Why enjoying a little gossip isn’t something to apologize for

Would you be offended if I called you a gossip? Would you assume I'd mischaracterised you as bitchy – or mean? As someone without moral fibre?

If the answer to that is, "Yes! How dare you?", then we have some unpacking to do.

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Gossip has a reputation of being frivolous, steeped in distrustful ridicule, and women have long been shamed for doing it.

Before gossip became synonymous with women's speech, it was genderless. A noun, not a verb. Meant to describe something sacred, like a God-sibling or parent, a baptismal font or a birthing chamber, transforming later to mean someone you could trust beyond measure – your “gossip”. These were often women, commonly midwives. Then, when women congregated in taverns or along riverbanks to discuss their lives amid a strengthening patriarchal system ordained by the Christian God, they were suddenly deemed too loud, too unruly; a group would be derogatorily labelled “gossips”. In short, the word became a pejorative when women became disobedient to narrowly defined modesty, imposed meekness and expected subservience.

Over the course of about 100 years, gossip became a woman's game and fell from grace.

This is partly why being called a gossip can feel like an accusation made against your character. And using “gossip” negatively in this way has an odd power that immediately casts doubt over what women say, dismissing it as baseless and devoid of fact.

It suggests that, ultimately, women who gossip have ill intent; are bitchy, nosy, and have nothing better to do but tear other women down, be they celebrities, colleagues, friends, or family.

But according to research, gossip makes up to 85% of all conversations, regardless of gender. This is because gossip, at its heart, is social speech, and as a social species, we are compelled to tend to our social bonds to settle our nervous system and reaffirm our sense of belonging. It's hardwired into our biology.

Of that 85%, only a small percentage, estimated anywhere between 2-15%, is where you might find the destructive kinds of gossip that give it its bad reputation. So while this small part of gossip's identity is a potent minority, with the power to ruin reputations, spread mistruths and malinformation, it's also true that there is more to gossip than we've been led to believe.

So, what more is there to gossip? And what is it about gossip that makes it feel like an unfeminist thing to do?

To explore why we would ever need to ask these questions in the first place, we must first understand that gossip's characteristics carry gender bias.

When a cisgender man uses social speech – or gossip, we're told it's political, productive and purposeful because of the transactional nature of the conversation. Generally felt to be empty of emotionally charged talk (and therefore not hysterical), or questions that delve into the more intimate realms of people's interconnected relationships, surface-level.

When the same is done by women, whether gender is attributed to them because of presentation or proximity, it's mired by distrust and plagued by questions designed to discredit or undermine the speaker's knowledge and experience. By their gender, and gender alone, they become unbelievable.

This is what I've termed the gender-based credibility gap, and it has everything to do with how women's words have come to occupy a space 'beyond belief'. In the research for my eponymous book, I found that this disbelief was entrenched and tangled with centuries of misogyny; from the dawning of Mesopotamia and the metamorphosis of Lamashtu to Lilith, to today's weaponisation of the legal system's Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) that silence those who seek justice for sexual violence and abuse.

Beneath the surface of this oppressive, determined discreditation, gossip bubbles as a connecting force that reaches across centuries in the form of oral traditions; between generations because of mothers and aunties who kin-keep histories; throughout history to secretly record the worlds of LGBTQIA+ people in Polari and coded letters; memorialised in the digital sphere to whisper words of warnings against predation in Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook groups.

Lest we forget, it is through speaking about our social ills that laws change and movements gather momentum.

We experienced something of this in 2017 when #MeToo went viral across social media; when women talk and share information, affirm their experiences under systematic misogyny, not only can abusers with immense power be toppled, but the cultural backlash is swift and unforgiving.

The result is a coercive sort of silence that dares threateningly for women to come forward to speak up and out to power.

And yet, under all this duress and oppression, women still continue to tend to their bonds, they still talk; to protect, to share information, to remember and to care.

For years, amongst academics, gossip's evolution and persistence were a mystery until new research found that gossiping is proven to give us a survival advantage and is integral to expanding social networks.

So, yes. Gossip can be bitchy and unkind. A pastime to wittle away the hours spent nursing a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with your good girl friends. But we must not forget its full, complex identity.

For this reason, you mustn't despair at being branded a gossip, because gossip is capable of being a feminist force majeure if we do it well.

Katie Baskerville is the author of Beyond Belief: A Defence of Gossip and the Women Who Do It, published on 12 March 2026 by HQ, an imprint of Harper Collins.

Original article appeared on GLAMOUR UK