and treatment of the same disease can be significantly different between the sexes. Convinced that the sex-specific differences in coronary artery disease were not unique, Dr. Legato began a wide-ranging survey of all medical specialties and in 2004, published the first textbook on gender-specific medicine, The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine. The second edition appeared in 2010 and the third edition, dedicated to explaining how gender impacts biomedical investigation in the genomic era, won the PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine from the Association of American Publishers in 2018. A fourth edition is forthcoming.
She also founded the first scientific journals publishing new studies in the field, The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine, and a newer version, Gender Medicine, both listed in the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine. She has founded a third peer-reviewed, open access journal, Gender and the Genome, which focuses on the impact of biological sex on technology and its effects on human life.
Dr. Legato is the author of multiple works, including: What Women Need to Know (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Eve’s Rib (Harmony Books, 2002), Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (Rodale, 2005), Why Men Die First (Palgrave, 2008), The International Society for Gender Medicine: History and Highlights (Academic Press, 2017), and most recently, The Plasticity of Sex (Academic Press, 2020). Her books have been translated into 28 languages to date.
As an internationally respected authority on gender medicine, Dr. Legato has chaired symposia and made keynote addresses to world congresses in gender-specific medicine in Berlin, Israel, Italy, Japan, Panama, South Korea, Stockholm, and Vienna. In collaboration with the Menarini Foundation, she is co-chairing a symposium on epigenetics, Sex, Gender and Epigenetics: From Molecule to Bedside, to be held in Spring 2021 in Italy. She maintains one of the only gender-specific private practice in New York City, and she has earned recognition as one of the “Top Doctors in New York.”
