What Men and Women Talk About—and How It's Changing

A focus on appearance?

Source: Espressolia/Pixabay

Do men and women really talk about different things—and if so, why? For over a century, researchers have explored whether conversational differences between the sexes reflect innate psychological traits or are shaped by the social roles we occupy. Three key studies explore the topics men and women tend to discuss and trace how they've shifted as gender roles have evolved over time.

A fundamental difference?

In 1922, psychologist Henry Moore reported the results of an experiment seeking to examine the conversational preoccupations of men and women by walking up and down Broadway in New York and jotting down overheard conversational segments.

His interest in what men and women might be talking about was in the service of proving that earlier reports of “mental tests” showing only insignificant differences in the mental capacity of men and women could not possibly be correct.

Breaking down his observations of topics overheard by sex, Moore claimed that women talked about men, home, and clothes 67% of the time. He found men spent about the same amount of time discussing business, money, and amusements.

His conclusion was that the topics of discussion represented the natural predilections of men and women, a result of differences in their fundamental natures. In his words, his findings supported the supposition that there were “ineradicable differences in the original capacities of the two sexes.”

Gender differences: The sequel

In a study published in 1993 in the journal Sex Roles, researcher Katherine Bischoping replicated Moore’s study in an effort to understand the topics involved in more modern conversations involving men and women.

For this more updated version of the study, students at the University of Michigan observed naturally occurring conversations in public locations around campus, likewise coding the topical content of conversational snippets they overheard and noting the observed sex of the speaker.

Had the topics changed since 1922? In the data from the 1990s, women and men discussed work and money roughly the same amount, with those topics taking up almost 40% of women’s conversations, compared to only about 4% in 1922. Similarly, leisure pursuits were the second most popular topic for both sexes.

What hadn’t changed? Bischoping noted that, though the ranking of topics discussed by men and women was much more similar in the 1990 data, women did discuss people and appearance more frequently than men did.

Overall, though, the modern study suggested that men and women’s roles are socially bound, and differences diminished as roles had changed over time. Importantly, the perspective on why topics might differ—it was the result of different sociocultural stereotypes and norms, not innate predispositions—also changed between the studies.

More on the topic of topics

Thirty years after Bischoping’s study, a 2020 study looked at differences by sex in choice of conversation topics (referred to as “domain choices”) across conversations among Wikipedia editors.

Their findings suggested that Wikipedia editor’s conversations did show some self-sorting into gender-typed topics, with women more often contributing to topics that were more stereotypically female (about the arts, for example). This may be driven simply by the fact that those topics are the ones women historically had more expertise in, giving them more confidence in making contributions.

However, the researchers also found that, for women who had more powerful roles, gender differences diminished and sometimes even reversed, especially in regard to women taking part in conversations about more controversial topics.

The take-away

What the research suggests is that conversational style—and conversational topics—are less linked to gender than they are to the typical roles and activities in which men and women take part. The distribution of talk topics may still reflect some gendered preferences, but these are more about what we most often do, not some intrinsic part of who we are.