On a late October morning about 20 students gather in a senior psychology class, laptops and notebooks at the ready, to discuss that enduring question: are women meaner than men?

Sarah Gomes begins by addressing the question of female nastiness, describing “that up-and-down look” that women use to size each other up. This is not a friendly look and most women are familiar with it. Gomes says that when she is on the receiving end she experiences a “hesitancy,” wondering whether this is a person she can trust.

Most of her classmates — one man, the rest women, most in their early 20s — nod knowingly.

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But Gomes then analyzes her reaction to the way women sometimes look at one another. Perhaps the assessment isn’t negative. Perhaps the woman is simply looking at her.

“Is it a stereotype that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?” Gomes asks. “Am I looking for it?”

Popular culture has been so consistent in depicting girls and women as treacherous, disloyal and devious that it has become a defining stereotype — even though there’s a growing body of research suggesting that boys and men practice what is termed “indirect aggression” as much and even more than females.

But others in Gomes’ class have had different experiences. An older female student says that in her work and as a mother she has found women unfailingly supportive.

Jaime Santana, the sole man, says that in his experience the shoe fits: Men can be mean, as in “you suck as a goalie,” but men’s denigrating banter is mostly in good fun: “When men in a group make fun of each other, they may be kind of condescending but they do it in a social bonding sort of way.” From what he’s seen, “women don’t know how to play fight.”

After class in the hallway, some of the women continue talking about the culture of female malice they’ve experienced. They even have a word for the way some girls size each other up — “cut eye” — an expression familiar to them though I’ve never heard it before.

“We avoid making new friendships with women,” says Nilani Sabanayakam. “That’s why we have cliques and we stick with friends we’ve already made.”

“It’s really sad,” says Allyson Opoku. “I didn’t want to say in class that women are meaner, but we’ve been through so many situations. You see stuff on TV and you think it’s far fetched, but then you see it really happens.”

Their professor, psychologist Jennifer Connolly, had a question for them. She is interested in how popular culture affects perception and how scientific evidence often doesn’t have popular uptake. Are girls and women expected to be meaner than boys and men?

“I’m wondering, does the media reflect, is it a mirror — and journalists would say it is — or does it shape behaviour?” she asks.

To some feminist thinkers, this constant harping on women and girls is in itself disturbing.

“It’s the persistence of sexism that women are pitted against each other and pit themselves against each other,” says Colin Johnson, who has taught a class called Mean Girls: Feminism and Female Behavior at Indiana University Bloomington. “It’s a double standard. Men are aggressive. Women are bitches. Somehow women end up bitches no matter what they do.”

The mean-girl phenomenon started around 2002 with a slew of research and the publication of psychology books aimed at a lay audience, among them Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes and Rachel Simmons’ Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. Others focused on how meanness roars on into adulthood: Cheryl Dellasega’s Mean Girls Grown Up, Joan Rosenberg and Erik Holiday’s Mean Girls, Meaner Women — Understanding Why Women Backstab, Betray, and Trash-Talk Each Other and How to Heal and Kelly Valen’s The Twisted Sisterhood. Then mean moved into the workplace, with Mean Girls at Work and, from Australia, Working with Bitches.

(Of course, there has always been a rich literary tradition of mean girls — starting with Cinderella’s mean stepsisters and continuing with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. In that 1988 novel, the narrator says she knows the unspoken rules of boys: “ . . . but with girls, I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder.”)

The first social science research showing that girls practiced a special kind of meanness was reported by the late developmental psychologist Nicki Crick at the University of Minnesota in the mid-1990s. The thinking was this: Girls are supposed to be “nice” — it is just expected — and when things go sideways, rather than clobber somebody they express their anger in underhanded ways.

Crick’s groundbreaking studies made people aware of a range of aggressive behaviour in girls — it wasn’t just something physical that boys did; girls practiced the aforementioned indirect (also known as relational or social) aggression using gossip, exclusion and manipulation.

Crick said that girls are quite capable of aggression — let’s call it meanness — when measured in this way. You don’t see it when you measure only physical aggression.

Aggression and gender

One of the most recent studies on indirect aggression and gender was reported this year by a University of Victoria professor whose research included nearly 6,000 teens from Canada and five EU countries.

It showed that more boys (47 per cent) than girls (32 per cent) reported using indirect aggression against their peers. That’s not what people expected, says Sybille Artz, professor in the School of Child and Youth Care. She calls her study “The end of the mean girl myth.”

She too had noticed that people, “for sensationalist reasons,” liked the idea of vicious or aggressive girls, which carries with it an almost sexual thrill.

“It’s true that there were girls who spread rumours and didn’t invite other girls to their parties, I’m not for a moment saying it isn’t there,” says Artz. “It isn’t just a girl thing.”

