What a Lunchtime Pattern and a New Study Reveal About Office Friendships

A Financial Times writer set out to test a simple idea during a London lunch hour: whether men or women were more likely to eat alone near the office. Across a Pret A Manger, a neighbouring café and the newspaper's staff canteen, the pattern was consistent. More men than women were eating by themselves, sometimes by a ratio of more than two to one.

The observation is only anecdotal, but it echoes a study published in the journal Social Networks by European and US academics. The researchers examined nearly 140 workers aged 18 to 24 in a US community development organisation and found that women tend to form workplace friendships differently from men. Women were more likely to become friends with the friends of their existing friends, creating closer circles. Men, by contrast, were more selective, often building individual relationships that could help them get ahead.

The difference matters because earlier research links good relationships at work to higher happiness, engagement, productivity and innovation, as well as lower turnover. Among college-educated American workers, almost 30% of women say they have good friends at work, compared with about 20% of men.

Yet closeness is not the same as useful information. Andrew Parker, a leadership professor at Durham University Business School and co-author of the study, argues that a strong professional network benefits from contacts in different functions — human resources, finance, marketing and sales — rather than many friends in the same department. A 2019 study estimated that nearly 40% of the gender pay gap at a major commercial bank could be explained by social relationships between men and their male bosses, underscoring that friendship patterns can quietly shape careers.

Why Men and Women Build Professional Networks Differently

The Friendship Gap Is About Structure, Not Just Preference

The Social Networks study points to a structural difference in how men and women build office ties. Women's tendency to befriend their friends' friends produces dense, supportive groups, but those groups can become closed loops. Men's more instrumental approach can appear colder, yet it may deliver access to senior decision-makers and cross-functional information.

Network Breadth Carries a Career Advantage

According to Andrew Parker, contacts in several departments are more valuable than a large number of contacts in one team. A close network may offer emotional support, but it is less likely to surface new information about opportunities, internal priorities or risks. That difference could help explain why male-dominated sponsorship relationships are linked to part of the gender pay gap in the 2019 banking study.

Mentoring Programmes Often Miss the Point

Many large employers already run mentoring and sponsorship schemes. The problem, the columnist notes, is that mentors and mentees frequently come from the same department or division. That reinforces existing networks instead of broadening them. If the objective is to give junior employees better access to information and decision-makers, cross-department pairings may be more useful.

Broadening Office Networks Beyond the Usual Circle

The research suggests a few concrete adjustments for workers and employers who want to make office networks fairer and more effective.

  • For individual workers: deliberately build contacts outside your immediate team. A contact in HR, finance, marketing or sales can expose you to information your close colleagues do not have.
  • For HR and managers: review mentoring matches that pair people from the same department. Cross-functional pairings are more likely to widen a junior employee's internal information network.
  • For employers: do not assume that close friendships automatically support career progression. Since male-male boss networks were linked to nearly 40% of the gender pay gap at one bank, sponsorship should explicitly span divisions and levels.