The Quick Read
- A 2026 study published in Social Networks found that women in the organisation studied were more likely than men to develop cohesive, non-hierarchical and strong same-gender workplace friendships.
- Researchers followed 139 employees over their first ten months, surveying their developing friendship networks on four occasions. Women were more likely to form new connections through friends of friends, creating more interconnected groups.
- The findings concern different patterns of relationship-building, not one gender being socially “better”. Men in the study tended towards more selective one-to-one ties, particularly where relationships could support individual or professional goals.
- Women’s networks may help organisations by strengthening cohesion and stability. The researchers also warn, however, that close friendship circles do not automatically provide access to influential contacts, resources or career opportunities.
- For women, the opportunity may lie in expanding sisterhood into allyship, sponsorship and broader professional networks, without turning genuine friendships into transactions.
Someone who knows why you went quiet in that meeting
There is the colleague you meet at 9.20 every morning without ever formally arranging it. The one who notices that you have said “I’m fine” in a tone that means precisely the opposite.
She knows which client call went badly, why you are dreading Thursday’s presentation, that your child has an exam this week and that you absolutely should not send the email you have just angrily drafted.
Somewhere between deadlines, tea, Teams messages, whispered post-meeting debriefs and “Are you free for five minutes?”, a colleague has quietly become a friend.
Workplace friendships can look inconsequential beside the serious machinery of business. They are not.
A new study from researchers at William & Mary, Durham University and Università della Svizzera Italiana suggests that women and men may build those relationships differently. In the workplace they studied, women were more likely to develop dense, interconnected and non-hierarchical friendship networks, often through mutual friends. Men tended towards fewer and more selective one-to-one relationships.
That finding is tempting to turn into a contest. Women: 1. Men: 0.
It would also be a rather poor reading of the research.
The much more interesting question is what women’s friendships actually do inside a workplace. Because apparently, quite a lot.
Workplace friendships: Women appear to build circles, not merely pairs
The researchers followed 139 people joining a national service organisation dedicated to community development. They tracked their friendship networks over 10 months rather than simply asking participants once whether they had friends at work.
That longitudinal approach allowed the researchers to see relationships develop. One pattern stood out.
Women were more likely to become friends with the friends of people they already knew. In network science, this creates more tightly connected groups: A knows B, B knows C, and eventually A and C connect too.
You can picture it without knowing any network theory.
One colleague joins you for lunch. Next week she brings another colleague. Somebody adds another woman to the WhatsApp group. Three people who barely spoke at the beginning of the year now know each other’s weekend plans.
Before long, it is a circle.
The study found that women’s friendships also tended to be less hierarchical and more likely to involve other women. The researchers describe these networks as cohesive and potentially important to organisational stability and integration. That deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Workplace culture is frequently discussed as something leadership creates through values statements, offsites and employee-engagement programmes.
Some of it is being created every day at lunch.
Why might women’s workplace friendships look different?
This is where caution helps.
The study does not establish that women are biologically programmed to be friendlier, nor does it suggest that every woman builds broad social circles. At the same time, every man strategically collects useful contacts.
The researchers instead examine how gender norms interact with the way networks develop. Those norms can influence what kinds of relationships people are encouraged to value and how comfortable they feel forming them.
Women have historically been expected to invest more heavily in relationships, emotional awareness and social maintenance. Those expectations can become burdensome when women are automatically cast as the office listener, peacemaker or unofficial culture manager.
But relational skill is still a skill.
Knowing how to bring somebody into a group, maintain trust, connect people who might otherwise remain strangers and make a new employee feel less new has organisational value. We simply do not always account for it that way.
Gallup has spent years studying close workplace relationships and includes “I have a best friend at work” among its core employee-engagement measures. Its research has linked close workplace friendships with engagement, retention, customer outcomes, innovation and productivity. Globally, Gallup says only around three in ten employees strongly agree that they have a best friend at work.
Which makes women’s apparent ability to create cohesive connections more than pleasant office trivia. It can be a workplace asset.
A good friend can make a difficult workplace survivable
Ask women what female friendship at work has meant to them and the answers are unlikely to fit neatly into an HR dashboard. Sometimes it means somebody telling you there is spinach in your teeth before the board meeting. And sometimes it is considerably more consequential.
A trusted colleague can tell a younger woman that the behaviour making her uncomfortable is not something she has imagined.
- She can share salary information.
- Explain the unwritten politics of a team.
