Nearly 150 people started new jobs, and for the next ten months, researchers watched exactly how their friendships took shape. The result, published in the journal Social Networks and detailed in a Durham University-led study, complicates a claim you’ve probably heard a hundred times: that men and women just “connect differently” at work. The data is more specific than that, and more useful, because it shows two distinct architectures of friendship being built side by side in the same offices, under the same conditions, from the very first week on the job.
A web versus a line
The research team, led by Andrew Parker, a leadership professor at Durham University Business School, worked with colleagues from William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business and Università della Svizzera Italiana. Together they followed almost 150 employees through their first ten months at a new organization, surveying them four separate times about who they considered a workplace friend. A corroborating account of the same research, reported by theprint.in, pins the sample more precisely at 139 young workers, ages 18 to 24, employed at a U.S. national service organization that places young adults in inner-city schools. The researchers tracked how each person’s friendship ties evolved survey to survey using a statistical technique built for exactly this kind of network data.
What emerged were two recognizably different patterns. Women, according to the Durham findings, tended to build close-knit friendship groups through their existing social connections — meeting new friends through friends they already had, and in doing so, growing larger, more interconnected networks. Those “friend of a friend” introductions overwhelmingly ran through other women. Men, by contrast, developed more selective one-to-one friendships and were far less likely to be introduced through a mutual contact. If you pictured the two patterns, women’s networks would look like a web; men’s would look more like a handful of separate lines.
Friendship with a purpose, friendship as a place to belong
The difference wasn’t just structural — it was about what each friendship was doing. Men’s one-on-one bonds were more often tied to personal or professional goals, the Durham researchers found, meaning each relationship tended to do a bit of double duty: companionship plus a strategic foothold in the organization. Women’s networks, denser and more interwoven, looked less oriented toward any single payoff and more oriented toward creating a stable, cushioning structure around the people inside it.
That distinction matters because it echoes something you can find in workplace surveys well beyond this one study. Reporting on the Durham research, the Irish Times notes that close to 30 percent of college-educated American women say they have good friends at work, compared with roughly 20 percent of college-educated men — a gap consistent with women investing more deeply, and more often, in workplace closeness itself rather than in what that closeness might unlock.
The catch inside the closeness
Here is where the study gets uncomfortable, and useful. The same interconnected structure that makes women’s workplace friendships feel richer may also be quietly limiting them. Because friend-of-friend introductions mostly stayed within the same social circle, the researchers suggest that women’s networks may offer fewer bridges to influential contacts and career-enhancing resources sitting outside the group. Men’s narrower, more deliberately placed friendships, meanwhile, were more likely to reach across departments and hierarchies — the kind of scattered, diverse contact list that tends to pay off exactly when you need a favor, a reference, or a heads-up about an opening.
The stakes extend past this one dataset. The same Irish Times coverage points to a 2019 study of a major commercial bank in which close to 40 percent of the gender pay gap could be traced to differences in the social relationships employees had with their managers. Put those two findings side by side and a pattern comes into focus: it isn’t that women build weaker workplace relationships — by several measures, they build warmer and more numerous ones. It’s that the shape of those relationships, tight and mutually reinforcing, doesn’t always extend outward the way a thinner scatter of individually chosen ties does.
What this means for how you build your own network
None of this means you should abandon the friend who introduced you to half the office, or that the only friendships worth having are the calculating kind. The Durham team’s point is subtler: the two patterns aren’t a story of one gender doing friendship “right.” They’re two different tools, each suited to a different job. A dense, trusted circle gives you stability, support, and somewhere to land on a hard day — the kind of workplace closeness that, by the numbers, women report more often. A scattered set of individually chosen ties gives you reach — visibility with people who sit nowhere near your usual circle.
The most durable approach, this research suggests, probably borrows from both. Keep the friendships that make the office feel human. But every so often, look at your own map of workplace relationships and ask a plainer question than “who are my friends here?” — ask who, outside your immediate circle, might never hear your name unless you put in the effort to make sure they do.
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