A distinction without (much) difference

Last year I had a post about the claim that men don't have as many friends as they used to.   I noted that the 2021 survey cited as evidence of a large decline in friendship among men showed a similarly large decline among women.   That survey used different procedures from previous ones, so it's not clear that we should accept it as evidence of a real decline in friendship, but if we do, it shows a decline among people generally rather than men specifically.  

A few days ago, I read an interview of Laurie Santos, a professor of Psychology at Yale, by Derek Thompson.  Santos said there was a decline in friendship, and "that decrease is much worse for men. One study found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship -- do you have six close friends you could talk to? -- men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. And if you ask how many men say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15% of American guys in midlife saying exactly that. That’s a fivefold decrease since folks have been running this survey."  Then there was this figure, summarizing the same 2021 survey I wrote about:

The share of men who reported six or more close friends indeed declined by more than half, from 55% to 27%.  The share of women who reported six or more friends declined from 41% to 24%.  That's a decline of 51% among men and only 41% among women, but it's just one possible comparison:  the share who report 10 or more declined by 62% among men and 61% among women, and the share who report five or more declined by 40% among men and 38% among women.  And the share of women reporting no close friends rose from 2% to 10%:  the same ratio of 5 as among men.  That is, the table doesn't support the general claim that any decline has been much worse among men.*  

That raises the question of why this misinterpretation is so prevalent (Santos followed this report, which is the source of the table).  The obvious factor is that people just like to talk about differences between men and women.  A second possibility is the influence of political ideology:  the idea of an especially large decline among men appeals to both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons.  Liberals are inclined to think that the traditional model of masculinity is unsuited to modern society, and we're seeing a symptom of that; conservatives are inclined to think that we've paid so much attention to the problems of women that we're neglecting the problems of men.  And moderates think that if both liberals and conservatives agree that there's a problem, we have a welcome opportunity for cooperation across ideological lines.  

*Even if you think that the comparison between six or more vs. five or fewer is especially important, you need to consider sampling error.  The 2021 survey had about 2000 people, and the 1990 survey had about 1200, so the figures for men and women are based on samples of 1000 and 600.  Then you have ratios, and differences between ratios, increasing the margin of error.  I estimate that the standard error of the difference between the ratios is about 5.5% assuming simple random sampling, but even without doing calculations it's clearly substantial.