By Eun Kyung Kim, TODAY contributor

Women have a gift for gab, and now they can silence their critics with science.

New research indicates there’s a biological reason why women talk so much more than men: 20,000 words a day spoken by the average woman, according to one study, versus about 7,000 words a day for the average man.

Women’s brains have higher levels of a “language protein” called FOXP2, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“The major finding that we discovered was that this protein FOXP2 is involved in vocalization,” Mike Bowers, who led the study’s team of researchers, told TODAY. “We can’t say that this is the end-all-be-all reasoning. but it is one of the first avenues with which we can start to explore why women tend to be more verbal than men.”