Why men are worse GOSSIPS than us!

GOSSIP is assumed to be a female vice, while we accept that men (so wise, so self-controlled!) have grand important things on their minds, so merely talk about serious facts which are part of their rightful business. But the idea that women gossip more than men is nonsense, as a recent survey demonstrated.

Researchers in Israel interviewed 2,200 people and found that men were just as likely to share tittle-tattle — unimportant personal stories and details — in the office as women. But I didn’t need a survey to tell me that men are prolific gossips.

Just a couple of things I’ve had whispered in my ear by male friends — although of course a good gossip never names names: ‘He fell asleep on the luggage rack, woke up at Swindon in a locked train and got caught trying to raid the buffet.’

And in rather more gleeful vein: ‘His ex-wife said she would cut the crotches out of all his trousers but accidentally picked up a pair of her own jeans first!’

But the Ariel University research also claimed men were ‘bitchier’ than women. Females generally spoke more supportively, ‘encoding more positivity’ in their anecdotes, while men tried to run down their rivals.

I have to say I’m not sure about that. I happen to know men who have used gossip for positive purposes — such as the friend who slyly put a bit of lucrative work someone’s way just because he had heard, informally and secretly, about that man’s child having an expensive health problem.

In my experience, meanwhile, women are brilliant at sticking verbal hatpins in one another while pretending to ‘encode positivity’.

You know the sort of thing: ‘She’s never found it easy to refuse a biscuit, poor love, it’s genetic really . . .’ or ‘ With a mother like that, running around with all those glamorous stepfathers, it can’t be easy for her staying with one man.’

The toxic mean-girl phase — schoolgirl malice — is one most women grow out of, but it does endure into adult life for some — and the more unhappy they are, the nastier they get.

I suspect a lot of female malice in the past was born of a sense of helplessness, of being under the thumb of husbands and male bosses and needing to assert some kind of superiority, even if it was just over the woman next door.

That, I sense, is fading as we step into more assertive roles in life: the idea of ‘ sisterhood’ is gradually getting stronger.

But nobody talks about whether men are ‘ brotherly’ enough. And in my experience, while men can be vile, their gossip can feel less barbed, less personal and defensive.

My impression is that they tend to relish the story for its own sake, especially if it’s pretty disgraceful. ‘ So he got out through the window but his foot got jammed behind a drainpipe, and when he kicked his trainer off it set off the guard dog next door. And he’d left his phone on the girl’s bedside table, so . . .’

I’m sure some men, as the Israeli researchers say, use gossip to brief against rivals.

But often they just enjoy telling a sort of epic tale, like Vikings in the great hall or medieval ballad- singers, and seem quite grateful to the friend who disgraced himself: ‘So he assumed she was a strippergram, because he’d been warned, and actually she was from HR . . .’ THE difference in men’s and women’s gossip is the difference between the truly angry swipe by Kim Cattrall at Sarah Jessica Parker recently — via Twitter, Cattrall publicly branded her Sex And The City co-star a hypocrite for sending condolences after her brother’s death — and the rollicking insults of Keith Richards about Mick Jagger, the latest spat coming last month when Richards said perhaps it was time for Jagger, now 74, to stop having children.

One study of 5,000 people found men’s gossip took up an average of 76 minutes a day, whereas women only chatted for 52. But they discussed somewhat different topics.

Men’s favourite subjects were what their friends had got up to when they were drunk, what had become of old schoolfriends, and which woman at work was most attractive.

Women were equally keen to update each other on everyone’s love lives — and who had put on weight, as well as complaining about other women.