Cross-sex Friendships: Who has More?

Abstract

This is the first study to examine the independent, simultaneous, and relative roles of several factors—sex, relationship commitment, perceptions of the benefits vs. costs of cross-sex (vs. same-sex) friendships, gender role orientation, and sexism—in the number of cross-sex (vs. same-sex) friendships people have. The latter four constructs were independently found to predict participants’ proportions of cross-sex friendships. Furthermore, a model comprised of all five factors provided a very good fit to the data, explaining 35% of the variability in the degree to which the participants possessed cross-sex friendships. Perceptions regarding the general benefits of both same- and cross-sex friendships and cross-gender role orientation continued to explain proportion of cross-sex friendship when the other factors were controlled.