A phenomenal new paper by Bailey, Johnston, Kuchler, Kumar and Stroebel offers unprecedented insights into gender relations through an extraordinary dataset of 1.38 trillion Facebook connections.
So I'm sitting here in Sweden wondering how in the world you missed the chance to point out the delicious irony that Sweden (and Scandinavia generally) is coming off as very sexist here, and much more so than the "macho" cultures of Africa and Latin America! Sweden and Finland are basically the same as Poland. More on this, please, because it is very counter-intuitive.
Also, can we remark upon the East and West divide in Germany? The former GDR seems to have totally bucked the trend in the former USSR. Or how the more European Mercosur region of Latin America is less gender equal on this metric.
Fascinating findings that would really challenge a lot of country's self-concept!
It certainly is! Also a clear indicator of religious influence as you pointed out. I wasn't expecting much from Turkey, but was still disappointed. That stark contrast with Europe betrays most secular Turks' view of themselves.
Also want to thank you for popularizing gender studies. I really like sharing your articles with non-academic Turkish (usually male) friends, whose first reflex is to roll their eyes when they hear the words.
>Cross-gender friendships are strongly associated with support for gender equality - as I would predict. In cultures where women forge their way in the public sphere, fraternising freely and demonstrating equal competence in socially valued domains, they can forge friendships with men - who crucially come to value their wants and welfare! It’s much harder to build broad support for feminism if men don’t have any female friends!!
I don't see how controlling for a bunch of variables addresses possible reverse causality, where support for gender equality leads to actual gender equality, which leads to more cross-sex friendships.
I wonder what to make of the very low cross-gender friending ratio of the Nordic countries compared eg to East or South Africa. The high cross-gender friending ratios in large parts of sub-Sahara Africa, Latin
America of blacks in the US make it look like a proxy for machismo.
It is an interesting piece of work. What observations do you draw from the Sahara's / Sahel's similarity to the west rather than to other Islamic communities?
I feel like this doesn't take into account generational divides across Facebook users on different countries. In some countries, it's mostly Boomers keeping up with friends on Facebook (I suspect this is the case in the West); while in other countries, it's the young people (unmarried, uncommitted) who use smartphones and are likely connecting on Facebook.
> Let me add one caveat. Gender gaps in mobile internet use are exceptionally large in South Asia. As recently as 2022, only 20% of ever-married Bangladeshi women had ever used the internet. Only the most progressive women would have Facebook friends, so this digital data on cross-gender friendships under-estimates real-life norms of seclusion.
I wouldn't be surprised if the cross gender friendship is comparable amongst working class families because working class women are more likely to work in Bangladesh. As soon as you become middle class in Bangladesh you're more likely to adopt Arab cultural traits.
Yeah, people underestimate how much Salafism is kind of a bourgeois thing among some Muslims that look down on their original semi-pagan rural impoverished origins.
Why is there more integration in much of Sub-Saharan Africa than in Northern and Western Europe when the latter is typically considered (and in some ways actually is) more gender-equal?
I'm not sure if I read this right in the methodology, but is the main point that it is comparing the percentage of female friends a man has, compared to how many a woman has? So in India, men have around 34% as many female friends as women do?
If so, how does this tell us how many male friends women have? Aren't they just looking female-female friendship first and comparing male-female to that?
If they did the reverse - compare female-male friendships to male-male, would the data be different?
Facebook is proof that a sucker is born every minute. The users are for the most part bots and they have been repeatedly caught lying to advertisers about engagement.
So much of the fall of the humanities as progressing scientific displine can be summarized by the title of this article. “We studied bajillion Facebook…” that's it. I know literally all the value this cough….study….cough has to offer and I know why parents don't let their kids major in these fields anymore.
". To ensure they captured meaningful social connections rather than casual acquaintances, they filtered out users in the bottom 25% of each country's friend count distribution."
Does that mean that people with a smaller number of connections were excluded and those with a large number of connections were included?
Wouldn't people with more connections have more acquaintances included?
Wouldn't people with fewer "Facebook friends" potentially have more meaningful connections with them rather than someone with hundreds or thousands of "friends"?
A good piece as usual, which is why I read this substack.
I find the difference of (Western Europe plus North America) and (South/Central America* plus Sub sahel Africa) most interesting [*I exclude Chile and Argentina as too 'European'].
It perhaps reflects a cultural difference where western nations favour the comparatively intellectual/impersonal relationships of a large scale society whereas in the global south there is more emphasis on the [small scale] social dynamics of one's local/in-person relationships. That is, the difference between established 'urban' culture and recently past 'village' culture. As such, East Germany is more 'village like' than West Germany.
I don't recall seeing maps for East Asia so it would be interesting to see if such a distinction can be seen there.
So I'm sitting here in Sweden wondering how in the world you missed the chance to point out the delicious irony that Sweden (and Scandinavia generally) is coming off as very sexist here, and much more so than the "macho" cultures of Africa and Latin America! Sweden and Finland are basically the same as Poland. More on this, please, because it is very counter-intuitive.
