- Women who network with high-status people at work end up being viewed negatively by their colleagues, a new study shows
- Networking to advance in a career is useful advice for men, but can be harmful for women, according to research by Siyu Yu and Catherine Shea
Women who network with high-status people at work end up being viewed negatively by their colleagues, a new study shows.
Although the career adage is: network to get ahead; the advice applies to men, but can be detrimental to women, according to research by Siyu Yu and Catherine Shea.
“When women form instrumental networks with higher status colleagues, other colleagues react negatively – but not so to men – because of stereotypes and prejudices about how women should behave,” the university professors said. wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
“This reaction causes the women to lose status in the eyes of others,” the couple explained.
Previous research has tended to focus on men’s success and professional networking.
Catherine Shea is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University
Siyu Yu is an assistant professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan
One such study found that basketball coaches were speaking out about their connections to elite coaches greater chance of being hired by a legendary basketball program.
Yu and Shea’s study studied three field sites in China and surveyed more than 2,000 American adults to explore how people perceive men and women whose networks are filled with high-status individuals.
Each participant was asked to rate how much respect, admiration and influence each other colleague has in his or her unit, and to identify their personal networks.
A person’s status was calculated as an average of the ratings he received from all others.
Women who had built networks full of high-status contacts gradually lost status among their peers over time, rather than gaining a status boost.
The opposite results were reflected in the study for men.
“People generally don’t like dominant and ambitious female leaders, research shows,” wrote Yu, assistant professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan, and Shea, assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University.
Feminine stereotypes say that women – even more than men – should put the needs of the group and others above their own self-interest,” they explained.
“So we conclude that people assume that a woman whose network targets high-status individuals is amassing resources for herself at the expense of others in the group.”