Just after 1pm last Tuesday, I bought a £7.50 chicken salad at the Pret around the corner from my office to test a theory. It wasn’t the grim little lunch that interested me. It was the other office workers hunkered down over their halloumi wraps and egg pots.
Sure enough, there were more men eating lunch alone than women.
It was the same at the cafe next door, at another lunch spot down the road and also the Financial Times staff canteen.
Sometimes there were more than twice as many single male diners. Sometimes the ratio was smaller. Nowhere did I see more women eating alone than men.
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This was just one brief unscientific snapshot of London lunch life. Countless things could have accounted for the preponderance of lone males, not least the possibility that men outnumber women around my office, or have the types of jobs that force a quick bite alone instead of more leisurely lunching.
Still, what I saw gels with new research that sheds a somewhat troubling light on how we relate to one another at work.
Women make friends on the job in different ways from men, according to a study by European and US academics in the Social Networks journal. They form wider, deeper relationships with each other, in part because they are more likely than men to befriend friends of their friends in the office.
Men tend to have more selective one-to-one work friendships, especially if it helps them get ahead.
The study did not go into what happens at lunch, but if men are not as close to their work friends as women, you can see why they might tend to eat solo.
Either way, the implications of the new research are important. Older research shows people with good work relationships are likely to be happier, more engaged, more productive and innovative. They are less likely to be thinking about jumping ship and more likely to know what is going on and what their employer wants them to prioritise.
That’s good news for employers and for women, some of whom do a distinctly better job of making friends at work than men.
Nearly 30 per cent of college-educated American women say they have good friends at work, while about 20 per cent of college-educated men report the same thing.
Why so? It could be because women have shared experiences of, say, motherhood, and want to be friends with other mothers in the office in the same way that they might gravitate to women with kids outside work.
But the new research suggests the picture is more complicated. The study tracked nearly 140 workers at a US community development group who were aged 18-24. That’s a bit young for parenthood.
Whatever the explanation for women’s tendency to become friends with people they are already connected to, it might not be that helpful.
If you were being strategic about your workmates, you would not necessarily pick people who were friends of friends.
They are unlikely to know much more about what’s going on than your existing friends, says Andrew Parker, a professor of leadership at the UK’s Durham University Business School who co-authored the new research. “As a network, you want somebody in HR, somebody in finance, somebody in marketing, somebody in sales,” he told me, because that’s more useful than if your friends all come from the same department.
It is also sobering to consider the advantages men might get from a more calculated approach to work friendships.
Close to 40 per cent of the gender pay gap at one big commercial bank could have been explained by the social relationships between men and their male managers, a 2019 study estimated.
Ultimately, this speaks to a need to be aware that all is not necessarily as it may seem at work.
Most large organisations have well-established mentoring and sponsorship programmes to advance women and other employee groups. In my experience, they can do a reasonable job of linking junior people with more experienced hands who can offer advice about how things work and who’s who. But both mentor and mentee often come from exactly the same department or division. It might be helpful if they did not.
As for lunch, sometimes it’s nice to eat with others and sometimes it is not. In the world of work today, there are larger things to worry about. – Copyright The Financial Times
