[Ed.32] Debunking the science behind women and communication —
— when men play Girls Night In, they are just as creative, just as communicative, and just as collaborative. Olea W3, 2024.
Coucou all,
I’m writing this from my aunt’s home in Ashford, my hometown. 🏡📍🇬🇧 I miss Paris already; I feel like my heart resides in France and my head resides in England. C’est compliqué, made even more so by the fact that I met a lovely Frenchman during my trip and kind of (accidentally) fell in love. Ouf. Oups. Anyway.
Back to business. Next week is going to be a big one as I relocate back to Cambridge for the Judge Business School Accelerator, starting on Thursday. 10 weeks of learning how to scale Olea. I’ll be creating content daily via the Instagram and doing daily word challenges on the WhatsApp group. It’s such an amazing opportunity and I feel really excited to be at the heart of such a thriving entrepreneur community.
Selling the games has proven tough post-Christmas, so my priority is pitching Olea Createathon workshops to businesses in Cambridge to get Olea on her feet. These workshops are a winner for team work, specifically communication, collaboration among diverse teams, and strengthening creative competitiveness. If you want me to do one at your company, email me at olivia@oleaeducation.com! Aaaand ze barti.
On ze agenda:
Goals: 15-21 Jan
Olea’s WoW
Men & Girls Night In
Upcoming events
Bisous, bye
Goals: 15-21 Jan
1/ Marketing
Recruiting Olea Ambassadors 2.0. We have had some great MFL students apply. Interview start the next week after next (I’ve got tonsillitis so speaking is painful). I am going to keep Olea Ambassador applications open so brilliant candidates can apply on a rolling basis. If you’re curious, take a look here.
Uploading daily Olea content to our Instagram. This is taking shape and I was able to get some awesome snippets of PJ in action last week. The Cambridge journal will start next week which I’m excited about!
Olea website. Ouf. I had a consultation with a marketing expert last week (hi, Alice 🥳❤️) which was awesome and very helpful. Next week my goal is to update the website and put all Olea Createathons on there too. E-commerce is f*cking difficult but I have a plan and am ready to adapt and iterate.
2/ Sales
Cold calling language schools, international schools, board game cafes, and hostels. Tested & Failed. Hostels don’t have budget. Board game cafés don’t make sense financially. No one got back to me in Paris. Great stuff. Language and international schools are a better shot, but my sales needs work, PJ is a new concept, and it takes stamina to push, push, push. I had 0 success in Paris, so will make a plan for Cambridge and get cracking once I’m settled.
Scoping options for Olea Createathons. I’ll put these on the website next week and chase up my Paris leads which I feel confident about. The workshops are such a great value-add for companies and I am aiming to sell 5 in Q1.
3/ ISMLA Conference
On Sat 27th Jan, I will be attending the ISMLA Conference with Olea in London. There will be hundreds of MFL departments in attendance and I cannot bloody wait! Next week I will prep all the marketing and sales pipeline for this. MFL teachers: let me know if you are going!
4/ Event Partnerships
We have two twin Galentine’s Day events coming up in Paris and Cambridge. I’d like to link these together with partner companies in respective cities. Updates to come.
5/ Settling back into Cambridge
Pace myself. I have a tendency to charge at things at 100mph. With the relocation on Tuesday and the Cambridge JBS accelerator starting on Thursday, I need to pace myself. I have a growing list of all the people I’d like to meet and am particularly keen to speak with companies who could benefit from an Olea Createathon workshop.
Olea’s WoW
WoW: Word of the Week. Thought of that myself, funky eh? We have three hilarious new words to add to the Olea dictionary, with a special thanks to all the brilliant people who attended our Paris events this week!
Men & Girls Night In
It was amazing to see the Girls Night In edition prove particularly popular, and it got me thinking about gender differences in communication. A few years ago, I read “The Female Brain” which I looooved. But then I found out it wasn’t entirely fact-based. You see, people think that women speak more than men, but this is untrue.
Debunking the science behind women and communication.
Women might self-disclose more than men, however research showing that most women speak on average 20,000 words per day, approximately 13,000 more than the average male, is actually FALSE.
I’ve found that when men play the Girls Night In edition of PJ, they are just as creative, just as communicative, and just as collaborative with their word inventions. What Girls Night In does is inform men about all the sh*t we have to deal with on a daily basis - from street harassment to menstrual pain.
New words are invented to articulate these inequalities. What that does is EMPOWER women to take back language and feed into the daily vernacular all of our lived experiences that are socially taboo.
The following excerpt is from a Guardian article on men and women’s communication styles, and seeks to outline that much of what we think we believe about male and female communication styles is actually false.
In 2006, for instance, a popular science book called The Female Brain claimed that women on average utter 20,000 words a day, while men on average utter only 7,000. This was perfect material for soundbite science - it confirmed the popular belief that women are not only the more talkative sex but three times as much - and was reported in newspapers around the world.
One person who found it impossible to believe was Mark Liberman, a professor of phonetics who has worked extensively with recorded speech. His scepticism prompted him to delve into the footnotes of The Female Brain to find out where the author had got her figures. What he found was not an academic citation but a reference to a self-help book. Following the trail into the thickets of popular literature, Liberman came across several competing statistical claims. The figures varied wildly: different authors (and sometimes even the same author in different books) gave average female daily word-counts ranging from 4,000 to 25,000 words. As far as Liberman could tell, all these numbers were plucked from thin air: in no case did anyone cite any actual research to back them up. He concluded that no one had ever done a study counting the words produced by a sample of men and women in the course of a single day. The claims were so variable because they were pure guesswork.
After Liberman pointed this out in a newspaper article, the author of The Female Brain conceded that her claim was not supported by evidence and said it would be deleted from future editions. But the damage was already done: the much-publicised soundbite that women talk three times as much as men will linger in people's memories and get recycled in their conversations, whereas the little-publicised retraction will make no such impression. This is how myths acquire the status of facts.
So men and women might speak the same amount, but the language needs to be more articulate towards what we live on a daily basis.
Think 1984 in reverse.
Upcoming events
Sun 28th Jan @ Fort St George, Cambridge 📍🇬🇧
First Cambridge Language Corner in Cambridge at Fort St George from 7-9pm. All are welcome whether you speak one language or ten. The idea of these is to inspire others to learn your favourite language, and share the language luv. Register here!
Thurs 15th Feb @ La Felicita, Paris 📍🇫🇷
Following the success of last week’s language corner, we’ll be having another in February as I head back to Paris from 15-17 Feb. Register here.
Valentine’s Day Special
Weds 14th Feb 📍🇬🇧 Cambridge
Fri 16th Feb 📍🇫🇷 Paris
Suffice to say I cannot bloody wait for Galentine’s Day. There will be two sister events in both Cambridge in Paris during which participants will get a Girls Night In Private Joke game, as well as dinner. Save the date. Tickets will be available next week so message me to be the first to sign up as these will be first come, first served!
Bisous, bye
How can you help us?
MFL Teachers: Check out our school package deal here. We trialled PJ in a number of schools across the UK in December with enormous success; on our site you’ll be able to see teacher and student testimonials.
Companies: More on the Olea Createathons next week, but if you are interested in a workshop that will inspire and enthuse creativity, intercultural communication and stronger culture within your team, look no further! Olea Createathons centre around a game of PJ with tools to strengthen your creative competitiveness. Reach out to me at olivia@oleaeducation.com to book!
Engage with our Instagram! So Gen Z, I know. But this is the best way to show PJ games in action, send in your invented words, and get people excited about (foreign) languages! Instagram is here.
That’s all from me this week.
Bisous, bye.
❤️, 🫒