Working capital
Frances Rosenbluth explores the role that networks can play in bolstering women's representation in the personal, professional and political arenas
Women fortunate enough to live in rich democracies have made great strides towards parity with men across an array of domains. The gender wage gap has narrowed substantially alongside a growth in female workforce participation, suggesting increased demand for female labour. More women are entering managerial and professional careers, which they often maintain through their childbearing years. More women than ever serve as political representatives on the national stage, though this is truer of some countries than others.
Yet a closer look at the evidence reveals that, around the world, women are still having to choose between family and career in a way that men are not. Women who choose to stay in the fast lane have, on average, fewer children than their male counterparts, and there are fewer women than men in the top ranks in virtually every field of human endeavour. A generation ago, we thought it was only a matter of time before the newly educated women could take their place at the table, but old patterns persist. Why?
In searching for the smoking gun, we should turn to the large and persistent gender imbalances in professional networks. While women tend to be better connected overall - a phenomenon amplified in recent years by access to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter - their networks typically fail to reach the boardroom. Women's extensive lateral connections grow thinner in the higher altitudes of power and authority, which are still disproportionately dominated by white men. Men's networks pave a vertical path to influence, while women maintain extensive lateral networks among friends. Twitter and Facebook still do not pack the same career punch as the golf course and the gentlemen's club. 
The gender gap in high-status networks impedes female success in business and politics at the very top, but unevenly across sectors. Women tend to be under-represented in professions that depend on continuous client contact, such as law or investment banking. The problem is that professional networks are often built outside working hours, when many women with young children are at home. The human capital that men accumulate early in their careers when they are able to work longer hours, at flexible times, consists not only in on-the-job learning but also in the relationships that they have built. As long as child-rearing duties are shared unequally between the sexes, women will be at a professional disadvantage. Given the uneven starting point, equalising opportunities for advancement may require taxpayers or civic groups to subsidise compensatory investment in female human capital.
Patterns of gender inequality often reflect differences in labour markets from one country to another. In most of continental Europe, the public sector is not large enough to be an engine of female employment, so there tend to be fewer working women than in Scandinavia, where the government passes on the cost of career interruption among female public sector workers to the taxpayer. This enables women to remain comfortably above the poverty line, although they are still under-represented in corporate management. In countries such as the US and the UK, the fluidity of the labour market means that more women wind up in managerial jobs; however, even here, most female employment clusters at the lower end of the skills ladder. Only 3 percent of the executives in the Fortune 500 are women - a sign that family-related career discontinuity is especially costly at the top.
Recalculating value
Some industries have begun to introduce initiatives aimed at giving men and women an equal chance of professional success. Innovations such as 'flexitime' have allowed more employees to work from home or to log irregular hours around family responsibilities, but this poses two problems. First, most firms seeking managerial talent continue to use billable hours as a measure of promise and productivity, which means that undivided attention to work leads not only to a bigger pay packet, but also to higher hourly wages and more upward mobility. Second, working mothers who are unavailable after hours tend to miss out on valuable opportunities for building relationships and can find themselves out of the running for the top professional jobs, which capitalise on the 'rainmaking' (client-building) power of networks. Thus, flexitime provides a short-term fix that allows women to stay employed at the cost of advancement to the top.
Other potential innovations are equally risky. For example, laws against redundancies in European welfare states can be harmful, as they encourage firms to avoid hiring and promoting women, regardless of equal opportunity laws. Similarly, laws that require firms to provide more generous parental leave and/or childcare facilities can, ironically, disadvantage women if they are known disproportionately to take up these benefits. Even more radical incentives, such as Sweden's introduction of two months of take-it-or-leave-it paternity leave, have helped equalise career interruption to some degree, but the much longer period of leave (up to 18 months) taken by most Swedish women continues to tilt the deck.
So what are the alternatives to traditional incentives? The importance of networks for career success at the highest level suggests two possible policy interventions. One, admittedly politically ambitious, is to offer tax incentives to firms that employ female managers, helping to offset the financial loss from women's presumed failure to contribute equal network power to the corporate bottom line. Take a firm with 10 male partners, each of whom is thought to bring E10-worth of value from networks. A government tax benefit of E50 for gender parity would offset the expected E50 loss that results from having five male and five female partners. Initially, this would give firms a financial incentive to invest in women's network power. In the longer term, the need for a tax benefit would disappear as firms used their ingenuity to create ways for women to build potent business relationships.
A second possibility is for nonprofit organisations to invest in substitutes for out-of-hours networking. Foundations and civic groups could fund networking opportunities for women to develop professional relationships at the highest levels of business and government. The quickest gains would be for women without children who are nonetheless the targets of 'statistical discrimination' because of their actuarial likelihood of being weak networkers. Ideally, networking events would take place during family-friendly working hours. Over time, employers would realise the value of enlarging the pool of potential managerial talent.
Women lag behind men in their access to professional networks, not only because of social inertia but also because firms, however good their intentions, have incentives to hire and promote the workers with the most to contribute to the corporate bottom line. Gender equality will remain out of reach until women and men have a statistically equal shot at being productive, which at the top of the career ladder invariably includes the difficult-to-quantify but real value of network power. Like many of society's thorniest problems, it is both hard to fix and worth doing.
Frances McCall Rosenbluth is Damon Wells professor of international politics at Yale University.
| Get involved The Women Speakers' Network is a new initiative that aims to encourage more women to participate in public speaking, using events, mentoring and coaching. Anyone interested in the project should email Louise Burfitt-Dons FRSA or join the network's group on the RSA Fellowship Social Network. |
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