Friendships, Sex Differences and Similarities

Gender Differences

Children, adolescents, and adults have been asked in many ways what they do with their friends, how they perceive their friends and their friendships, what they give to and receive from their friends and how they feel about their friends and [Page 714]their friendships. A sampling of results from these studies of friendship shows that in childhood girls, compared with boys, have fewer friends but more exclusive, intimate, and expressive relationships with their same-sex friends; girls rate their best friends higher for companionship, help, security, and closeness; both pre-adolescent girls and college women report greater communion with their best friend (i.e., support, nurturance, intimacy, validation, love, loyalty, and companionship); women rate their best friends higher than men rate their best friends on supportiveness, security, concern, and desire to spend free time together; in describing providing help to a same-sex friend, women report spending more time helping; women engage in more intimate self-disclosure to a samesex friend; women report talking to their same-sex friends more about relationships, personal problems, and secrets; women express more affection, verbally and nonverbally, toward their same-sex friends; and women use more supportiveness, openness, and interaction in maintaining their same-sex friendships.

Conversely, boys are somewhat more likely than girls are to describe their same-sex best friend as someone who fulfills instrumental needs, such as competition, status, guidance, favors, and praise for accomplishments; young men are more likely than are women to describe their same-sex closest friend as someone with whom they compete, quarrel, and tease; and men talk more with same-sex friends about sports, hobbies, work, and shared activities. Although some researchers have found that women are more satisfied with their same-sex friends, others have found no sex differences in satisfaction. Even in a sample where women reported more personal self-disclosure and involvement in their interactions with same-sex friends, women and men gave similar ratings for meaning-fulness, pleasantness, and satisfaction.

Although sex differences in same-sex friendships are reliably found, they tend to be small to moderate in size, meaning that being male or female accounts for a relatively modest portion of the overall variance in same-sex friendships. A further caveat is that most data on friendships are collected from self-reports, where participants are asked to describe their relationships with friends, rather than through direct observation, making it probable that what men and women think their friendships should be like, as well as what their friendships really are like, influence participants' responses.

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