Do men really gossip more than women?

 For a long time, gossip has been assumed to be a female character trait (Photo: iStock)

For a long time, gossip has been assumed to be a female character trait. Even in movies, you're likely to see ladies or girls having these secretive chit-chats with one another and you'll rarely see a depiction of guys doing the same thing.

But at some point, we have to really assess the real facts about gossip to understand whether this assumption holds true. In real life we've come across men who actually gossip more than women but does this represent all men? Let's discuss.

First, we should define what gossip is. It can be defined as negative talk about someone or people without their knowledge. It's not based on confirmed facts, but rather a twisted version of events or situations.

To understand what gossip looks like for men versus women, it is fundamental to look at what the experts have to say. A study conducted by the University of California in 2019 carried out among men and women ages 18 to 58 had the participants wear a listening device that recorded their conversations for a couple of days.

At the end of this experiment, the researchers noted pieces of information shared about someone who wasn't present and categorized them as positive, neutral or negative.

The findings were that women gossip more than men in what was categorized as neutral gossip, and in fact, most gossip that people generally participate in is actually neutral rather than negative malicious talk.

Another study done by OnePoll, a global research company also revealed the interesting fact that men gossip for about 76 minutes a day as compared to women at 52 minutes per day. But funny enough, another study done by Western Canadian University found that gossip had a more positive impact on male friendships, but damaged female friendships more.

The main challenge that comes in when looking at these studies is clarifying what people define as gossip. It's considered to be a negative habit because is there really such a thing as positive gossip?

And if we describe it as conversations about someone who isn't present, won't that mean we all gossip? It's not really practical to ensure you only talk about someone when they are around so that's another question that comes up when we assess these conclusions.

But generally, we can say that men gossip more than women. And you will most likely bust them doing it at the office.