I'm male and I never was part of any political machinations in high school or college. It's definitely not everywhere. Every behaviour obviously exists in every gender, but playing nasty political machinations at an early age is definitely girls' forte and almost never observed with boys.
Your personal anecdote is not conclusive evidence for the statement in the second sentence, and to inappropiately attempt to counter it with my own: I've been a misfit for the the first two decades of my life, and been on the receiving end of "let's pick on the weirdo to establish dominance and decide our own internal pecking order" far too often to accept that nasty political machinations are "almost never observed with boys" - if anything that just shows you haven't really looked.
