The gender friendship gap is driven primarily by white men, not a universal difference across groups

For years, researchers have claimed that men’s friendships are shallower and less emotionally supportive than women’s, a pattern called the “gender friendship gap.” But new research challenges how universal that really is. Published in Sex Roles, the study finds that the gap is largely driven by white men specifically, not men as a whole.

Much of the work on the gender friendship gap has relied on predominantly white, middle-class samples, which raises an important question: do these patterns actually apply across different racial and socioeconomic groups?

Researcher Emily C. Fox revisited this assumption by taking an intersectional approach, examining how gender and ethnoracial identity jointly shape friendship experiences. Drawing on prior research suggesting that social context, marginalization, and cultural norms influence how friendships are formed and maintained, the author questioned whether the “gap” reflects a universal gender difference or whether it is concentrated within specific groups.

The study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort, a large, nationally representative U.S. sample tracked over time. Fox focused on respondents who, in 2002, were between 18 and 21 and had identified a best friend who wasn’t a parent, romantic partner, or co-parent. The final sample included 1,765 participants across Black, Latino/a, and white ethnoracial groups.

Participants were asked to think about their best friend and report how close they felt to that person using a 0 to 10 scale. Participants also provided demographic information such as gender and ethnoracial identity, as well as a proxy for socioeconomic background based on the educational attainment of a participant’s residential guardian. The dataset included information about the friend’s characteristics, such as whether they were the same gender or ethnoracial group, how similar they were in age, and how long the friendship had lasted, allowing the researcher to account for similarities between friends that might influence closeness.

The study also looked at how friends actually interacted. Participants reported how often they communicated with their best friend in a typical month, how often they discussed personal relationships or sought advice, used as a measure of emotional support, and how often they talked about education or career decisions, capturing practical support.

Overall, participants reported high levels of closeness with their best friend, suggesting that these relationships were meaningful and emotionally significant. Initial comparisons showed that women reported feeling closer to their best friend than men, and that closeness also varied across ethnoracial groups.

A closer look at these patterns revealed that the differences were not uniform. Black men and Black women reported similar levels of closeness, while Latino men reported somewhat lower closeness than Latina women. The largest gap appeared among white participants, where white men reported noticeably lower closeness than white women.

When communication patterns were factored in, some of these differences shifted. Among Latino participants, differences in how often men and women had emotionally supportive conversations helped explain the closeness gap; once those interaction patterns were accounted for, the difference between Latino men and women was no longer significant.

The friendship gap between white men and white women, however, held up even after accounting for communication frequency and the kinds of conversations they had, pointing to other factors at play.

Looking across groups, a consistent pattern emerged in which emotional support, especially discussing personal relationships and seeking advice, was strongly associated with greater closeness, regardless of ethnoracial identity. At the same time, other influences varied by group.

For example, socioeconomic background showed a small but meaningful association with closeness among white participants, with those from more advantaged backgrounds reporting slightly less closeness. Additionally, friendship similarities, such as sharing the same gender or racial identity, didn’t consistently predict closeness across all groups, suggesting the factors that shape friendship quality depend heavily on social context.

Of note is that this study focused on young adults aged 18 to 21, which may limit generalizability to older populations or different life stages. The dataset also did not include all racial groups in sufficient numbers for analysis, leading to the exclusion of some smaller ethnoracial categories.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the gender friendship gap is not a universal feature of human relationships but instead reflects the specific experiences of white men, underscoring the importance of considering race and social context in psychological research.

The research “Are White Men Missing Out?: Differences in Friendship Closeness by Gender and Ethnoracial Identity” was authored by Emily C. Fox.