Taller still

More evidence that, on average, men are taller than women, (late vacation find).

I'm taller than you

These are doors at the Rockville, Maryland location of the restaurant Matchbox. They are facing restroom doors near the bar. The one on the left of this picture is the door to the women's room. The one on the right is door to the men's room. Notice the scatterplot wear pattern of hand placement on each door. Men, generally taller, have worn away the paint on the door higher than that worn by the, generally shorter, women. Accurate measurements of the heights of the center of each wear pattern would give us estimates of height of hand placement on the door, likely to be about shoulder height as customers push on the door. Of course, being restrooms accurate measurements would just be weird! As it is, standing their with a camera was weird enough!

Similar door scatterplots can be found here and even another restroom door here.

Do Women Really Talk More Than Men?

In their article published today in Science, "Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?" Mehl, et al. address what has become a cultural "truth" quantified in the book "The Female Brain" by Brizendine. There it is claimed that women use about 20,000 words a day while a men use about 7,000. But Mehl and colleagues have studied the actual conversations of nearly 400 people over the past 8 years. The histograms above from their online supplement display the findings. Women spoke an average of 16,215 words a day with a standard deviation of 7301 words. Men spoke an average of 15,669 words a day with a standard deviation of 8633 words. A one-sided t-test results in a p-value of 0.2479. Hardly a significant finding. Each group spoke about 16,000 words a day with large individual variation. This illustrates perfectly the quote by novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, "There is more difference within the sexes than between them."