- Tell her which manager actually develops people.
- Read the resignation email before it is sent.
- Encourage her to apply for a role she has already decided she is underqualified for.
- Remind her that one poor appraisal is an appraisal, not an identity.
- Make returning from maternity leave feel less like arriving at a company where everybody has carried on without you.
Friendship can provide the sort of informal knowledge that organisations are remarkably bad at putting into induction manuals. It can also soften one of the less discussed experiences of working life: professional loneliness. A woman can attend 12 meetings a day and still feel that nobody at work really knows her.
We have looked closely at how workplace loneliness can affect women’s confidence, careers and ability to do their best work. Friendship cannot solve every source of isolation, but having somebody with whom you can stop performing competence for five minutes is no small thing.
Gallup’s findings support some of that value. Employees who say they have a best friend at work are more likely to be engaged, and Gallup reports links with productivity, innovation and retention.
The watercooler may have been undervalued.
Then the study introduces an awkward twist
Women’s friendship networks may be stronger. They may also be less useful for getting ahead. That is where this research becomes much more than a cheerful story about office besties.
The Durham researchers note that women’s cohesive networks can contribute to organisational stability while still providing fewer routes to influential people, important resources or career-enhancing opportunities. Men’s more selective relationships in the study were more likely to form where the relationship appeared useful to personal or professional goals.
Nobody needs to conclude that women should start choosing friends according to their organisational grade. Please don’t.
But the research touches on an old career problem: A supportive network and an influential network are not necessarily the same network.
- You may have 6 colleagues who will talk you through a terrible day. None may be in the room where your next promotion is being discussed.
- You may have a wonderful group of peers. None may know the head of the division you want to move into.
- You may be surrounded by people who believe in you. None may possess enough institutional power to convert that belief into an opportunity.
Research on professional networks has repeatedly connected access to influential contacts with career outcomes. A 2025 study on social networks and the glass ceiling, for instance, found that gender-biased network formation can leave women with fewer connections that lead to referrals for senior management roles.
So perhaps the issue is not that women’s friendship networks need changing. They may need extending.
Sisterhood works. Now let it travel further
Sisterhood has occasionally been treated as a sentimental idea: women cheer for women, women support women, women lift one another.
Real workplace sisterhood can be considerably more practical. It sounds like:
- “I saw that job. You should apply.”
- “I’ve sent your name to her.”
- “I told the director that was your work.”
- “Here is what I negotiated.”
- “Come with me to this industry event.”
- “You haven’t met our new VP, have you?”
- “I won’t be able to take this assignment. I think you should.”
- “I think you’re being underpaid.”
- “I’ll introduce you.”
That is friendship beginning to acquire reach. And this is where allyship becomes relevant.
Sisterhood becomes professionally potent when support travels beyond the immediate friendship group. A colleague can amplify another woman’s idea, make a useful introduction, nominate her for an opportunity, defend her contribution when she is absent or open a network that had previously been inaccessible.
Our earlier exploration of feminist allyship at work focused precisely on these everyday behaviours: credit, visibility, mentoring and speaking up for another person.
Friendship provides trust. Allyship gives some of that trust movement.
But there is a trap here too: Women cannot network their way out of unequal systems
This story could easily drift into another instruction manual telling women to make more useful friends. That would miss half the research.
If influential positions remain disproportionately occupied by men, any network centred mainly around other women may naturally contain less organisational power, particularly at earlier career stages.
That is a structural problem disguised as networking advice.
The answer cannot be to tell women, “Your friends are lovely.” Please acquire more senior ones. Organisations have work to do.
- They can create meaningful cross-team exposure rather than leaving access to senior colleagues to chance.
- They can formalise sponsorship. They can make stretch assignments visible.
- They can design mentoring networks that cross functions and levels.
- They can ensure informal social practices do not become unofficial gates to opportunity.
- And they can notice who is performing the often invisible labour of keeping teams socially connected.
Companies spend extraordinary amounts trying to manufacture belonging. If employees are already creating it for one another, leaders should at least recognise the value.
At the same time, close networks should not become closed networks. Women benefit from relationships with women who understand their experiences. They also need access to men, senior leaders, people in other functions, clients, customers and networks beyond their immediate workplace circle.
A 2026 study of formal female professional networks found that women’s networking behaviour was associated with subjective career success, while research on professional connections among financial analysts found that women could gain significantly when given access to valuable cross-organisational connections.
