Can Men and Women Be Friends in South Asia?

“If she’s being nice to me, she’s into me.” That’s the assumption that many South Asian men hold about women, Devika Mittal, a sociology professor at the University of Delhi, told The Juggernaut. 

“You do have this idea…that a man and a woman can be friends,” she said. But on the other hand, she said, men can also judge women for the crime of merely talking to them. Men tend to think “either she’s interested in me, or her character is not good,” she observed.

That tension has long played out in films and movies. When Harry Met Sally famously asked: can straight men and women just be friends? Bollywood, too, has explored this question, from Bobby (1973) to Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), concluding: no. Now, New York University researchers are trying to answer a question that comes even before that: do men and women even interact with each other in society? They sifted through 1.38 trillion Facebook friendship links to do exactly that. In much of South Asia, they found: not really. We spoke to the study authors, sociologists, and young South Asians to find out why.