Gender differences in male and female friendship formation

¶ … Friend by Any Other Name

Sex matters between friends. No, not in the way you might think -- or the kind of sex that you might think. Sex matters in terms of gender: Male friendship and female friendship really is different from each other. Of course, there are always exceptions to statements as broad as this, and other traits of any individual dyad matters a great deal. Race matters as well as gender, and age, and physical disability, and personality.

But aside from all of these factors there are substantial differences between the ways in which men and women (and before them, boys and girls) conceptualize and practice the art of friendship. These differing definitions of friendship reflect larger social and cultural ideas about gender, a point that will be taken up below in this paper that examines how sex -- that is, gender -- affects friendships.

The basis for this paper is a miniature qualitative study that included semi-structured interviews with two individuals, a man and a woman. Of course, this is a very small sample indeed and if one were conducting quantitative research it would have no validity, both because of its size and because the subjects were not selected randomly.

However, for the purposes of this paper (and setting their answers within the framework provided by previous research on this topic), the answers that they give can be considered to be valid and as a possible stepping-off point for a larger study should that be desired.

Literature Review

While there is a high level of agreement among scholars from different disciplines that male friendship is very different from female friendship in key ways, there is not a lot of agreement about why this should be. The variety of explanations arises in part precisely because the answers are being offered by scholars with different backgrounds. An evolutionary biologist, for example, will no doubt offer a different explanation of why men and women bond differently than will a social psychologist.

To some extent, the different explanations for different types of friendship can be divided into the nature v. nurture divide. Researchers who study non-human primates have tended to focus on how purely biological concerns affect friendships, with cross-sex friendships being common in primate groups in which there is a relatively high potential for violence, especially infanticide. In non-human primate groups where there is a low potential for violence, friendships tend to be single-sex dyads or groups.

In other words, female primates choose male primates for friends when they need to be protected from other males. Absent such threats of physical violence, primates tend to choose friends among their own sex. Rather, female primates tend to choose female friends, leaving males no course but to associate with other males (Moscovice et al., 2010).

But what does this have to do with human friendships, one might ask? Baboons or chimps or marmosets, after all, are not people. True, but researchers agree essentially without exception that the behavior of non-human primates parallels and helps to explain the behavior of humans as well, given that other primates are evolutionarily close to us. And when one watches other primates, it is indeed difficult not to feel a close connection to their behavior, as males and females gather with their same-sex friends to groom each other, share food, wrestle, and inspect potential mates (Hamilton & Busse, 1982).

Other researchers take a middle-ground approach, arguing that the sex-segregation that is common to humans is partly biological, partly cultural and social. For example, Mehta & Strough (2009) argue that sex-segregation in friendship begins in childhood and continues through old age based on a combination of the following factors as each of them intersect with the biological factors of human development:

Individuals' socio-cultural contexts in childhood, adolescence, and early and later adulthood

Behavioral compatibility

Communication styles

Third-party resistance to other-sex relationships

Data from Interviews

The two interview subjects offered answers on how they conceive of friendship, what they want from friends and what they are willing to offer. One thing that is striking right away is that while both the man and the woman are using the same word, the idea of friendship is in fact very different for the two of them. It is a well established finding of linguistics that there can be a great deal of difference in the ways that two different sociolinguistic groups use the same word. This should provide a warning to us that we should not assume that there is a significant degree of overlap between the way in which males and females use the word "friendship." There may be, but there may not be.

Alexander presents a view of friendship that accords with what other researchers have found, which is that his friendship with another male is a casual one, satisfying in its own way but lacking in a great degree of depth:

Both, well I suppose we just sat about sometimes, we also sort of played footie as you do and uh em & #8230; he em, after our GCSE's, we em, he had a villa in er Minorca em so there was a group of us planning to go out so we basically, we sat in er, during lunchtime planning what we were going to do, and we just sort of went to the pub, I mean my mum kicked me out at the age of sixteen and told me to go to the pub with the lads, and it's like 'Er yeah cheers mum' [laughs]. Er so you know we went to the pub every Friday and yeah just general stuff, you know just hanging around, meet up with some girls and stuff.

It is quite easy to imagine a young woman reading the above description of an important male-male friendship and wondering what the whole point of such a friendship would be, given that it seems to contain so little personal content. This is the same friend that Alexander tells the interviewer that he would want to have as the best man at his wedding. It is hard to think of a woman describing her future maid of honor in such a way.

Alexander also describes one of the dynamics that can limit the depth of male friendship, which is the degree of bullying and even brutality that can occur between boys and young men:

Some were ok [laughs], erm I haven't had an easy life with friends, I've always been sort of erm bullied, I know when you erm, some of my friends you know the hard way, erm so there are a few folks like that but I always got on, tried to get on with everyone, erm I can't dislike, erm I fail to dislike people in a way, there's only took, I got taken advantage of, I'm a nice guy, you know does everything for everyone, doesn't say no, and people took advantage of me so, I sort of learnt very rare people that I dislike and that's a very good reason, only if they upset my family or something and that's it, but otherwise I get on well with people in general.

Despite the fact that Alexander does indeed seem to be a nice guy, as he describes himself, he has been subjected to same-sex relationships that are far from rewarding.

The potential for other males to be brutal would tend to make any friendship that does arise between males is likely to remain guarded. Women do not in general trust men to become good friends; it seems that this may well be true of men as well. There is also the dynamic that boys and men may avoid forming closer friendships with each other because of fears of accusations of homophobia, or fears of actual homosexual desire.

The interview with Deborah also suggests that she fits into well-established patterns of gendered friendship. While Alexander (above) describes a long-term friend in very casual terms, Deborah describes a short-term friend in much more intimate terms:

Er I've met a good friend from university, I've not known her long but I class her now as a friend [INT: yeah] kind of thing, we're both mums and we both you know we're on the phone all the time and wherever, whenever, like she'll probably come here and meet me now cos I'm here kind of thing [INT: yeah] and we'll have a cup of coffee together and stuff, and I just met her through starting this degree and [INT: ok] just erm, yeah I think we just had a lot in common and we just sort of stuck together when we first started, even though we never knew each other and I'd never seen her in my life before, but [INT: ok] it was nice.

Deborah identifies so closely with her new friend because she sees the two of them as being essentially the same. They like each other because they are like each other. Alexander, in contrast, describes his friendship more in terms of what he likes to do with friends, rather than any acknowledgement that he and his friends are in fact like each other in terms of anything as personal as character or personality.

Both Alexander and Deborah describe themselves as having good friends who are important to their lives, but they describe these friendship in very different ways. What they do not seem to be aware of is the fact that their approach to friendship reflects not only their own personalities and emotional inner landscapes but much broader cultural concepts of how friendships should be defined and practiced and -- beyond this -- even broader cultural and social ideas about what constitutes proper femininity and masculinity.