UC Santa Barbara

Research on friendship has consistently documented a gender friendship gap: men’s friendships are less close, intimate, supportive, and satisfying than women’s friendships. Explanations of such findings have generally relied on gender essentialist frameworks that erase possible intra-gender variation. Studies rarely account for multiply-constructed identities—notably missing is work that considers how ethno-racial identity impacts men’s friendships. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I investigate how gender and ethno-racial identity affect Black, Hispanic, and white young adults’ reported closeness to their best friend. Regression analyses demonstrate that the gender friendship gap is, in fact, a racialized gender friendship gap. White men report feeling less close to their same-gender best friends than Black men and women, Hispanic men and women, and white women too. These latter groups do not report significantly different levels of same-gender best friendship closeness. Results challenge the long-accepted finding that men’s friendships are universally less close than women’s friendships. In addition, this study demonstrates the importance of quantitative research informed by intersectionality theory and the error in using white research subjects as the unmarked norm.