Sex Segregation of Friendship Networks. Individual and Structural Determinants of Having Cross-Sex Friends

Abstract

Insights from psychological and sociological research are combined to explain why some individuals include more opposite-sex friends in their network than others. Individual determinants include sex-role attitudes and social needs and skills; structural determinants include a person's life course and the composition of settings to which people were exposed. Hypotheses derived from the literature and panel data on young adults in the Netherlands are analysed to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that for women, the chance of having opposite-sex friends is increased by a heterogeneous sex-composition of local settings (schools, work, and associations) and by a high degree of social skills. For men, the chance of opposite-sex friendships is increased by egalitarian sex-role attitudes and by a high degree of loneliness, not by local settings. For both men and women, the chance of having opposite-sex friendships declines sharply over the early life course. When comparing men and women, it is concluded that for women, opportunity structures have the biggest impact, followed by life-course variables and individual characteristics, while for men, individual characteristics are most important, followed by life-course variables and opportunity structures. The relative order of the three explanations thus appears to be the opposite for men and women