Literary Awards Favor Men

>>I think it can be hard to represent female friendships sometimes, especially as some female writers were actively excluded and tormented by the other girls as children and the general response by the responsible adults is 'girls can be bitchy'. If the excluded girl isn't 'bitchy', she will take that to mean that 'bitchy is normal' and she's 'weird'. <<

Yes, that's true. Some people are lucky to find real friends later, but others aren't. And it's also true that if you taste in female friendship is more about discussing how to settle Mars than who's fucking whom, statistically speaking the number of potential friendships is much smaller.

>>It's also difficult to get adult female friendships as an adult if you were actively excluded from them when younger.<<

What it really means is that adult women follow cliques as ruthlessly as children do, and if you were ever "out" then they never want you "in."

>> To be fair, I often consider female friendships like acquaintances even though I care about them just as much as my male ones- I'm just worried I'll be gossiped about, yelled at or kicked to the kerb without warning.<<

Credible threat, unless you observe a specific woman sticking up for people who aren't present.

>> I'm also trying to write female friendships in the way I wanted them as a child. Yes, they'll banter, they'll argue, they'll ask each other about other women due to concern but they will not be mean-spirited or two-faced.<<

Good for you! I do this too.

>>She's not evil nor a 'bitch', just a bit of a hothead and frustrated with others like some very clever, quick people get.<<

Well played.

>>This is why the term 'social skills' bugs me. Teachers will always say a friendless child has none and a child surrounded by friends has plenty but will completely ignore the fact that the isolated child could have better manners and buy into treating others how they wish to be treated and that the popular child may be a bully or insensitive to kids not like them. <<

Social skills are real, but not the only factor. A person with good social skills is more likely to be popular than someone without. But other factors include parental finances, skin tone, beauty standard, and whether the person has something that other people want. Adults often overlook these factors. Furthermore, social skills include good manners. A bully doesn't really have friends; they have cronies. The functionality is different just as the means of attraction is different. A bully may have charisma or resources, but their emotional intelligence and social skills tend to be low.

I handle this a lot in my writing. Some of my characters are mean because they enjoy hurting people; Shiv is like that. Some are just socially inept, like Mason. Lawrence has minimal social skills due to lack of opportunity, so he's learning them from Stan; but he actually managed to put together a functional set based on logic rather than intuition for running the chess club. Angelica can be downright cruel to people she dislikes, but it's not a prevailing trait or else Stan wouldn't have stuck with her for so long.