Cross-sex Friendships: Who has More?

Abstract

This is the first study to examine the independent, simultaneous, and relative roles of several factorssex, 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 sameand cross-sex friendships and cross-gender role orientation continued to explain proportion of cross-sex friendship when the other factors were controlled.

A Latent Semantic Analysis of Gender Stereotype-Consistency and Narrowness in American English

“…One of the first author's previous studies (Lenton & Webber, 2006) provided a second source. In that study, 40 role-words assessed participants' gender diagnosticity, Lippa and Connelly's (1990) reformulation of gender role orientation.…”

Male-Female Workplace Friendships: Third Party Coworkers' Perceptions of and Behavior toward Organizational Peers in Cross-Sex Workplace Friendships

“…First, both men and women may be perceived as being more willing to help coworkers of the same sex than they are coworkers of the opposite sex (perhaps a sense of "having each others' backs" due to their shared sex). Previous research suggesting that men and women tend to have more friendships with individuals of the same sex as opposed to those of the opposite sex (Lenton & Webber, 2006, Reeder, 2003, Werking, 1997, in addition to even preferring these friendships (Rose, 1985), lends support to this explanation.…”

“…! individuals who reported that they preferred cross-sex friendships reported that those friendships were higher in closeness, trust, caring, having common interests, and providing narcissistic benefits than those respondents who reported having a preference for same-sex friends. Further, relationship commitment, perceptions of the benefits, gender role orientation, and sexism were independently found to predict participants' proportions of cross-sex friendships (Lenton & Webber, 2006). Specifically, for individuals low in romantic relationship commitment, increasing commitment was associated with having more cross-sex friendships, but for individuals high in romantic relational commitment, increasing commitment was associated with having fewer cross-sex friendships.…”

“…Furthermore cross-sex friendships appear to be becoming more common and even more significant within people's social networks (Fehr, 1996;Monsour, 2002). Despite this trend, research suggests that individuals still tend to have fewer cross-sex friendships than they do same-sex friendships (Lenton & Webber, 2006, Reeder, 2003, Rose, 1985Werking, 1997).…”

Interpersonal Influences on Interpretation of Workplace Sexual Harassment

“…Connecting communication across work and personal spheres, I also draw from previous research demonstrating that individuals' close interpersonal relationships may influence both sexist attitudes and workplace behaviors (e.g., Lenton & Webber, 2006;Helms, Walls, Crouter, & McHale, 2010;Kapoor, Pfost, House, & Pierson, 2010;Brands & Kilduff, 2014;Kim & Dew, 2016;Carnes, 2017;Huffman, Matthews, & Irving, 2017;Umukoro & Oboh, 2017;Xie, Shi, & Ma, 2017;Yucel, 2017;Pepli, Godlewska-Werner, Po, & Lewandowska-Walter, 2018). I assume that this effect will persist in terms of intolerance for and reporting of harassing behaviors at work.…”