Our social network is clearly hugely important in terms of our success (or otherwise) in the labor market. For instance, it’s widely believed that large and loosely connected networks give us better access to information, whereas smaller and tightly formed networks lead to more peer pressure. The benefits of each form of network differs depending upon the work environment, with information typically better in uncertain work environments, whereas peer pressure is more beneficial in more certain work environments.
New research from Yale University highlights the differences in how men and women network, with loose networks most common among men, and tight networks most common among women. It’s a finding the researchers believe highlights why men are more likely to self-select themselves into occupations involving high-risk decisions, with women gravitating towards sectors such as healthcare and education.
Different networks
The analysis found that looser social networks tend to facilitate greater information sharing, which allows those with such networks to make smarter decisions about the projects they have before them. By contrast, a tight network is more valuable in more stable environments where such information acquisition is not so important. The researchers explain that these tighter networks, due to the closeness of relationships between members, can be more prone to peer pressure, which in turn makes the ‘cost’ of failure higher. As such, those with tighter networks often choose projects with lower risk of failure.
The researchers cite the academic world as an area where looser networks might work well, as projects typically have very uncertain outcomes. Similarly, they believe areas such as management and finance are equally uncertain and unpredictable.
The findings emerged after an analysis of data from Digital Bibliographic Library Browser’s computer science set (438,531 men and 146,829 women), email communications from Enron (1,628 women and 2,298 men), and AddHealth’s friendship networks which is composed of information from roughly 140 US schools (73,244 students).
It emerged that women typically had tighter and more interconnected networks with a higher degree of clustering. By contrast, men were more likely to have larger networks with looser connections.
The researchers went on to discover that women performed worse relative to men in a range of high risk occupations, and suggest that the networking structures may be a major factor in this outcome. What’s more, they believe it to be a largely overlooked source of wage differences, especially in these high risk occupations.
“We were surprised to learn that men’s and women’s networks differ in these drastic ways, with the differences being robust across very distinct environments,” the researchers conclude. “We hope that our findings spark more research into the importance of network structure for labour market outcomes, not only but also to better understand gender gaps in the labour market.”
