FOR WOMEN JOB SEEKERS, NETWORKING LIKE A MAN ISN'T ENOUGH

EMILY DREYFUSS

TO GET A great job, you’ve got to network—make contacts, know the right people. You know the drill. But a study out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the kind of networking that works best for men isn’t enough for women.

Women need access to key kinds of information that men don’t. And how can they get it? From other women.

The study looked specifically at graduates of a prestigious MBA program, using these students' emails to map out their social networks. (The program is not named in the study to protect student privacy.) For both men and women in the program, landing highly ranked leadership positions was correlated with having “high centrality” in their peer network, meaning they are connected to other well-connected peers across their social network. These kinds of contacts provide helpful information for job seekers, like who’s hiring, what salaries look like, and what a company’s reputation is. But the researchers found that high-placing women shared an additional characteristic: In addition to high centrality that would give them access to general job information, they also had a tight-knit inner circle of other well-connected women.

That tight-knit circle of other women provides a crucial benefit to women job seekers—what the authors of the study refer to as “gender-specific private information and support.” That means insight into questions such as the following: Does this company treat women well? Are women leaders respected? Is this a hostile work environment? Is the company looking to increase its gender diversity? The study authors hypothesize that the answers to these questions help women apply to jobs that better fit them, tailor their interviews to the work culture, and negotiate better. Men, conversely, don’t need to worry so much about whether a potential new job will be a hostile or supportive fit because of their gender.

“Quite frankly, most of the jobs are still male-dominated and therefore the kind of private information that's so important to help women get ahead isn't as important to men's advancement,” says Northwestern University data scientist Brian Uzzi, the lead author on the study.

Of the top Fortune 500 companies, only 25 had women CEOs as of 2018, a meager 5 percent. Women in male-dominated fields face all sorts of hurdles, not just in breaking into positions of power, but also once they attain them. Women make less than men in their same positions, face bias around motherhood and maternity leave, and are often asked to do more “feminine” tasks (such as service or secretarial work) unrelated to their actual job, among other gender inequities.

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