No woman, no lie

Lying is a universal human behavior, but it is not distributed evenly. Research in psychology and behavioral science suggests that women, on average, lie less often than men. The difference is not absolute - women certainly do lie but it is patterned, shaped by power, expectation, and survival.

I've noticed over the years, inspired by recent events, a common scenario in which a woman lies.
It is usually a symptom of her not feeling secure to be herself. It's stricly a coping mechanism with other people. It's very circumstantial and specific. Not engineered like male lying.

Women who don't value themselves, need to reinvent themselves so the external validation is delivered and that opens the pandora box.

Rather than offended or hurt, we should feel sorry and figure out how to help her feel safe and seen.

In one of the most cited and fascinating studies on deception, Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tracked daily lying habits across gender.
(Not to sound Instagram-fake like, I am dropping a link to the full study below)

Men: She found, lied slightly more frequently than women, but more importantly, they lied differently. Men tended to lie to enhance themselves: exaggerating achievements, overstating confidence, minimizing flaws.

Women: By contrast, more often told what DePaulo called “other-oriented lies” - deceptions designed to protect feelings, avoid conflict, or preserve relationships. In other words, women lied defensively, not expansively.

Lying, it seems, is not gender neutral. It is fluid, bending and shifting according to circumstance, social pressure, and the structures of power that govern men’s and women’s lives differently.

Yes, it is about equality, again.

Here's a must-read for anyone interested in the highest quality of psychology: https://smg.media.mit.edu/library/DePaulo.ManyFacesOfLies.pdf

LYING HAS ITS POLITICS

Nations have been built and destroyed on the back of male dishonesty. Wars, colonial projects, and grand ideological experiments from communism to fascism - required the creation of alternate realities, propped up by endless repetition. Manipulations too, are in the spectrum of lying and deception.

The result is not a politics without lies, but a politics with fewer women.

Of course, there is another layer of irony. Ask men, and many will tell you that women are the more deceptive sex: they hide emotions, feign affection, disguise intentions.

Ask women, and many will reply with equal certainty that men are the liars: they make false promises, inflate achievements, claim loyalty where none exists. Both are right, and both are wrong. The perception depends on perspective.

What would Einstein say?

Einstein’s theory of relativity reminds us that motion looks different depending on where the observer stands. Truth and lies can feel similar. A man who sees a woman conceal her disappointment may call it dishonesty: she experiences it as politeness, even self-protection. Teasing can be perceived deceiving. The one common emotion is someone's "hurt feelings".

A woman who hears a man exaggerate his credentials calls it a lie. Megalomania is in a spectrum of lying too. Although, for an alpha male it is considered ambition, or even strategy. A certain profit is always at the end of this game, but it tends to be short term and less gratifying.

Just as in physics, the phenomenon itself does not change but its meaning, purpose and effect shifts with the frame of reference.

Truth = the quality or state of being true

We are not taught to know what's true or not, we are rather made very early on in life - to lie.

Facts are facts when they are not being filtered by 1682 different sources. The best sources are always the first ones, anything else is just a highly processed data. Just like in the food production chains.

We are required to absorb more information without being developed enough to verify them and critique.

But even in modern democracies, the asymmetry persists. A 2014 meta-analysis of behavioral experiments across Europe and North America showed that women report greater guilt and discomfort after lying than men do.

Neuroscience studies suggest heightened amygdala activation associated with emotional regulation when women tell falsehoods. Whether these findings stem from innate wiring or centuries of social conditioning, the effect is the same: women are less likely to lie when the stakes are high.

This difference carries a political cost. In the public sphere, lies are not only common, they are often rewarded. The ability to distort, manipulate, and spin is central to campaigning, coalition-building, even statecraft.

Leaders from Stalin to Trump have demonstrated that shameless lying can galvanize loyalty, not diminish it. Until we become a part of a Big Beautiful Lie.

A male politician who bends the truth is seen as “tough” or “strategic.”

A female politician who does the same risks being branded as “untrustworthy,” a word that haunts women in public life. From Athena to Hillary Clinton.

The paradox is stark: women are penalized both for lying and for refusing to lie. In political systems where dishonesty is a currency of power, women either opt out or enter the game at a disadvantage.

Let's not forget that women do not have a history of starting wars, almost solely men do.

Lies and deception start and fuel wars, because the truth sets everyone free.

How do we resolve this imbalance?

No woman, no lie means: We women should being truthful to ourselves and others.

Standards have dropped in almost everything and that opened a window for a mass lying and its tolerance.

But we don't have to let it happen to us.

Independent media, strong judiciaries, and fact-checking bodies are not just abstract democratic ideals they are mechanisms that reduce the political advantage of dishonesty.

The more we reward accuracy and punish deceit, the more space women (and truth-telling men) will find in public life.

LYING AS A SELF PROTECTION

At the personal level, recognizing the defensive nature of women’s lies matters too.

When a woman conceals anger, softens her critique, or pretends not to notice an insult, it is usually not an act of manipulation but of survival. These are strategies born from unequal power.

If a woman lie it's usually a symptom of her not feeling secure to be herself.

If we reduce the asymmetries in pay, in representation, in safety the incentive to self-protect through deception diminishes.

“No women, no lie” is not a literal claim. It is a reminder that truth is political, and that those who have historically been denied power often carry within them a different relationship to truth.

To take women seriously in public life is to take truth, or better facts telling seriously as well. Regardless gender.

And in an era of weaponized disinformation, that may be democracy’s last defense.

Cause the only way to kill a lie is to tell the hardest truth.