Social connections shape lives in manners that extend far beyond casual companionship. A study published on 5 November 2025 in Science Advances by S. Martin-Gutierrez, M. N. Cartier Van Dissel, and F. Karimi showed that people who belong to multiple marginalized groups experience social isolation far more intensely than previously understood. This unwraps hidden layers of inequality in social networks.
Invisible Barriers Found By a Mathematic Model: Why Belonging to Multiple Marginalized Groups Hurts Social Connectivity and Leads to Intensified Social Isolation
The findings offer a roadmap for interventions that promote inclusion. Schools and platforms can use these insights to strengthen social ties for students most affected by intersectional disadvantages.
Background
Social networks do not form randomly. People tend to link with those similar to themselves. This phenomenon is called homophily. Factors like gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background influence friendships. This creates clusters of well-connected groups while pushing marginalized groups toward network peripheries with limited access to opportunities.
A team of researchers from Austria, headed by F. Karimi, aimed to explore how overlapping social disadvantages, such as being female and from a minority ethnicity, interact to affect network position. Previous research considered individual traits but often ignored how multiple traits combine to produce nonlinear effects on friendship formation.
The researchers developed a mathematical network model simulating social tie formation based on identity traits and preferences to analyze the aforesaid dynamics. The model was tested using real-world data from over 40000 high school students in the U.S. in 1994 and 1995. These included self-nominated friendships, gender, ethnicity, and academic grade.
Key Findings
The findings demonstrate that social isolation is amplified for individuals facing multiple intersecting disadvantages. Note that an introductory analysis of the data specifically reveals that the simple addition of single-trait disadvantages fails to capture the complex dynamics of real-world social networks. The following are further details of the findings:
• Intersectional Amplification
Individuals belonging to multiple marginalized groups experience disproportionately higher social isolation. Black girls and Asian boys, for example, had fewer connections than predicted by examining gender or ethnicity alone.
• Homophily Effects
Social ties cluster around similarity. This benefits majority and structurally favored groups and isolates marginalized groups on network peripheries. Connections among isolated individuals often limit access to central opportunities and resources.
• Notable Emergent Patterns
Some marginalized groups exhibit unexpected connectivity gains in some contexts. Black boys were sometimes better connected than expected because of complex interactions between group size, preferences, and network structure.
• Structural Advantage
White girls had the most social ties. They benefit from overlapping majority ethnicity and a gender that is more likely to receive friendship nominations. White boys also gained from ethnic majority status. This increases their relative connectivity.
• Real-World Validation
The mathematical model closely matched observed friendship patterns from tens of thousands of students. This confirms that intersectional disadvantages significantly influence network formation in real social settings.
Implications
Structural disadvantages in social networks contribute to broader inequalities because social ties are often gateways to opportunities. Previous studies also established the impact of social isolation on health and well-being. Nevertheless, by modeling how different identities and traits interact to produce social isolation, targeted interventions can be developed.
Understanding intersectional social isolation has profound implications for education, social platforms, and policy design. Educational institutions can use the insights from the findings to implement programs that can foster social inclusion and connection among students with multiple marginalized identities and mitigate structural disadvantages before they solidify.
The findings highlight the importance of considering overlapping social identities in research and intervention design. Policies or programs targeting only one identity dimension may fail to address compounded disadvantage. This can leave the most isolated groups unsupported despite general improvements in inclusion or investments in inclusion programs.
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
- Martin-Gutierrez, S., Cartier van Dissel, M. N., and Karimi, F. 2025. “Intersectional Inequalities in Social Ties.” Science Advances. 11(45). DOI: 1126/sciadv.adu9025