Men are bigger liars than women
I don’t mean that men tell more lies, or are better at lying. But men and women lie about different things.
When men lie, it’s often to look bigger – taller, richer, more powerful and more sexually attractive. In both personal ads and in face-to-face conversations, men tend to “inflate” the numbers by saying they make more money than they do, are taller than they are and have had more sexual partners than is factual.
Women, by contrast, tend to use lies to minimize – they pretend they are younger, weigh less, and have had fewer sexual partners.
In the workplace both males and females fib, flatter, fabricate, prevaricate, equivocate, embellish, “take liberties with,” “bend,” or “stretch” the truth. They boast, conceal, falsify, omit, spread gossip, misinform, or cover-up embarrassing (perhaps even unethical) acts. They lie in order to avoid accepting responsibility, to build status and power, to “protect” others from hearing a negative truth, to preserve a sense of autonomy, to keep their jobs, to get out of unwanted work, to get on the good side of the boss, to be perceived as “team players” when their main interest is self-interest. They lie because they’re under pressure to perform and because (as one co-worker observed about his teammates) “they lack the guts to tell the boss that what is being asked isn’t doable.”