Who is in your network? Will seeking out people just like you at work help your career?
By Aimee Hansen
Theglasshammer in 2015 is addressing the need for women and men to work better together and for men to champion and authorize talented women as well as recognizing talented men. Building your network with all sorts of people who can help you in your career is crucial.
According to an INSEAD study and other research, when you default to those with the same social identity as you at work, this can help or hinder individual performance.
Not surprisingly, the higher leaders are sitting, the more important it is, for their own benefit and the organization’s, to acknowledge and go beyond the leading lens of their own homophilic bias when structuring project teams. This matters for women since it is at the very psychological and behaviorial heart of what used to be the old boys club.
Does working with one group help or hinder your career?
Homophily and homophilic association is the tendency for people to seek out and have greater contact with those who remind them of themselves. Researchers Gokhan Ertug and Martin Gargiulo studied its impact in their INSEAD paper, “Does Homophily Affect Performance?”, observing the relationships of workers in the Equities division of a global investment bank. The study focused on the variable of nationality – controlling other diversity factors like ethnicity, gender, age, religion, education and occupation.
The study confirmed that unsurprisingly employees were more likely to seek out those like themselves when they needed information or advice on a task-related topic. What differed is the outcome of this bias at different levels.
INSEAD found that while homophily helped more junior employees overcome the barrier to accessing information and getting other’s attention to improve performance, it actually created a barrier to performance amongst upper management, who already hold legitimacy and power within the company.
INSEAD researchers stated, “we find that while the tendency to build homophilous ties has a positive effect on the performance of people in the entry rank among bonus-eligible bankers (associate directors in our sample), the same tendency has a negative effect on the performance of employees who are above this entry rank.”
The paper continued, “Relying on similar people to form instrumental ties can be an effective survival strategy for people facing significant difficulties in securing access to the information and knowledge they need to carry out their jobs in the organization. At the same time, sticking to such a strategy when it is no longer necessary can harm performance.”
For executive at more senior levels, homophily became blinding, leading senior employees to ignore qualified colleagues who could help them succeed. The researchers proposed the trade-off homophily can create, “We argue that, while homophily might make it easier for workers to request and obtain knowledge from colleagues, it might also prompt them to approach less qualified colleagues.”
Though it did not correlate to individual performance impact, the INSTEAD study also found secondarily that bankers were more likely to seek task-related inputs from colleagues of the same age, tenure and gender. The implication would seem to follow that low female representation in boardrooms and at senior executive levels suggests lower indirect female influence and access at a senior level too.
Women in the boardroom pose a financial advantage. But if female influence is lost to gender homophily, that’s an advantage companies are not harvesting. A study in the Journal of Business Ethics concludes “Women on the board are positively related with financial performance (measured in terms of return on assets and return on sales) and with ethical and social compliance, which in turn are positively related with firm value.”
Network Closure for Women
A very recent longitudinal study by Mark Lutter to appear in the American Sociological Review toplined “Do Women Suffer from Network Closure?” analyzes gender dynamics in the film industry across 81 years and provided intriguing insight into contexts in which women are more likely to be closed out by homophilious dynamics within a project-based labor market. The study “shows how observed career inequalities between males and females decrease or increase through different forms of network embeddedness.”
The researcher builds on prior research to propose that “gender inequality is particularly striking when women are exposed to cohesive project teams during their careers, whereas gender inequality is less severe when they are involved in weaker, more diverse network structures.”
How can more diverse structures support gender equity? Lutter explains, “This is because information flow in cohesive networks is likely to be redundant and gender-homophilous, which creates stronger disadvantages for women compared to men, because women’s close information networks are lower in status and consist of fewer ties to important (mostly male) sponsors. In diverse networks, however, information is non-redundant, non-exclusive, and beneficial especially to women, because women face fewer network constraints and can more strategically exploit external, weak tie relationships.”
In other words, tight male top-dominated networks function to keep the status quo. Within them, homophily amongst men works against women, and yes, homophily amongst women works against women, too.
Lutter’s report further states, “The more open and diverse team structures become, the more gender equality can be expected in project-based career advancement.”
Networking Opportunity for Women?
Gender homophily amongst women may also serve as a powerful tool for women, if they leverage it as a passport to cross other organizational barriers.
A Harvard Business School paper observed that while both sexes showed gender-based homophily, “it is women more than men who tend to bridge formal structural boundaries in organizations.” While women had the same number of male contacts as males in the studied firm, “they span organizational boundaries in their ties to other women, connecting otherwise disconnected populations, at a higher rate than do men.”
The results suggest (but not prove) that, “homophilous interaction can actually help to span formal organizational boundaries that are otherwise difficult to traverse.” At an individual level, homophily can be a tool for women networking out and up, if women also remember the importance of looking beyond it, and don’t neglect the need for male sponsors and mentors.
In Summary
Homophily is a bias wielded by both sexes that can help and hurt at an individual level based on where you sit, but ultimately it is more foe than friend when it comes to moving organizations towards diversity and gender equity. Women simply do not have the numbers at higher level management to mitigate this bias. The inevitable disadvantage to career progression remains with women as long as men disproportionately dominate executive positions, and leadership circles remain tight.
Real change will come when the organizations realize the disadvantage lies also with them.
