Boys have bromances; girls have frenemies. Boys “tell it like it is”; girls are “bitchy”. Boys have a group of mates; girls have a coven.

Clearly, we have a poor opinion of female friendships in schools. You might argue that the evidence speaks for itself: girls fall out more often; girls are just more difficult.

But, really, we just misinterpret girls, and that misinterpretation is doing a lot of damage.

First up, there’s little evidence that girls actually fall out more.

“The empirical evidence about whether girls have more conflict than boys is mixed,” reveals Eileen Kennedy-Moore, a clinical psychologist from New Jersey and author of Growing Friendships: a kids’ guide to making and keeping friends.

On top of that, we then misinterpret fallouts when they do happen because we fail to understand the true nature of female friendships. “What we know from research is that girls expect more of their friends than boys do,” says Kennedy-Moore. “Boys expect somebody who can keep the game going, and the girls expect a full mate.”

She describes this “full mate” as someone who will provide emotional support, unwavering loyalty and a full understanding of who you are. And girls tend to want only one such mate: the best friend. It is the hunt for this best friend - and the fallout over girls thinking they have found one - that can cause many of the negative stereotypes about female friendships.

“Children reach this age and begin to feel a lot of jealousy, because they have this idea that they want this best friend all to themselves - so when their best friend has another friend, it feels like a terrible betrayal,” Kennedy-Moore explains.

To a teacher, the endless best friend fallouts may seem to reinforce the bitchy, flaky nature of female friendships compared with the more stable male friendships. What is actually happening is that girls think they’ve found “the one”, and have a natural reaction to that not being reciprocated: feelings of betrayal and abandonment.

It’s not bitchiness or maliciousness that we are witnessing - it is a reaction to deep distress.

We similarly fail to understand gossip, according to Kennedy-Moore. It’s often viewed as the key weapon of mass destruction that girls can wield to decimate or create friendships - but it’s not like that at all.

“When girls are at the age [when this happens most], their empathy isn’t fully developed yet, and they’re experimenting with social power,” she says.

Kennedy-Moore explains that young girls will gossip without fully thinking through the consequences of what they’re saying, and will also be experiencing for the first time that thrill of power when you know something that other people want to know. What’s more, everybody gossips, and acquiring the skills to be able to gossip is a normal part of a child’s development, she says. “Gossip isn’t necessarily mean, and we need it to get along - otherwise you would be clueless,” Kennedy-Moore explains. “There is a study with a pair of girls who had a 15-minute conversation where they mentioned 36 different pieces of gossip about 25 different people.

”[Most of that gossip] was sharing information, entertainment, and only a tiny percentage was actually harmful or unkind.”

A better understanding of gossip and female friendships should lead to better interventions to support female friendships (and more positive views of them). At present, most schools tend to be reactive. Time is short, friendship issues can be niggly, and everyone wants a solution with a nice neat ending. So, when female friendships break down, firefighting tends to be the approach taken by most: “Who did what to whom?” “Why did you do it?” “Let’s all think about this from another perspective.” “Now, I don’t want to see you in my office again …”

What is needed instead is a much more long-term approach, one that is not simply reactive when incidents pop up.

“It can take time and positive intervention from adults to help girls to feel more confident about relaxing into a friendship and also to see the benefits of having a best friend, while maintaining strong friendships with others, too,” says Jessica Deighton, who lectures in child mental health and wellbeing at University College London.

Adults need to model these benefits and how they can be reaped, she explains - and it will take time for this to have an impact.

Take gossip, for example. When it comes to gossip, Kennedy-Moore emphasises that yes, we need to teach young people that their words matter, but trying to quash gossip is futile. Gossip isn’t going to go away, and it’s an important life skill. Rather than pretending that you can go through life without it, we need to help pupils to figure out when it’s OK to use it, and when certain information needs to be kept to yourself.

And Kennedy-Moore adds that we also need to tackle the issue from the other direction: the preoccupation of young girls with what others are saying about them.

“If you spend your life worrying about what others are saying about you, you won’t actually live your life,” she says. This is where resilience, wide groups of friends, self-esteem and just knowing there is someone looking out for you are so important.

Which is why the negative way that female friendships are viewed is so damaging. It robs girls of friends, because instead of helping them to nurture friendships, to believe in friendships and to take pride in friendships, we trash them instead. It’s a vicious circle. The more that we, as teachers, view those friendships as complex, the more complex girls believe them to be, the more they fear or become suspicious of those relationships, and then the harder they are to form. Girls aren’t mean - we are.

This article originally appeared in the 24 July 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Female friendships”