"In Bowling Alone, Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families"

The author states that they dismiss this thesis because "groups have more leisure time now than before" but that's not a valid rebuttal. The problem isn't the amount of leisure time, but the way that leisure time is used. It's easier for a planning and hosting novice to invite friends out than it is to host. If you don't have the skills to host, it doesn't matter how much time you have, you won't host.

I have a 1930s vintage Hood (the milk company) "basic" cookbook. In it's 800 pages, it includes hundreds of pages about how to run the larder of a household including how to understand how a carcass is broken up (and how to do it yourself) so you can chat with some fundamentals with the butcher, rules of thumb for how to stock a brand new kitchen with tools and supplies and also how to plan for an entire month's worth of groceries and using the whole animal to stretch your budget, how to plan and prepare and set a large dinner party, how to preserve your food with several different canning methods, an entire section about coffee and how to be a gentle coffee snob (in the 30s!) and about a hundred pages of printed photos to illustrate those points. The chapter on cookies starts with two pages discussing cookies as an abstract concept!

This tome is just a tiny part of what used to be the "Woman's job". You could construct equivalently large tomes for most other tasks and duties and "Roles", especially the one about managing social networks!

But western society offloaded all that work to women so long ago that it largely forgot to even recognize it! When women were allowed to seek careers, quite frankly men did not pick up the slack at all. They basically just assumed all this stuff happened magically it seems. There was no institution that really worked to push this knowledge to people, as it previously was largely passed down mother to daughter outside of institutions, and no 90s era "home economics" classes didn't even come close, so the chain was broken and a lot of that knowledge just kind of didn't make it to younger generations!