On the flip side, they find that labor force participation gaps are a better predictor of the rate of more marginal (top 200) friendships in a place.

The Economist published an article today about my team's research on measuring social ties between men and women. The article had cool original analyses, including showing that the rate of cross-gender ties among close (top 5) friends is predicted by an index of sexism (a 🧵)

Our paper describes the construction of the data, but we think there are still a ton of stories to tell from people who have more local context than we do. For instance, I'd like to know more about the differences we see here!

My team's paper on cross-gender friendships is out today in the AEA Papers & Proceedings. We use data from Facebook to show where connections between men and women are more (blue) and less (red) common, in almost every country, and release the data publicly!
A 🧵 of maps:

Great questions! I think the first few "closest" friendships are likely to be partners or family, though this is just an educated guess based on the fact that the closest few friendships display weaker gender homophily in most countries (see Figure 1 in the paper).

Realized I forgot a to include a map of cross-gender social ties in North America--details on the methodology (and a link to the data) can be found in the original thread!

Thank you so much for your interest! Glad to hear that people find this interesting--one small note though, 1 here actually indicates no bias, not 0.5! I've copied the formula for the values here. You can see more details in the paper: drew-johnston.com/files/cross_...

We think our data is an appealing way to measure attitudes on gender, particularly in countries not often surveyed.
If you're interested in working with this data, download it here: data.humdata.org/dataset/cros...
The paper (out soon in AEA P+P) is available here: drew-johnston.com/files/cross_...

Across countries, the Cross-Gender Friending Ratio is strongly predictive of gender differences in labor force participation.
Within countries, we also find a strong correlations with gender attitudes in the World Values Survey, such as opinions about women's suitability for political office.

We measure gender differences using the Cross-Gender Friending Ratio, the ratio of female friends in men's networks to the share of female friends in women's networks in a given place.
Men almost always have a lower share of female friends than women do, but the degree varies across countries:

Have you ever wondered how social networks differ by gender?
Check out my team's new dataset, which uses Facebook data to measure regional differences in social networks by gender all across the world!
A 🧵 with examples, a description of our methodology, and a link to download the data:

We measure gender differences using the Cross-Gender Friending Ratio, the ratio of female friends in men's networks to the share of female friends in women's networks in a given place.
Men almost always have a lower share of female friends than women do, but the degree varies across countries:

Across countries, the Cross-Gender Friending Ratio is strongly predictive of gender differences in labor force participation.
Within countries, we also find a strong correlations with gender attitudes in the World Values Survey, such as opinions about women's suitability for political office.

We measure gender differences using the Cross-Gender Friending Ratio, the ratio of female friends in men's networks to the share of female friends in women's networks in a given place.
Men almost always have a lower share of female friends than women do, but the degree varies across countries: