Sarah Sands: Women make friends, men join clubs

My husband regarded my copy of Hello!, the Liz Hurley wedding issue, with an expression of helpless anguish. It was not Hurley in particular, but the notion of a wedding going on and on and on. I murmured that it was too late for the night sweats because we were already married. With luck, he need never go through a wedding again.

What appals many men about weddings is discussing a personal relationship in front of a crowd, many of whom support the same football team. Even Hurley's tearful husband Arun Nayar stumbled over the word "betrothed". But for women, hearts laid bare in front of your mother, your old schoolfriends, your slightly less attractive bridesmaid, is heaven. The personal made public.

Friendships are a female gift, a study from Manchester University concluded last week. Women have "deeper and more moral" friendships than men. Male friendships are fickle and based on self-interest.

The different ways in which men and women connect is a subject of enduring academic interest. It affects systems of education and work. It influences business and social activity. It has apparently defeated a generation of social engineering. The teaching establishment has devoted itself to the re-education of boys. It has tried to make them less restive and more sensitive. More co-operative, less competitive.

Nature has given nurture an almighty kicking. Girls continue to form friendships; men join teams. Girls love social networking internet sites; boys lose interest once they have posted pictures of themselves and given their opinions. They are much better suited to blogs, a one-way conversation.

Relationships settle in life as in childhood. I remember discussing Angela Merkel with Margaret Beckett. She noted that Merkel seemed to form her own views rather than fall back on conventional alliances. This had rather dumbfounded the French, who were used to the Franco-German axis, because that was how it had always been.

Clubbishness is a male tradition but unfamiliar to women, who are less tied to rules and structure, more maverick. The bonds are differently measured. I don't believe, for instance, that gender solidarity is as pronounced among women as men. The ties are personal.

When Ségolène Royal, the socialist French presidential candidate, began her campaign, she knew that her public weakness was foreign affairs. Her team worked hard on a photo opportunity with Hillary Clinton. This would be the cover story of political sisterhood. Catastrophically, Hillary Clinton found herself unable to find time in her schedule after Royal made some clumsy remarks about the Middle East.

The Manchester University study states that men are more self-interested in their friendships. This is because their friendships are often based on networking, which is a statement of professional self-endorsement. In the end, most women would rather be at home with their family than playing golf with their boss.

We have witnessed a critical phenomenon of women at work in the past few years. It is that women, on the whole, tend to become less ambitious as they move up. The workplace is crowded with determined, clever, superlatively educated female graduates, who start to drop out in middle management and who have virtually disappeared at boardroom level. The women who make it through are the same as the pioneering working women, i.e. honorary men.

Hillary Clinton may be calling on female support but she has as little in common with other women as Margaret Thatcher. The hormonal fluid required to get you to the top is not the milk of maternal kindness.

Studies of the female diaspora from offices warn of the commercial consequences. The talent pool halved, plus the loss of feminine attributes. Women are better at collaborative creativity, which means persuading men to cough up their ideas for the greater good rather than storing them up for personal promotion. The cockerel is a recognisable figure in offices. Extremely confident, often unbriefed, he is happiest flapping alone. Is it sexist of me to observe that Michael Grade's make-it-up-as-you-go-along performance on the Today programme last week was strikingly male?

The empirical evidence for the nature of male/female friendship is one of the greatest arguments for single sex education. The numerous studies of women's failure to grasp science, for instance, conclude that high-performing girls have a beneficial effect on their girl friends. If a girl is good at maths or science she takes pleasure in helping a girl friend improve her marks. This natural mentoring does not appear to extend to boys. A girl will say: "This is how you do it." A boy will say: "Just copy mine."

The model of female friendship is the basis for our education system. It is emotionally developed and co-operative. The sale of playing fields destroyed the forum for male bonding. Friendships were formed in the mud and sweat of team games, the grunting of the scrum. Men like external landmarks of friendship, rites of passage such as 21sts or stag nights. It is friendship by photograph. One reason men may be squeamish about illness or misfortune in others is that you cannot stage a group photograph around it. Female friendships are the best and worst of women. Emotional drama, which begins in earnest at about 11, is nursed and inflamed by girlfriends. If a girl is dumped by a boy, she can expect her Bebo site to overflow with sympathy. "He is like so wateva you can do so much better" etc. A row of mascara-flaked eyes will be glaring beneath beanie hats next time the boy appears. Yet we know that girls fall passionately in and out of friendship in volatile contrast to the stolid, ritual based companionship of boys.

Girls can manage sympathy and Schadenfreude simultaneously. I recently witnessed a teenage girl's birthday disco in a municipal hall. She was distressed that it was sparsely attended and she would be branded a loser. Part of the reason the hall seemed empty was the large band of girls who kept disappearing to the lavatory. They went there to discuss the unfortunate situation and returned to make a flurry of calls to summon reserves. The girls they phoned had either not been invited so were naturally offended or had refused because they were at noisy, crowded, happening parties elsewhere. In other words, it was a show of loyalty that felicitiously accentuated the social humiliation.

The boys at the party were oblivious to the undercurrents. They happily skidded across the empty floors. The calls they made were simply to check football scores.

The University of Western Ontario came up with a simple formula on male/female friendship. Women are face to face, men are side by side. Women have lunch, men go to matches. Women keep friends, men lose them.

It is visibly true that women are far more aware of each other. They conduct spot checks on other women in the street; they notice hairstyles and fashion and weight and degrees of ageing. Men look at the finished effect, women dissect the work that has gone into it. Their friendships start by being analytical and progress through psychotherapy. They acknowledge vulnerability and conflict in a way that men would not dream of.

Can you imagine a man on the touchline asking, "So how do you manage work and children?" Women are much better at the maintenance of friendship in the same way that they are better at organising Christmas and remembering dates of the school calendar. They monitor friendship, they make sacrifices for it. It is an end in itself. Men prefer a context for friendship, which is why their friends are often work colleagues.

My husband has an old friend he values dearly. When his friend's wife had a baby, my husband bought a tiny, knitted sweater. He went back twice to the shop to swap it for larger sizes because he had not got round to taking it to his friend's house. Which is about two miles away.

Men find the expression of friendship awkward but it does not mean it is felt less. The love for comrades in arms is sublimely moving. I cannot read dry-eyed the written account by VC-holder Pte Johnson Beharry of being wounded in Southern Iraq.

"Next thing I know, I'm in the back of a Warrior. I open my eyes. Broomstick is still looking down at me. My head is in his lap. Tears are rolling down his face. Tears... "Stick?" "Yeah, mate?" "Am I dying?" "Nah, mate, you're not dying." "It hurts, Stick. It hurts." "Hang in there Harry, we're nearly there mate, nearly there." Male friendship may be ultimate. But for the rest of life, you are better off with a woman.

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