Consider the last youth comedy film you watched. Was there a character who was supposed to be a close friend of the heroine, but in reality meticulously planned to make her split up with her boyfriend, whom she was secretly in love with, or some stupid blond school beauty queen who terrorized her friends, making them feel ugly and uninteresting? I am more than sure that there was. And this, to my mind, reflects one of the most offensive gender prejudices in our society, a belief that girls are always mean to each other.
First of all, meanness, similarly to cruelty, kindness, shyness or generosity, is not gender-adherent, it is just a feature of character, which can be either predetermined genetically or result from the upbringing. It is mainly the responsibility of parents to teach their child what is good and what is bad and what a positive attitude to people means. Moreover, my life experience proves that many negative traits or bad habits, traditionally associated with women, such as excessive talkativeness, nosiness and gossiping, can be equally found in boys and girls. Among my male friends there are a lot of people who enjoy gossiping and sometimes say much more disgusting things than girls do. More than that, if being offended, girls merely say something rude, boys can take actions immediately and a row can turn into a fight.
In my opinion, people must not be judged according to their sex. Men and women are definitely different in terms of physiology, but they are not that different in terms of their feelings and emotions. The only point, which is by the way predetermined by the society, is that women express their feelings openly, whereas men tend to keep them to themselves, thus sometimes producing a better image.