Men are louder than women

Well, when I was looking for some elder papers, I found a funny work in the Bell Technical Journal [1]. Basically, they conducted a speech volume measurement on their own network, which includes some interesting conclusions drawn from the measurement data.

They discovered that business calls tend to have a somewhat higher speech volume than social calls:

Speech volumes on business calls average slightly higher than those on social calls, partially because business talkers are predominately men and business calls tend to be over long distances. (…) Over-all, men tend to talk slightly louder then women, and business conversations are louder than social ones.

They also give some statistics on the distribution of speakers:

Approximately 73 per cent of the business calls observed were made by male speakers, whereas females made 81 per cent of the social calls. (…) most of the local telephone calls were made by women.

So is this a sign of old ‘fashion’ (?) gender roles where men are predominately into business and thus earn the money for a living whereas the role of women is (was?) socialising? So men were hunters that provide for food, whereas women do local phone calls to socialise and invite other families to eat the food men were hunting?
Seriously, I’d love to see some more recent statistics, but I don’t think that service providers still analyse calls in that way. Fortunately, the role of women (especially their job opportunities) is changing nowadays, so I would expect different result if the study was conducted in 2007. If you know some related work, please, let me know.

(..) there is an increase in near-end speech volume of approximately 1 dB per 1000 miles. This increase may be caused by increased noise and distortion on longer toll connections or may be psychological.

The last point is quite funny as I know about people who intuitively speak louder when involved in long distance calls, as they thing they have to reach the speaker far away better that way and the quality of the used line is poor in general.

[1] K. Adoo, Spech Volumes on Bell System Message Circuits–1960 Survey. Bell System Technical Journal, 1963.