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Do women talk more that men? Well at least that’s what the world tends to believe.

There are many opinions, lots of contradictions and lack of sufficient scientific data adds up more fuel to the debate.

But most likely a solution has arrived from the work of Northeastern professor David Lazer. His work focuses on research involving social network has got a different approach to address this particular question.

With the help of "sociometer", a wearable device roughly that of a size of smartphone, real time social data was accumulated. After analysing the data Lazer’s team found out that the concept of talkative women largely depends on the context.

The report got published in the journal Scientific Reports and it is being counted as one of the first papers where sociometers were used to address this kind of question.

To study this, a group of men and women were provided with sociometers and split into two different social settings for 12 hours. In the first setting, candidates with master's degree were asked to complete an individual project, about which they were free to converse with one another for 12 hours. In the second setting, employees at a call-center in a major U.S. banking firm wore the sociometers during 12 hour lunch breaks with no designated task.

It was then observed that women were only slightly more likely than men to stay in conversations during lunch-break setting, both in long and short-duration talks.

In the academic setting, women were much more likely to prefer long conversations than men. Interestingly, these observations were limited to small groups of talkers. When the groups has six or more participants, it was men who talked the most.

"In the one setting that is more collaborative we see the women choosing to work together, and when you work together you tend to talk more. So it's a very particular scenario that leads to more interactions. The real story here is there's an interplay between the setting and gender which created this difference," Lazer said.

So at the end it’s the context that matters.