The Myth of Mars and Venus, By Deborah Cameron

In 2006 there was a headline doing the rounds that claimed that women on average uttered 20,000 words a day, while the most that men could manage to muster was a mousey 7,000. In this articulate volume Deborah Cameron, an Oxford professor of Language and Communication, debunks both the statistics and the myth that women are inherently more verbal creatures.

We may like to blame marital tiffs on some interplanetary failure to connect, says Cameron, but the truth is that every decision that a modern couple has to make is now up for debate – from taking out the bins, to childcare. Linguistic gender differences, it seems, can be summarised in a postcard quip: "Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Deal with it."

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