Do Women Talk More Than Men?

Researchers equiped male and female college students with a small device that secretly recorded sounds for a random 30 seconds during each 12.5 minute period over 2 days. By counting the words each subject spoke while being recorded, the researchers were able to estimate how many words each subject spoke per day.

talking = read.csv("http://people.hsc.edu/faculty-staff/blins/classes/spring18/math222/examples/talking.csv")
men = subset(talking,Sex=="M")$Words
women = subset(talking,Sex=="F")$Words

In this sample there were 20 men and 27 women. Here is a side-by-side boxplot showing the differences between the two groups.

boxplot(men,women,names = c("Men","Women"),horizontal = T,col='gray',xlab="# Words per Day")

To do a two-sample t-test in R is simple:

t.test(men,women)

## 
##  Welch Two Sample t-test
## 
## data:  men and women
## t = -1.2616, df = 41.309, p-value = 0.2142
## alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
## 95 percent confidence interval:
##  -8107.007  1871.889
## sample estimates:
## mean of x mean of y 
##  12866.70  15984.26