Jeff Renaud

Women often need stronger and more complex professional networks than men to reach corporate leadership roles, according to a new Western-led study analyzing 20 years of data from more than 19,000 employees. The research, published today by the high impact journal Cell Patterns, also found that women with professional connections to other female leaders were more likely to be promoted. “Understanding how people get to these high-level positions can help us design effective interventions to support people across their careers, either at a policy level or through internal corporate governance,” said senior author Cristián Bravo, Canada Research Chair in Banking and Insurance Analytics. “We need to support people from the very beginning. We can’t just start when they’re already senior managers.” Despite incremental improvements in the past decade, women remain underrepresented in corporate boardrooms. Though networks are undoubtedly vital for career advancement, it’s not clear which networks are most influential or whether certain networks are helping or hindering initiatives to improve gender disparity, say the researchers. “You don’t see job postings for executives or board positions because those high-level positions are more grounded in network-based relationships,” said first author and financial mathematician Yuhao (Jet) Zhou, PhD candidate in Western’s department of statistical and actuarial sciences. “Our goal was to obtain a clearer view of how gender interactions within networks shape that path.”  

Women must be ‘excellent at everything’ to advance

The researchers analyzed publicly available data on the corporate leadership of 772 publicly traded Canadian firms between 2000 and 2022. The dataset included information on 19,395 senior employees, including their work history, educational background and social engagement, such as active memberships in clubs, organizations or charities. The team then used an AI deep learning model to map how each person’s social and professional network changed as their careers evolved and to identify factors that increased or decreased a person’s likelihood of advancement. The model was able to predict whether someone would make it to a director-level position with more than 80 per cent accuracy. Among the 19,395 employees studied, including 15,167 men and 4,228 women, 17 per cent of men (2,578 men) and 19.4 per cent of women (820 women) ultimately reached director-level roles. There was a gradual increase in the number of women granted first-time board appointments, reflecting initiatives that began in 2015 to promote gender diversity on corporate boards in Canada. The researchers note that the available data only included binary gender descriptions. When they compared the contribution of different networks for men and women with similar demographics and educational and professional experience, the researchers found notable differences between genders. The likelihood that a man attained a director-level position was determined in much higher relevance by his current employment, whereas past employment and current and past social networks weighed more heavily in women’s success. “The women who are making it to the top have to be excellent at everything,” said study co-author María Óskarsdóttir, lecturer in mathematical modelling at the University of Southampton, UK. “It’s not clear whether this is because that is what is demanded of women to succeed, or because there are fewer opportunities for women, so only the truly exceptional women make it.” To see how individuals assist the advancement of others in their network, the researchers also investigated the number and quality of connections for each existing board member. This analysis revealed that women who advanced to high-level positions were more likely to be well-connected to other female leaders. “Women that have been promoted to directors have been helping bring other women up,” said Bravo, professor in Western’s department of statistical and actuarial sciences. “These women are acting as bridges between communities that the traditional circles don’t easily reach because of structural inequalities that we have been dragging on for decades.” The findings show how invisible social processes affect hiring decisions, information which they hope will help in designing interventions to achieve better gender representation in leadership. “We have similar patterns in academia, so these insights and methods also could be generalized to other fields with gender inequality,” said Óskarsdóttir.