There’s a common belief that boys punch each other then shake hands and go on. “That absolutely not the case,” she says. “If we need an example of indirect or relational aggression to hold in front of ourselves while we make up stories about the mean girl we only have to sit in any legislature or parliament.”

University of Arizona psychologist Noel Card and his associates analyzed 107 studies, which included 50,000 children and teens, to find out if, as popularly believed, girls use indirect aggression more than boys.

But they found “no meaningful difference in the amount of indirect aggression used by girls versus boys,” he says. “Too often, small differences in gender get oversimplified into ‘Men are like this and women are like that’. I do worry that oversimplifying these differences can lead to neglecting behaviours that don’t correspond to stereotypes.”

One of those stereotypes is that boys and men don’t respond to bullying and gossip to the extent that girls and women do. But recent research suggests that boys are just as likely to be hurt by slander and shunning.

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“We certainly should not assume that anyone’s — boys’ and girls’ — experience of gossip and exclusion is harmless,” Card says. His new research looks at the effect of meanness on both.

Researchers say if you compound physical aggression with verbal, boys without question are more aggressive than girls.

Several years ago, University of Alberta professor Peter Hurd noticed the jockeying among faculty members that goes on at departmental meetings to get their projects approved. What surprised him was that some faculty were not given all the information that others were. “It involved some exclusion.” A classic element of indirect aggression. But was it typically male or female behaviour, he wondered.

His research paper, published in 2009, looked at male and female university students and the way they used the tools of indirect aggression: malicious humour, exclusion and guilt.

The results showed that men reported “significantly higher” rates of indirect aggression. That’s out of sync with popular perception. “When we see indirect aggression in girls we see it as confirming a world view.”

Cheryl Dellasega, a Penn State University professor, wrote Mean Girls Grown Up. She says frankly that she is dismayed by how her work has been interpreted.

She’d hoped that writing about girls’ aggression would help girls learn healthy ways of expressing anger or conflict. Then she saw the movie Mean Girls and heard people laughing at the way the girls in the film behaved. “Once pop culture gets its teeth into something, it gets a response and you have to be meaner and meaner and keep upping the ante.

Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out, says that girls used to “suffer in silence” in their dealings with other girls. “Then it became this hugely popular thing and the conversation went too far in the frenzy to identify with the problem.” The result is that you end up thinking that all girls are mean, she says.

Popular culture has to be accountable for setting girls up to behave in this way, she adds. Meanness becomes, “this unavoidable behaviour” in girls and part of the “essentialness of being female.”

Rosalind Wiseman, whose Queen Bees and Wannabes inspired the Mean Girls movie, wanted to help girls “navigate their anger and jealousy and sense of anger with their dignity intact.”

When I read her the titles of recently published books about mean women, she said it “breaks my heart a little. It assumes this bedrock of nastiness is the default thing that women do. It misses the entire point of what I was trying to do. It’s not getting it.”

Now Wiseman has turned to boys in a new book, Masterminds and Wingmen. Boys, too, are affected by the mean things that their friends say to them even in a joking way.

“They felt they couldn’t admit it,” she says. “They had to laugh it off and say that it was nothing serious. To admit you were really bothered by something made you incredibly vulnerable to ridicule.”

Boys were eager to speak to her, she says, “to help other boys, because ‘girls get this stuff and boys don’t.’ ”

That perception that the boys are all right is commonly held. “I went to an all girls’ school,” says Krista Bridge, the Toronto writer who was a Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize finalist for her novel The Eliot Girls. It’s set in a private school, where a lonely outsider is manipulated by bullies.

Recalling her own high school experiences, she says, “When we would go to boys’ schools they all seemed to get along so well. From the outside, it looked like an easier dynamic. More artless than the one we had.”

She grew up thinking that girls were meaner in a way that was insidious and therefore more damaging. “That’s what I’ve always had in my head. I’ve never really challenged it.”

Mean motives

The York students who gathered after class to talk about gender and meanness say they were surprised at those research findings that found no gender difference in meanness because it is contrary to their experience.

“I’m fairly shocked,” says Nikita Lobo, “because I’ve never witnessed males using relational forms of aggression. It’s usually more physical.”

Why girls undermine other girls’ troubles and confuses them. “We can’t figure out why,” she says.

“I think it’s a phase that girls go through, where some outgrow it and some unfortunately do not. For those who do outgrow it, we want to understand why other females — who we have never encountered before — dislike us, because personally I’ve never witnessed a guy spreading rumours.”

The young women recall instances where they’ve been excluded and defamed. One describes a jealous girl taking her boyfriend’s cellphone and sending a text saying, “I hate you. Delete my phone number, you stupid bitch.”

These psychology students accept such tales with sad resignation, though they say the cult of mean seems to be abating now that they are at university.

“It is going to get better,” I tell them.

“Is it?” Sarah Gomes replies.