On Valentine’s Day this year, when I was, somewhat depressingly, in Addis Ababa airport rather than enjoying a romantic dinner with my wife, I stumbled on a paper asking whether men and women can be friends. The traditional view is that this is hard because, as Harry said to Sally in the film, “the sex part always gets in the way.”
This is too gloomy. Sure, people fancy each other. But most of us are perfectly capable of controlling our urges. And it matters a lot whether half of the population can get along with the other half. As my colleague Ainslie Johnstone showed, using data on 1.8bn Facebook users, in countries where men and women find it harder to be friends, sexism is more extreme and women struggle in the workplace. We combined Ainslie’s insights with reporting from America, South Korea and Turkey, where our correspondent Piotr Zalewski shared a warning from the religious authorities that male-female chumminess can “drag people into the pit of adultery”. The good news is that societies evolve and men and women
can learn to like each other.
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