Why Men Benefit So Much From Female Friends: 3 Key Insights

Most people have a best platonic friend who shares their gender. Overall, a recent study found that 89% of volunteers in the analyzed dataset reported that their best friend had the same gender as themselves. So only 11% had a best friend who had a different gender than themselves (Fox and co-workers, 2026).

There may be different reasons for this:

• People may meet more people of the same gender than people of the other gender when growing up, e.g., when playing on a male or female sports team.
• People may tend to form friendships more easily with a person who shares their gender, due to a higher number of shared experiences and societal expectations.
• Romantic partners in heterosexual relationships may be critical of cross-gender friendships and, in some cases, actively oppose them. Depending on personality type, heterosexual people in romantic relationships may sometimes be quite jealous if their partner has a best friend or close friend whom they might qualify as a potential partner.

This made me wonder: Despite these factors, why do some people choose to have a cross-gender best friend, and what has psychological science found out about the psychological benefits of having female friends for men?

Here are three main insights on the science of the benefits of cross-gender friendships for men:

1. Men are more likely to disclose problems and feelings to female friends than to male friends.

A study from the early 1990s entitled “Intimacy in same-sex friendships” (Reisman, 1990) found that compared to women, men were less likely to disclose personal problems in their same-gender friendships. However, in their friendships with women, men were more likely to disclose feelings and problems than they were with other men.

2. Men show less competition with female friends than with male friends.

Depending on personality type, some men can become quite competitive in friendships, e.g., when playing a round of tennis or any sport with their friends. If this competitiveness becomes too extreme, it could put a strain on the friendship. A study from 2022 found that men are less competitive in friendships with women than in friendships with men (Hojjat and co-workers, 2022).

3. Men with a female best friend feel emotionally closer to their best friend than men with a male best friend.

In a recent post, I wrote about the gender friendship gap, e.g., the well-replicated scientific finding that men rate their friendships as less emotionally close than women do. The study this post focused on replicated the friendship gender gap that previous studies had described, but additionally found that it was particularly strong in white men (Fox and co-workers, 2026). There was, however, one finding in the study I thought was quite curious: White men, whose best friend was a woman, felt substantially more emotional closeness to their best friend than did white men whose best friend was another man.

Takeaway

Taken together, cross-gender friendships have strong benefits for men, especially regarding feelings of emotional closeness and the ability to discuss personal problems.