In the U.S., men and women can just be friends. What about California?
According to one study, it depends where you live.
The study, which brought together researchers from NYU and from Meta, which owns Facebook, focused on active Facebook users aged 18 to 65. It ranked the friendships by closeness using a measure of strength developed by Facebook, with the findings largely focused on the gender makeup of a user's top 25 friends.
Obviously, connections on Facebook may be telling, but probably not fully representative of real-life connections. For one thing, not very many people under 30 use it very much. Still, the results mirror some well-known social realities.
Across countries, the differences were stark — and aligned with existing measures of gender disparity, like differences in labor force participation, the researchers found. And within countries, a similar pattern emerged: places with greater support for equal treatment of men and women also had higher rates of cross gender friendship.
Western Europe and America were only middling along this index: They were outscored by parts of Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. On the other end of the spectrum, the Islamic world and South Asia had the lowest measured rates of male-female friendship.
Within the United States, there was 'relatively little variation' in friendship rates across genders. Still, cross-gender friendships were generally less common in areas in the U.S. with a larger White population share, higher incomes, and more religious congregations per capita.
Within California, there was even less variation than nationwide. Still, a few counties rose to the top: tiny Modoc and Siskiyou counties in the northernmost part of the state had the highest rates of cross-gender friendships. On the other end of the spectrum, Imperial and Sutter counties had the lowest, though the rates were still very close to the middle.
But in some ways, the California pattern cut against the national picture. Some of the counties with the most mixed-gender friendships were, in fact, relatively white. Instead, a Chronicle analysis of a number of demographic features found that the strongest correlate of mixed-gender friend networks was median age: The older the people in a county, the more members of the opposite gender people had in their top 25 friends.
All nine Bay Area counties were in the middle, with cross-gender friendship rates between 0.56 and 0.58.
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