It’s official. Men exaggerate their size. Women talk it up too. That was the finding of US researchers who looked into husbands’ and wives’ reports of their salaries and compared them with their actual earnings.

The study from the US census, “Manning up and womaning down”, looked at what it termed “non-traditional couples” — the 22.9 per cent of married couples where the woman earns more than her spouse, according to data from the US Internal Revenue Service. It found that both partners in such couples inflate the husband’s salary and reduce the wife’s when they report.

However, the researchers were especially struck by the finding that a higher-earning woman tends to talk up her husband’s salary even more than he does. It is the financial equivalent of the tall woman ditching her own stilettos, and buying her spouse stacked heels — the Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy of wages, if you will.