Women use professional and social networks to push past the glass ceiling

(Press-News.org) To understand how professional networks contribute to persistent gender disparities in corporate leadership, researchers analyzed data from more than 19,000 corporate employees over 20 years. Publishing March 12 in the Cell Press journal Patterns, their results show that educational, employment, and social networks matter for both men and women, but women rely on more complex social networks to reach director-level positions than men. Women with professional ties to other female leaders were also more likely to be promoted.  

“Understanding how people get to these high-level positions can help us design effective interventions to support people across their careers, either at a policy level or through internal corporate governance,” says senior author Cristián Bravo (@cribravo.bsky.social) of Western University, Canada. “We need to support people from the very beginning. We can’t just start when they’re already senior managers.” 

Despite incremental improvements in the past decade, women remain underrepresented in corporate boardrooms. Though networks are undoubtedly vital for career advancement, it’s not clear which networks are most influential, or whether certain networks are helping or hindering initiatives to improve gender disparity, say the researchers. 

“You don’t see job postings for executives or board positions, because those high-level positions are more grounded in network-based relationships,” says first author and financial mathematician Yuhao (Jet) Zhou of Western University, Canada. “Our goal was to obtain a clearer view of how gender interactions within networks shape the path to board appointments.” 

The researchers analyzed publicly available data on the corporate leadership of 772 publicly traded Canadian firms between 2000 and 2022. The dataset included information on 19,395 senior employees, including their work history, educational background, and social engagement, such as active memberships in clubs, organizations, or charities. Then, the team used an AI deep-learning model to retrospectively map how each person’s social and professional network changed as their careers evolved and to identify factors that increased or decreased a person’s likelihood of advancement. 

The team found that out of 15,167 men and 4,228 women, 17% of men and 19.4% of women eventually secured director positions. There was a gradual increase in the number of women granted first-time board appointments, reflecting initiatives that began in 2015 to promote gender diversity on corporate boards in Canada. The researchers note that the available data only included binary gender descriptions. 

When they compared the contribution of different networks for men and women with similar demographics and educational and professional experience, the researchers found notable differences between genders. The likelihood that a man attained a director-level position was mostly determined by his current employment, whereas past employment and current and past social networks weighed more heavily in women’s success.  

“The women who are making it to the top have to be excellent at everything,” says coauthor and mathematical modeler María Óskarsdóttir of the University of Southampton, UK. “It’s not clear whether this is because that is what is demanded of women to succeed, or because there are fewer opportunities for women, so only the truly exceptional women make it.” 

To see how individuals assist the advancement of others in their network, the researchers also investigated the number and quality of connections for each existing board member. This analysis revealed that women who advanced to high-level positions were more likely to be well-connected to other female leaders. 

“Women that have been promoted to directors have been helping bring other women up,” says Bravo. “These women are acting as bridges between communities that the traditional circles don’t easily reach because of structural inequalities that we have been dragging on for decades.” 

The findings show how invisible social processes affect hiring decisions, the researchers say—information which they hope will help in designing interventions to achieve better gender representation in leadership.  

“We have similar patterns in academia, so these insights and methods also could be generalized to other fields with gender inequality,” says Óskarsdóttir.  

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This research was supported by funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Icelandic Research Fund, the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Government of Ontario. 

Patterns, Zhou et al., “Unveiling gender disparities in corporate board career paths using deep learning” https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(26)00004-8

Patterns (@Patterns_CP), published by Cell Press, is a data science journal publishing original research focusing on solutions to the cross-disciplinary problems that all researchers face when dealing with data, as well as articles about datasets, software code, algorithms, infrastructures, etc., with permanent links to these research outputs. Visit: https://www.cell.com/patterns. To receive Cell Press media alerts, please contact press@cell.com.  

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