The facts of life: men & women

The main advantage of being a woman is that you live longer. Life expectancy at birth in the UK is 81.3 for a woman, 76.9 for a man.

The main advantage of being a man is that you earn more. Full-time female employees in the UK earn 17 per cent less than men. Over a lifetime, this works out as a shortfall of some £330,000.

Men and women who go shopping together as a couple can usually do so for 72 minutes before they start to quarrel, a "retail psychologist" has calculated. The man will have had enough by then, whereas the woman will happily shop for another 28 minutes before shopping fatigue sets in.

Not only do women have more shopping stamina: they are also better at it. A recent Californian study found that woman did a much better job than men at locating food items in stores. The authors of the study believe that this difference is a survival from when humans lived in a hunter-gatherer society in which men hunted while women collected plants. This, it seems, made them better at remembering the locations of food stuffs, especially when the food in question was something with high calories.

Research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men, with females talking on average 20,000 words a day and males just 7,000. The findings suggested that women also talk more quickly and devote more brain cells to chatting – while the male brain's capacity for communication is inhibited by testosterone. "Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion," explained Dr Luan Brizendine, the author of the study, "while men have a small country road."

Eighty-four per cent of women say that, when it comes to buying products to help them stay young, money is no object. The average woman spends £483 each year on gyms, creams and treatments.

On average, women start to worry about wrinkles, grey hair and crow's feet at the age of 28.

The Chambers Slang Dictionary lists 1,365 synonyms for "penis" and 1,131 for "vagina".

Seven per cent of British men have lied about the size of their penis in order to tempt someone to sleep with them. Males are three times more likely than women to lie about their "vital statistics", with just 2 per cent of females lying about their bra size.

Men are more likely to remember their first car than who they first kissed, according to a poll conducted earlier this year. Forty per cent of respondents remembered the number plate of their first vehicle (and a quarter had even given it a name). But cars aren't entirely removed from romance in the male mind: over a third of the men in the survey had had sex in their car, and 12 per cent had felt more attractive to the opposite sex after passing their driving test.

Men are more likely to believe in love at first sight than women. The average man claims to have fallen in love 2.9 times, the average woman just 2.2. The most susceptible men are likely to be aged between 41 and 55 and to live in London.

Both men and women tend to distort the truth when it comes to discussing how many lovers they have had. However, while women underestimate the number, men prefer to exaggerate their conquests. Britons on average sleep with 9.55 people in their life; men on average claim 13, and women claim a mere seven.