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The trade-off between ambition and friendship is a false one. Strong friendships are a career input, not a distraction from one. But most ambitious women have, at some point, decided that friendship is the thing that gets sacrificed when work gets demanding - not out of coldness, but because a missed dinner feels recoverable, while a missed deadline doesn't.
Harvard Business Review has made the opposite case explicitly: "Everything we do to succeed in our careers is improved when we're supported by a foundation of strong, stable friendships", writes Kellogg School of Management professor Neal J. Roese - and the basic research backs it up, even though many people who focus hard on their careers run the real risk of losing touch with the people who'd actually support that focus.
The actual bottleneck isn't time spent with friends - it's the planning that gets you there, which is exactly what a low-planning community structure removes. The research is specific to women: a recurring inner circle of two or three close friends predicts measurably higher-level job placement, and having a best friend at work roughly doubles the odds of being engaged in your job. What follows is what the data says, and five concrete ways to protect friendship time without treating it as the first thing to cut when work gets hard.
The reason "prioritize friendship" sounds like a time-management problem is that, for most people, it is one - building a social circle from scratch takes ongoing planning, and planning is exactly what a demanding career leaves the least room for.
Les Amis is a useful example of a structure built specifically around that constraint. It's a members-only community for women that combines an application-based matching process with participation in recurring local events - members-only dinners, creative workshops, curated experiences, and so on. They are built into the membership itself rather than left for members to organise. New 1:1 matches are introduced weekly, and the community runs across cities including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, and Stockholm, plus Austin and New York, with membership pricing that varies by city.
The relevance to a career-focused woman specifically is structural: the time cost of "prioritizing friendship" isn't really the time spent with people, it's the time spent arranging to see them - finding the group, picking the restaurant, chasing the group chat for a date that works. A model where the events already exist removes exactly that planning tax, which is usually the actual bottleneck for someone whose calendar is already full of things with harder deadlines than a dinner.
This isn't the only way to solve the planning-tax problem, but it's worth naming early in the article, since it addresses the specific failure mode ambitious women describe most often: not a lack of desire for friendship, but a lack of bandwidth to build the infrastructure for it from zero.
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Women with a strong, recurring circle of close female friends are placed into leadership roles at measurably higher levels than women without one - a finding that holds specifically for women, not for men.
The clearest evidence here comes from a 2019 PNAS study at Northwestern's Kellogg School, which analysed the social networks and career placements of hundreds of graduate students using 4.5 million email exchanges. The findings: 77% of the highest-achieving women in the study had close, recurring relationships with two to three other women, and women with a female-dominated inner circle landed jobs 2.5 levels higher than women with a male-dominated network. Notably, the same effect did not exist for men: for them, the gender composition of their network had no measurable relationship to career placement.
Separately, Gallup's long-running research on workplace engagement found that women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged in their jobs (63%) as women who don't (29%), and that employees with a best friend at work are, broadly, seven times more likely to be fully engaged. A 2025 study using the job demands-resources framework found that workplace friendships specifically buffer burnout under moderate stress - meaning the relationship between friendship and career performance isn't just correlational goodwill, it's a measurable stress-management mechanism.
Put simply: the assumption that friendship competes with career focus doesn't hold up. For women in particular, the research points the other way.
The single biggest predictor of whether a friendship survives a demanding career is whether contact with that friend has a fixed slot, rather than being scheduled fresh each time. Research on relationship maintenance consistently finds that closeness grows through predictable rhythm, not through occasional high-effort gestures - a standing monthly dinner protected the same way you'd protect a recurring client call outperforms trying to "find time" for friends reactively.
A two-hour dinner with four friends maintains four relationships for the time cost of one evening; four separate one-on-one coffees cost roughly four times as much calendar space for a comparable result. For a career-focused woman with limited discretionary hours, recurring group formats are a genuine efficiency gain, not a compromise on depth. This is the mechanic behind Les Amis's small-group events, capped at 8 to 12 women rather than left open-ended, so a single evening maintains several relationships at once instead of just one.
Given the PNAS findings above, the two-to-three-woman inner circle that predicted the strongest career outcomes wasn't built through more socialising overall - it was built through consistency with a small number of people. If your calendar can't support a wide social circle right now, the research suggests concentrating effort on two or three relationships is a better return than spreading thin contact across many. Les Amis's 1:1 matching runs on the same logic: rather than a wide funnel of new introductions, it concentrates contact with a small number of people over time - closer to what the research says actually predicts career outcomes than a large, loosely maintained network.
A common pattern among ambitious women is postponing emotionally open friendship until "things calm down" professionally - a point that, for most careers, never actually arrives. Psychological research on high-achieving women has linked this pattern to burnout specifically, since professional environments often reward compartmentalising emotion, which can mean the people best positioned to catch early signs of burnout, that said close friends, are the ones being kept at the most distance.
If you're consistently the one organising every dinner, that role itself becomes a hidden tax on your limited time. Moving part of your social life into structures where someone else owns the planning - a recurring class, a professional network with a fixed calendar, a curated community - removes that specific cost, which is often the actual reason friendship feels incompatible with a demanding career, rather than a lack of time. Les Amis is a direct example of this: matches and events are scheduled by the community rather than by members, so joining doesn't add a new planning responsibility to an already full calendar - it removes one.
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A: No, the research points the other way. Harvard Business Review has argued that career performance is generally improved, not hurt, by a foundation of strong, stable friendships, and a 2019 PNAS study found that women with a close female inner circle were placed into leadership roles 2.5 levels higher than women without one, with no equivalent effect for men.
A: The research points to structural fixes: treating friendship contact as a recurring, protected commitment rather than something scheduled reactively; using group formats so one plan maintains several relationships at once; and choosing structures - a recurring class, a curated community like Les Amis, a professional network with a fixed calendar - where someone else handles the planning, since the planning itself is usually the actual time cost, not the socialising.
A: Yes. Gallup's research found that women who strongly agree they have a best friend at work are more than twice as likely to be engaged in their jobs, and workplace friendships have been shown to buffer burnout specifically under moderate stress, functioning as a measurable stress-management resource rather than just a social nicety.
A: The PNAS research on women's professional networks found the effect in groups as small as two to three close, recurring female friendships - not a large network. Consistency with a small inner circle predicted stronger career placement than breadth of acquaintances.
A: Usually not desire, but planning capacity: the ongoing coordination required to keep seeing the same people, on top of an already full calendar. Structures that remove that planning burden (recurring communities, fixed-schedule groups) tend to solve the actual bottleneck more effectively than trying to find more discretionary time.
The idea that friendship and ambition compete for the same limited resource doesn't hold up against the research - what actually competes with ambition is unstructured friendship, the kind that depends on finding time that a demanding career rarely offers. Structured friendship - recurring, planned-for-you, concentrated among a small circle - is a different proposition entirely, and it's the version the data says actually supports career performance rather than draining it.
Les Amis is one concrete way to get that structure without adding it to your own to-do list: application-based matching, small recurring events, and a calendar that's already built.
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