Successful women rely on other women to reach leadership roles, study finds»

Landing an executive leadership role at a major company often requires making connections with the right people. Graduate students seeking high-ranking corporate jobs are encouraged to build a network of diverse and influential contacts, and avoid cliques.

That advice often works — for men. After all, the leaders of corporate America are overwhelmingly men: Women make up fewer than 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOS and fewer than a quarter of Fortune 500 board members, according to the Pew Research Center.

But for women, a new study suggests, networking like a man is simply not enough. For women seeking to break into a leadership position in the corporate world, the key to success may in fact lie in other women.

A study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the most successful female jobseekers from a top-ranked graduate school relied not only on a wide network of contacts, but also on a close inner circle of other women who provide support and gender-specific job advice.

“When you talk to students on the ground, many of them think, ‘The way for me to achieve the things I want in life is to emulate the network that men have,’ ” said Brian Uzzi, an author of the study and a leadership professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “Some women do, and those are the women who do the absolute worst.”

Corporate leaders are increasingly recruited directly from highly competitive graduate schools, so the study’s authors chose to focus on a group of 728 students in their late 20s and early 30s at a top-ranked graduate business program between 2006 and 2007. About three-quarters of the students were men, and about a quarter of them were women.

To examine the link be- tween students’ social networks and their eventual job placements, the authors analyzed 4.55 million emails sent among all the students. Then they collected data about each student’s job placement — including the industry sector, the regional location and the starting salary — to determine the level of leadership authority each student reached.

After controlling for factors such as a student’s work experience and academic performance, the authors found that students’ social networks strongly predicted their placement into leadership positions. Among the men, the more influential connections a male student had across the school-wide network, the higher his leadership placement would be.

But among women, the authors were surprised by the findings: 77 percent of the highest-achieving women had strong ties with an inner circle of two to three other women. The lowestachieving women had a male-dominated network and weaker ties with other women in their network.

Having a tightknit circle of female friends provided women with a support system as they navigated the job market. The women in these circles would share company information specific to women, such as details about a company’s workplace culture for women.

“That kind of support, we hypothesize, helps propel women into leadership positions,” said Nitesh Chawla, a co-author of the study and a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame. “They can apply for jobs that are a better match.”

When studying these close networks of women, the authors “found something else that made us put the brakes on everything,” Uzzi said. The inner circle itself was made up of women who are connected to one another. In other words, it created a clique, a kind of network that research has shown can create an echo chamber.