Why friendship among white men is considerably more 'shallow': researcher

Attendees react during the AmericaFest 2024 conference sponsored by conservative group Turning Point in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. December 19, 2024. REUTERS-Cheney Orr

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 from PsyPost suggests this is more a problem with white men than other races.

A study published in Sex Roles finds that the gender friendship gap appears to be more a thing with the same race behind the widening dating and marriage gap in President Donald Trump’s MAGA-haunted America.

Researcher Emily C. Fox addressed the assumption of gender friendship gaps across races with an intersectional approach, examining whether gender and ethnoracial identity is a universal phenomenon concentrated within specific groups.

Using 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.

In addition to asking participants to think about their best friend and report how close they felt to that person on a 0 to 10 scale, respondents also provided demographic information such as gender and ethnoracial identity and socioeconomic background.

Women reported feeling closer to their best friend than men, and that closeness also varied across ethnoracial groups, but a closer look 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,” reports PsyPost. “The largest gap appeared among white participants, where white men reported noticeably lower closeness than white women.”

According to reporting, the “New Right misogyny” that has come to define the modern MAGA movement is driving women from the political enclave. Meanwhile, documentarians and researchers are discovering that many of the biggest architects behind the MAGA men’s movement are alienated not just from the opposite sex but also from their own fathers — a rift that appears to impact them well into adulthood.

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