Whisper it quietly, but a shocking new study has revealed that men gossip as much as women.
And far from behaving like gentlemen, they are more likely than their female counterparts to bitch about workmates.
Researchers quizzed more than 2,200 people about their gossiping habits and found that males and females are equally likely to share tittle-tattle in the office.
But while women tend to talk supportively about colleagues, men try to run rivals down. The researchers suggested that gossip gave women a way to compete in a non-physically threatening manner, while for men it helped build their self-confidence.
The study, carried out by Ariel University in Israel, asked participants to imagine describing a person they had just met to a friend and analysed the responses.
The results, said the report’s joint author Batia Ben-Hador, not only undermined the common view that women were far bigger gossips than men, but also showed that they were nicer too.
The study, published in the Journal of Gender Studies, concluded: ‘Our findings suggest women and men engage in the same amount of gossiping activity, undermining invidious common stereotypes.
The results indicated a statistically significant difference between genders, confirming that women’s gossip is encoded with more positivity than that of men.’