Also, can we remark upon the East and West divide in Germany? The former GDR seems to have totally bucked the trend in the former USSR. Or how the more European Mercosur region of Latin America is less gender equal on this metric.
Fascinating findings that would really challenge a lot of country's self-concept!
Could it be that they don't use facebook as much in Sweden as Poland?
Interesting as always. Thanks for sharing! Tiny correction: the Turkish province is called Tunceli, not Tuncelli :)
Thank you so much! My apologies!! But isn’t it a fun outlier?
It certainly is! Also a clear indicator of religious influence as you pointed out. I wasn't expecting much from Turkey, but was still disappointed. That stark contrast with Europe betrays most secular Turks' view of themselves.
Also want to thank you for popularizing gender studies. I really like sharing your articles with non-academic Turkish (usually male) friends, whose first reflex is to roll their eyes when they hear the words.
You would do me a huge favour if you shared this with Turkish men and asked what they think! Please let me know!
>Cross-gender friendships are strongly associated with support for gender equality - as I would predict. In cultures where women forge their way in the public sphere, fraternising freely and demonstrating equal competence in socially valued domains, they can forge friendships with men - who crucially come to value their wants and welfare! It’s much harder to build broad support for feminism if men don’t have any female friends!!
I don't see how controlling for a bunch of variables addresses possible reverse causality, where support for gender equality leads to actual gender equality, which leads to more cross-sex friendships.
Conclusion: women use Facebook more than men do.
Real conclusion: bots pretending to be women use it more than bots pretending to be men
I wonder what to make of the very low cross-gender friending ratio of the Nordic countries compared eg to East or South Africa. The high cross-gender friending ratios in large parts of sub-Sahara Africa, Latin
America of blacks in the US make it look like a proxy for machismo.
It is an interesting piece of work. What observations do you draw from the Sahara's / Sahel's similarity to the west rather than to other Islamic communities?
I feel like this doesn't take into account generational divides across Facebook users on different countries. In some countries, it's mostly Boomers keeping up with friends on Facebook (I suspect this is the case in the West); while in other countries, it's the young people (unmarried, uncommitted) who use smartphones and are likely connecting on Facebook.
> Let me add one caveat. Gender gaps in mobile internet use are exceptionally large in South Asia. As recently as 2022, only 20% of ever-married Bangladeshi women had ever used the internet. Only the most progressive women would have Facebook friends, so this digital data on cross-gender friendships under-estimates real-life norms of seclusion.
I wouldn't be surprised if the cross gender friendship is comparable amongst working class families because working class women are more likely to work in Bangladesh. As soon as you become middle class in Bangladesh you're more likely to adopt Arab cultural traits.
Yeah, people underestimate how much Salafism is kind of a bourgeois thing among some Muslims that look down on their original semi-pagan rural impoverished origins.
It's less of an elite thing and more of a newly middle class thing.
Why is there more integration in much of Sub-Saharan Africa than in Northern and Western Europe when the latter is typically considered (and in some ways actually is) more gender-equal?
I'm a bit confused.
I'm not sure if I read this right in the methodology, but is the main point that it is comparing the percentage of female friends a man has, compared to how many a woman has? So in India, men have around 34% as many female friends as women do?
If so, how does this tell us how many male friends women have? Aren't they just looking female-female friendship first and comparing male-female to that?
If they did the reverse - compare female-male friendships to male-male, would the data be different?
Facebook is proof that a sucker is born every minute. The users are for the most part bots and they have been repeatedly caught lying to advertisers about engagement.
So much of the fall of the humanities as progressing scientific displine can be summarized by the title of this article. “We studied bajillion Facebook…” that's it. I know literally all the value this cough….study….cough has to offer and I know why parents don't let their kids major in these fields anymore.
I don't understand this part.
". To ensure they captured meaningful social connections rather than casual acquaintances, they filtered out users in the bottom 25% of each country's friend count distribution."
Does that mean that people with a smaller number of connections were excluded and those with a large number of connections were included?
Wouldn't people with more connections have more acquaintances included?
Wouldn't people with fewer "Facebook friends" potentially have more meaningful connections with them rather than someone with hundreds or thousands of "friends"?
It's less of an elite thing and more of a newly middle class thing.
A good piece as usual, which is why I read this substack.
I find the difference of (Western Europe plus North America) and (South/Central America* plus Sub sahel Africa) most interesting [*I exclude Chile and Argentina as too 'European'].
It perhaps reflects a cultural difference where western nations favour the comparatively intellectual/impersonal relationships of a large scale society whereas in the global south there is more emphasis on the [small scale] social dynamics of one's local/in-person relationships. That is, the difference between established 'urban' culture and recently past 'village' culture. As such, East Germany is more 'village like' than West Germany.
I don't recall seeing maps for East Asia so it would be interesting to see if such a distinction can be seen there.