Mumbai: If you are a woman, your friend’s friend may be more likely to become your friend as well. Men, on the other hand, may be more likely to form selective, one-to-one friendships.
The findings are based on a new study on workplace friendships, in which researchers followed 139 young people during their first 10 months together at a US national service organisation involved in community development.
Titled ‘Gender differences in workplace friendship development: Insights from network dynamics’, the peer-reviewed study was published on 8 July 2026 in Elsevier’s Social Networks journal.
It was authored by Inga Carboni of William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business in the US, Andrew Parker, professor of leadership at Durham University Business School in the UK, and Alessandro Lomi, professor at Università della Svizzera italiana in Switzerland.
The organisation at the centre of the study recruits people between 18 and 24 years old as community workers, largely in inner-city schools. Participants were surveyed four times, allowing the researchers to track how friendships took shape and evolved. They then used a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to analyse changes in friendship ties among the participants.
A friend of my friend is my friend
A key difference that emerged involved what network researchers call “transitivity” — essentially, the likelihood that two people connected by a common friend will go on to form a relationship themselves.
In simple terms, if A is friends with B, and B is friends with C, women were more likely than men to “close the triangle” by forming a friendship between A and C.
When this happens repeatedly, workplace friendships can grow into closer, more interconnected groups. The study found that women were more likely to build strong, cohesive, and non-hierarchical relationships with other women, especially where a mutual connection was already in place.
For men, having a friend in common was less likely, by itself, to result in a new friendship. Their networks were more likely to consist of selective, one-to-one ties, including individual friendships with other men.
A Durham University summary of the study said such relationships were likely when they were perceived as supporting personal or professional goals.
The researchers refer to these patterns as “relational strategies” — approaches to building relationships that people may not necessarily follow consciously. Drawing on gender-role theory and research into how social networks develop, they suggest that social expectations associated with gender can influence how people form relationships and, over time, the networks those relationships produce.
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Close-knit friendships come with a catch
For organisations, women’s tendency to build more interconnected networks can have clear benefits. The researchers say women may serve a “stabilising and integrative” role, forming reciprocal ties and helping bring colleagues together into more cohesive groups.
But the kind of network that offers greater social support is not necessarily the one that provides the greatest individual career advantage.
Who people know at work can influence the information they receive, the resources they can access, the influential people they encounter, and the opportunities that come their way.
The researchers suggest that dense friendship circles among women could offer fewer links to people outside those groups, including more distant contacts. Men’s more selective ties, by comparison, may in some situations be better positioned to yield individual professional benefits or preferential treatment.
The researchers say this could have wider implications for inequality at work, including the gender pay gap. The point is not that men deliberately make friends because they expect a career payoff, but that different ways of forming friendships can, over time, result in very different professional networks.
Not every workplace is the same
There are, however, limits to what can be concluded from the findings. The researchers deliberately studied what they describe as an “exceptional case” — one organisation with relatively little formal hierarchy and ample opportunity for new friendships to develop.
While that setting made it easier to examine friendship formation apart from some of the structures found in a conventional workplace, it also means the findings cannot simply be applied to every workplace.
The paper, therefore, does not suggest that all women naturally form close-knit circles or that all men approach friendships primarily as useful connections.
What it does suggest is that gender can shape the many small choices through which a social network develops — who becomes friends with whom, when a mutual acquaintance becomes a friend, and ultimately, whether individual relationships grow into a tightly connected group.
(Edited by Maryam Hassan)