But the truth is, you gossip just as much as women do.

That juicy tidbit is offered by the Social Issues Research Centre, a nonprofit think tank in England that recently interviewed 1,000 people about how they use their cell phones for gossip and how gossip affects their lives.

Many male participants initially denied that they gossip, according to the study, while almost all of the women admitted doing so.

The study found, however, that 33 percent of men indulge in gossip every day or almost every day -- compared with 26 percent of women.

It quoted definitions of gossip as "chatty talk among friends" and "the process of informally communicating value-laden information about members of a social setting."

Other findings:

• Men gossip more often with work colleagues, love partners and female friends; women prefer to dish primarily with female friends and relatives.

• Men gossip about work, politics or other highbrow topics less than 5 percent of the time -- except around women, in which case the proportion devoted to sounding impressive increases to 15 percent to 20 percent.

• Men talk much more

about themselves than do women.

Other studies -- including those at Northeastern University in Boston, the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin -- confirm the idea that gossip is universal.

Gossip isn't all bad, however: To plenty of scholars, it fulfills an important role in daily interactions.

Gossip can unite us, calm us and entertain us. Sometimes, gossip leads us to improved livelihoods ("Did you hear about the new job postings?") or home situations ("I heard your new neighbor does in-home day care").

Gossip can warn us about bad behavior, bad weather or, worse, bad people.

It can even be deadly dull. ("So, that cashier -- you know, the one who likes bright pink lipstick -- well, she's moving into a bigger house with a basement apartment so her mother-

in-law, the one with the bad heart, can move in, but not until she sells her house. . . .")

Mostly, though, this form of banter gives us something we never think we have enough of: power.

"Gossip," said Ken Stewart, a St. Paul, Minn., marriage and family therapist, "is the mutterings of the powerless."

While women historically have drawn the short stick when it comes to power and control, Stewart said men have plenty of insecurities. Gossip is a way to try to regain control.

Gossip wasn't always viewed as naughty. For primitive societies, it was a survival skill used to discredit the reputation of rivals. Later, the Old English term God-sibb literally meant "Next-Sibling," and typically referred to a woman's close female friends during the birth of a child.

Through gossip, people learned about the good works of others that they could try to emulate. Only later did it lose its saintly status and come to mean the chatty talk about an unwitting third party.

"Girl talk," said Jack Levin, with tongue planted in cheek.

The professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University in Boston has been interested in the gender differences of gossip for decades and wrote a book about it in the 1980s. He suspects that "gossip-mongering," as he calls it, became associated with females as a way for men to discredit them.

"Women would stay at home and talk about men. Those men got very nervous. It was a way of belittling them."

But his research also found that men -- from teenage boys talking about girls to middle-aged businessmen trashing sports stars -- gossip plenty.

Yet, if Levin's research and the Social Issues Research Centre study are to be believed, only 5 percent in the research-center study -- and about 33 percent in Levin's work -- is critical or negative, the stuff we can't wait to read about in the checkout lines.

Most of us indulge largely for a less cynical reason: We're genuinely interested in people.