Endnote 10 – Men are from Judah, Women are from Bethlehem

Barbara Westbrook Eakins and R. Gene Eakins, Sex Differences in Human Communication (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 26. Similar results surfaced in an analysis of question and answer periods at academic conferences. In one study, women gave 40.7 percent of the papers and made up 42 percent of the audience; however, they made only 27.4 percent of the responses following the presentations and took only half as long to phrase their comments (the mean was 23.1 seconds for women and 52.7 seconds for men). See Marjorie Swacker, “Women’s Verbal Behavior at Learned and Professional Conferences,” in Papers in Southwest English IV: Proceedings of the Conference on the Sociology of the Languages of American Women, ed. Betty Lou Dubois and Isabel Crouch (San Antonio: Trinity Univ., 1978), p. 156.