The way people build friendships at a new job may be quietly shaping who ends up with a stronger safety net at work — and a new study finds women and men are doing it in measurably different ways. Research published in the journal Social Networks in July 2026 followed people through their first 10 months in new roles and found a clear gender gap in how those early workplace friendships took shape.
What the researchers studied
The study, led by Inga Carboni of William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business along with researchers at Durham University Business School in the UK and Università della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland, tracked 139 young adults, ages 18 to 24, at a U.S. community-development organization with a relatively flat structure across four survey points over 10 months. It is a narrower group than “the American workplace” broadly — young workers at a single type of organization — but it gave researchers an unusually detailed look at how friendships actually form over time rather than a one-time snapshot.
Following the same people across four separate points over nearly a year, rather than surveying different people once, let the researchers see the actual sequence of how a friendship formed — who became friends with whom, and in what order — instead of just measuring who was friends with whom at a single moment.
What they found
Women in the study were significantly more likely to “close the triangle” — becoming friends with a friend’s friend — creating denser, more interconnected social circles. Men, by contrast, tended to form more selective one-to-one friendships, with a shared connection being less likely to spark a new friendship between two people who had not already known each other.
“Closing the triangle” is a specific, measurable pattern in social-network research: if person A is friends with both B and C, does B and C’s shared connection to A make them more likely to become friends with each other too. The study found women did this significantly more often than men, which is what produced the denser, more interconnected networks the researchers describe.
Why it matters beyond the numbers
The researchers say women’s tightly-knit networks offered more group cohesion and stability, while men’s more selective approach could translate into broader individual career advantages, since a wider, less interconnected network tends to expose someone to more distinct opportunities. That trade-off, the study suggests, may be one thread in how workplace networks quietly contribute to gaps in advancement and pay between men and women — not through any single decision, but through how relationships form from day one.
That framing draws on a well-established idea in social-network research known as “structural holes” — the theory that a network with fewer redundant connections, spanning more separate social circles, tends to deliver more novel information and opportunities than a tightly interconnected one, even though the tightly interconnected network offers more support and stability. Men’s more selective friendship pattern, in this study, more closely matches the structure that theory associates with career advantage.
Why the timing of a new job matters
The study’s focus on the first 10 months in a new role is deliberate — early workplace relationships often set patterns that persist well beyond the initial onboarding period. Someone who builds a dense, interconnected friend group in their first year at a job may carry that same networking style into future roles, just as someone who builds more selective one-to-one relationships tends to repeat that pattern elsewhere.
That makes the first months at a new job a more consequential period than it might feel like at the time — the researchers’ data suggests the social patterns formed early are not just about fitting in initially, but about the shape of the professional network someone carries forward.
What this does not mean
The study does not suggest women should abandon close, interconnected friendships in favor of a more selective networking style modeled on the men in the study — the researchers frame the two patterns as different, each with real benefits, rather than one being simply better than the other. Group cohesion and stability, the advantage the study attributes to women’s networks, is a genuine workplace benefit, particularly in roles or organizations where collaboration and mutual support matter as much as individual advancement.
It also is worth noting the study’s limitations: 139 people at a single type of organization is not a claim about every workplace or every woman and man within it — it is a documented pattern in one setting that raises a broader question researchers are likely to test in other workplace types going forward.
How this connects to the broader pay-gap conversation
Discussions of the gender pay and advancement gap often focus on factors like negotiation behavior, caregiving responsibilities, or outright discrimination. This study adds a different, less-discussed thread: the structure of workplace social networks themselves, built through ordinary friendship choices in someone’s first months on the job, may be quietly contributing to the same gap through an entirely different mechanism.
That is a harder factor to address directly than a policy change, since it involves personal relationship patterns rather than formal workplace rules — but naming it as a contributing factor is itself useful for anyone thinking about how early career networking choices might shape opportunities years down the line.
What it could mean for how women approach early networking
For someone starting a new job, the study is less a prescription than a piece of information worth knowing: the instinct to build a close, supportive circle of friends who also become friends with each other has real value, but deliberately also cultivating a few more distinct, less-overlapping connections outside that circle may be worth doing alongside it, not instead of it, if broader career exposure is a goal.
The researchers’ underlying point is not that one networking style is right and the other wrong — it is that the two styles produce genuinely different outcomes, and understanding that trade-off is useful information for anyone navigating the first year at a new job.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.