If Men Have Better Business Networks, We’re Just Not Trying
Quick! If you’re a woman with a male domestic partner, husband, lover, boyfriend, or friend with benefits, who has the larger social network?
No brainer, right?
You do.
Yet the Economist reports today that men promote other men so much more frequently than we do that social scientists believe the networking gap accounts for all the pay and leadership inequity in the upper reaches of business and finance.
Let’s not ignore gender bias, but frankly, ladies, no one in power gives it away. They might share it quid pro quo, but they don’t wake up one sunny New York City morning and say, “I think I’ll help a woman achieve pay equity today.”
The Economist article, Networking and pay: Contact sports, notes that men are “better at developing passing acquaintances into a network, and better at maintaing a high personal profile through these contacts.”
The Economist piece doesn’t ignore gender challenges, acknowledging that women may “also be hurt by the existing dominance of men on boards and a male preference for filling executive positions with other men.”
Nevertheless, the present “tendency to think of other men first will be amplified if talented women don’t stay on the radar.”
What To Do?
Get on the short list of the people with power to enhance your career. This means men’s lists, ladies, not simply the happy, cooperative and collaborative networks of business women you’ve been developing, all of which is to the good, but most of which is operating below the highest levels of economic and political power everywhere in the world.