The useful network may therefore look less like a replacement for sisterhood and more like another layer around it.
Friendship, mentorship and sponsorship are 3 different things
They can overlap. They should not be confused.
- A friend might believe you deserve a promotion.
- A mentor can help you become ready for it.
- A sponsor can help put your name into the decision.
Women need all 3 at different points in their careers.
Change in Content has previously examined the continuing mentorship gap for women, and the difference becomes particularly important here. Close peer relationships may offer outstanding emotional and practical support, but career mobility often requires connections to people with different experience, information and authority.
Strong friendships should be celebrated for what they are rather than judged for failing to perform every function of a professional network.
Your work best friend does not need to become your career strategist.
But between friendship, mentorship, sponsorship and broader networks, women should have enough social capital to be both supported and seen.
Men are part of this story, just not as the punchline
Gender research has a bad habit of becoming an online scorecard within minutes. This study gives us no reason to do that.
Men in the research built friendships differently. They tended towards more selective one-to-one ties, and some relationships were more closely associated with professional or individual goals.
That does not make men’s friendships colder or women’s friendships nobler.
Different relational patterns can offer different advantages. There may even be something useful for everyone to borrow from both.
Women should not have to lose the richness of cohesive relationships to broaden their networks.
Men may benefit from workplaces where friendship is allowed to be friendship, where relationships do not need a professional return to justify themselves and where larger circles of trust become easier to form.
The healthiest workplace culture probably contains both depth and breadth: people who know you well and people who can open unfamiliar doors.
There is enough room at the lunch table.
Employers should create the conditions, not organise the friendships
This is an important distinction.
“Mandatory friendship-building session, Tuesday at 4 pm” may be one of the quickest known ways to make adults dislike one another.
Friendships cannot be assigned. The workplace can, however, make connection easier.
- New hires can enter through cohorts rather than alone.
- Cross-functional projects can bring people together naturally.
- Employee networks can receive enough support to do meaningful work.
- Offices can retain spaces where colleagues meet without needing an agenda.
- Remote teams can have interaction that is not entirely transactional.
- Managers can avoid treating every five-minute conversation as evidence that somebody is not working.
Senior leaders can participate in mentoring and sponsorship programmes rather than leaving networking to people who already know how to reach them.
Companies should also watch for exclusion.
Strong friendship groups can create a sense of belonging for the people inside them and isolation for someone standing immediately outside. Cliques, information hoarding and favouritism are friendship’s less attractive office cousins.
The aim is a workplace where relationships grow easily, but access does not depend entirely on being socially connected to the right person.
That is a much healthier form of inclusion.
The Change in Content: Keep the friendship. Widen the circle.
There is something rather hopeful in this research.
In a working world preoccupied with productivity software, performance dashboards and increasingly intelligent machines, one competitive advantage remains stubbornly human:
people becoming fond of one another.
Women in this study appear particularly good at turning individual relationships into circles of connection. Those circles can welcome newcomers, carry information, absorb difficult days, build trust and give an organisation some of the social glue that no policy document can manufacture.
We should value that. We should also want more for women than support without influence.
The strongest form of workplace sisterhood may be the one that gradually widens: a friend becomes an ally, an ally makes an introduction, a senior colleague becomes a sponsor, and somebody who once needed a door opened eventually holds it open for somebody else.
No friendship needs to become a transaction. But good relationships can create generous careers. And perhaps a better workplace begins with something much less complicated than another corporate initiative: someone saving you a chair.
Editorial Note
This article is based primarily on the peer-reviewed 2026 study Gender differences in workplace friendship development: Insights from network dynamics, published in Social Networks, together with Durham University’s research summary and supporting research on workplace friendships, professional networks and career outcomes. The study followed 139 employees in a single national service organisation and was deliberately conducted in an unusual organisational setting designed to reduce structural confounds; its authors therefore caution against assuming that the findings generalise to all workplaces. References to gender describe observed patterns within the research and should not be interpreted as fixed characteristics of all women or men. This article is intended for editorial and informational purposes.
Sources
- Durham University: Study finds women build stronger workplace friendships than men
- Social Networks: Gender differences in workplace friendship development: Insights from network dynamics
Durham University Research Repository: Carboni, Parker and Lomi, 2026 - Gallup: The Increasing Importance of a Best Friend at Work
- Journal of Economics & Management Strategy: Social networks, promotions and the glass-ceiling effect
