Guys and dials

For decades, stereotypes reinforced the notion that women spent all their time chatting away via telephone. The same stereotypes suggested that the last phone exchange between men took place the day Alexander Graham Bell called Thomas Watson. But wireless is changing all that: According to a recent Cingular Wireless study, the carrier's male subscribers are 16% more talkative than their distaff counterparts, using their mobile phones an average of 455 minutes per month while women rack up only 391 minutes monthly. It's the fourth consecutive year the study has concluded that men are chattier than women, due in no small part to another Cingular finding that men make twice as many business-related mobile calls while women primarily make personal calls…which is where the study loses me. Guys may claim they're only on the phone for professional purposes, but if so, then we're making a whole lot of important business calls from baseball games and bars. Face it, fellas: We like to talk on the phone. There's no shame in it. Cingular says we also use our camera phones just as much as women, and they play as many wireless games as we do. Gender stereotypes just don't mean anything when it comes to wireless. This all could change dramatically by the time Cingular publishes its 2005 study, however: Much-disputed research issued about the same time as this year's Cingular report suggests that prolonged exposure to mobile phone radiation can slash a man's sperm count by as much as a third. If that won't get guys off the phone, nothing will.