Student blog post: Men more likely to gossip than women – survey

Feed URL: https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/criticalthinking/2017/03/26/student-blog-post-men-more-likely-to-gossip-than-women-survey/feed/?withoutcomments=1

This Daily Mail article discusses the idea that, according to a survey conducted by BMBR Research, men enjoy gossiping more than women. The article supports the headline  by using a number of statistics including one in ten men like to ‘dish the dirt’ about other people compared with 4% of women and 55% of men gossip at work compared to 46% of women.

It is noticeable that these statistics do not make sense when compared with each other. If, as the article claims, 55% of men admit to gossiping at work, then it is likely that more than 10% would have said they enjoying gossiping. This could indicate that those surveyed found the questions confusing with respondents having different perspectives on what it means to gossip and what they consider to be dishing the dirt.  Men may gossip more but they are talking about topics very different from women as explained later in the article. For men, the main topics are old school friends, the sexiest girls at work, promotions etc, whereas the focus on women’s’ gossip is more likely to be family feuds, TV shows, friends etc. To provide greater clarity the survey should have asked more direct questions referencing particular types of gossip and so allow for a direct comparison, for example ‘how often do you talk about you co-workers with friends?’.  The results of this survey are also likely to be unreliable as it is asking about a topic which people may feel ashamed to tell the truth and more pressured to lie.

There are also issues with the research sample with only 1,033 adults across the UK surveyed. This is an odd number and with the ratio of female to male respondents not stated, it can be assumed that either a greater number of males or females were polled thus meaning the percentages shouldn’t be compared. The sample is also too small for the sampling frame making it unrepresentative of the British population, which is 64 million. The fact that only adults across the UK were sampled should be stated in the headline, else it could be assumed from reading the headline alone that this survey is representative of all men and woman globally and of all ages.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-83255/Men-likely-gossip-women–survey.html

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