Women who Network: Obstacles and Approaches
While workplace relationships with high-status colleagues is helpful in advancing careers, decades of research has found that building these relationships is more challenging for women than for men.
One challenge is that confidence and assertiveness are typically required for lower-status workers to make these connections. Owing to gender bias, women exhibiting these traits are often perceived as pushy or arrogant. Self-promoting or refraining from doing so to avoid backlash are both obstacles to women creating strong collaborative connections with high-status individuals.
Women do have one networking advantage over men, researchers found: they are about one-third times more likely to form high-status connections through third-party ties—intermediaries who can introduce a lower-status worker to their high-status connection. These third-party ties are particularly helpful to women, researchers Carla Rua-Gomez et al. found, “Because they are not mere connections; they are endorsements, character references, and amplifiers of capability. They carry the implicit approval and trust of the mutual contact.” This endorsement can help override any biases the high-status connection might subconsciously or consciously hold.