Differences in communication styles between the sexes

I've been thinking about this recently, the way that there are differences between the sexes in communication style. I've noticed as a general rule and of course there are exceptions, but that for the majority of people it holds true is that men generally communicate directly and women communicate indirectly. Men seem to impart the information that's relevant to the discussion at hand, they will then have a discussion about the information. Women will impart information that isn't relevant, sort of like filler around the edges and then drip feed in the actual relevant information during the discussion, so that you don't have all the information until a long way through the conversation and to get to the information you have to filter though a lot of junk data.

I'll use an example, but there are thousands of examples that could be used. I went to see my mum on the way home from work last night, cooked her dinner, had a conversation about various things, at one point I asked her what time were we all meeting (family) on Saturday for a family members birthday. She then proceeded to talk for about 20 minutes telling me about irrelevant people I don't know doing things which changed times etc. After 20 minutes I was still none the wiser to the time we were meeting so I said "So what time are we actually meeting on Saturday?", On Friday I phoned a friend to ask what time we were going to meet in the pub, his reply was "Half six". In both instance the only piece of information requested and the only piece of information relevant was the time, yet one took 20 minutes and had to be prompted to actually answer the question, where as the other just answered the question.

Now I'm using those two instances as examples, but as a general rule that kind of behaviour seems to hold true across life, whether it's with friends, family or in a work environment. I suspect that there's an element of my ASD contributing here because it makes me less tolerant of waffle and I like information and precision, not noise and vagueness. 

I was thinking what are other people's perceptions?