Job Discussion Forums

[Alex42]

I was having this discussion in the pub last night. I think women probably are better at languages than men are, based on the evidence that almost all my students (of any age) are female, as are almost all the language teachers.

One girl I asked said she thought women who go abroad are more likely to make the effort to learn the local language in order to get on better with people in the country.

I think it may also have something to do with women�s brains being better at learning languages. It�s generally acknowledged that men are better at science, maths and things that involve learning logical rules and formulas. However, languages only work this way to a certain extent, then there are always irregularities to make things difficult!

Does anyone have any research to confirm/deny this theory? I�ve Googled "women are better at languages" but the results were pretty much just speculation by people like me!

[thelmadatter]

Ive heard such speculative ideas or musings (not developed enough to call "theories") even when I was doing my English Language and Linguistics (essentially applied linguistics) masters. But there hasnt been any research done because that might be politically dangerous. Any idea or theory that even hints that mens and womens brains are different (men better at some things, women better at others) is tricky terrain at best. Remember Larry Summers, the president of Harvard got into hot water when he mused that maybe men are better at sciences than women.

Without any hard evidence, all we have is anecdotal stuff. I would agree that more women learn languages than men but I dont know how much of it is nature or nuture. There have been studies that seem to indicate that women use language a bit differently and more creatively (and seem to be more sensitive to using "correct" language) in everyday life. In almost all the mixed-language marriages and relationships Ive seen, the woman speaks the man's language. But in most of those marriages, it was a soldier married to a foreigner. Usually it is NOT a marriage of equals (financially at least). I (a woman) more often speak Spanish to a guy than vice versa but then I am in Mexico. However, if a guy has decent English we usually wind up speaking half/half and/or Spanglish. A bit more equality in my dealings with men as I have my own job. Add to the list that most of those who reach the pinnacle of L2 use (scholarly work or creative work etc) are usually men.

An overwhelming number of people in my masters program were women, but then women seem to dominate the teaching field in many countries - or at least in Western ones.

[Alex42]

[JZer]

[ls650]

I dunno... My students are evenly split between male and female, and are all between 18 and 24.

I think that at first glance it might appear that the woman students are better, but I think it's really just that the female students tend to be more serious with their studies.
The guys tend to have more of an attitude that "book learning ain't cool" - but they seem to be less reluctant to use their speaking skills.

Overall it balances out, and I don't think either gender has an edge over the other in language skills.

[Alex42]

[jezebel]

That's not true - there has been research done, but people are hesitant to make conclusions about it, and like all research, it can be grossly misinterpreted. Just like Harvard's President Summers, who made a logical and non-discriminatory remark that was misunderstood by people with small brains, of both genders.

Some examples of what scientists have shown to be true:

- In the US, females have a higher average score on verbal components of the SAT test while males have a higher average on the math section. This does not mean that any given female can't score higher than a male on math (or vice versa), but merely that the averages are different between males and females. Is this an acquired difference? Maybe.. but:

- Developmental psychologists have also found that female children tend to start speaking at an earlier age than males, when you compile the numbers from a large group of toddlers. By kindergarten, girls have a larger vocabulary on average than boys do. On the other hand, boys have been widely shown to have better spatial perception skills on average (this is why, no matter what few girls may break the stereotype, it's still more often that you'll see a girl who can't parallel park; or why 90% of the competitors at the World Rubex Cube championship were male).


People are hesitant to acknowledge this difference because it harkens back to an unpleasant social period when women were deemed inferior than men, so suggesting that women aren't as good at math, or even that we are better at linguistics (with the corollary that we are therefore bad at math) tends to anger a lot of people. I don't think that's true at all. If anything, the stereotypical yet oft-observed behaviours of chatty teenage girls, predominantly-female english departments, and even female novelists (who focus more on dialogue and describing emotion, vs males, who focus on action) should be viewed as our gender's strength. If anything, it's because we learn to think in words so early on that we don't need to develop our spatial skills or math skills as much as boys, who perhaps compensate for their linguistic deficiency by becoming good at math.

I'm not trying to ridicule males here either, I just am trying to say that there are biological differences that are true on average (and of course, there are always exceptions), but that a lot of people politicize any scientific findings and attempt to interpret them by their own value systems. Ironically, these are the same people who are holding girls back - by arguing that it's unfair to us to claim that a difference exists, they are implying that this difference is something to be ashamed of. I don't know - there are lots of things about females that are different from males (the size of certain body parts being one key example), and I'm certainly not complaining about that difference! I think we should embrace our (average) differences, rather than trying to ignore them!


**Interestingly - this is exactly why segregated girls' math & science classes do well. Some schools in North America have experimented with this strategy for adolescent girls, placing them in their own class, under the assumption that girls don't want to look smart in front of boys and thus will underperform when boys are in their class. Indeed, the girls do perform better than before (sometimes even better than the boys) - but it's not because they're so overwhelmed by hormones that they can't learn in the presence of pimpled preteen boys (I mean, come on - with bovine estrogen in beef and girls hitting puberty at 8 or 9, I doubt many girls in grade 9 or 10 have that much lust for boys who are physiologically about 4 years behind them in maturity). The reason girls do better in these classes is because the teaching style is usually altered to favour the female style of learning - instead of focusing on rote memorization, or learning a model and then applying it, girl courses teach in a female-friendly manner: encouraging class discussion rather than chalk-and-talk, determining marks more from essays and presentations than right-or-wrong tests, and discussing the sociological implications of things learned in class. It should be no surprise that these teaching methods cater directly to the female-preferred style of learning: through verbal and social communication!

I'm not surprised that there would be more females in your language classes. It was true at the french immersion summer program I went to that was held for university students. The beginner level was close to 50/50 breakdown, but the two more advanced levels were almost totally composed of females. Of course, you'll still see a lot of men taking language classes - partly because there are some men who may have above-average language skills that are equal or better than women, but it's more likely that you'll see men because in many ESL countries, men are predominantly the career-oriented gender, and they tend to learn english to better their career.

It would be interesting to do a poll of various ESL classes. My bet is that women would be more likely to take the class out of personal interest (for something to do, to socialize, in order to understand American movies, etc), whereas men would be more likely to take it for career reasons. Do you find that?

[JZer]

[Alex42]

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Interesting theory; interesting replies.

There may be something to the female vs. male thing, although I'm not quite convinced yet.

In my experience, however, there does seem to be a rather strong correlation between language skills and musical talent, whether that talent lies in the ability to actually read music and play an instrument, or just having 'a good ear' and being naturally able to reproduce the sounds one hears.

I don't mean to veer off-topic; this is just a personal observation I've made over the years.

Show me a quick & talented language learner and I'll show you somebody who can sing on-key!

Is it possible that girls are just more likely to pursue music as a hobby, and/or to be musically inclined, whereas boys are more likely to pursue football, video games and ... um ... girls and that this would account for the apparent strength of girls over boys in second language acquisition?

[valley_girl]

I'm with Kent. I am unconvinced at this point. I've had really fast learners of both genders in my classes (as well as really slow learners of both genders) and I have an equal amount of male and female students. The ability to learn a new language quickly and/or easily appears to be more of an individual trait than a gender-based one. Some people - regardless of sex - are just more linguistically inclined than others. JMO