We know several reasons that men get ahead of women as
employees and entrepreneurs. There are cultural beliefs that men are better for
work and more committed to it than to family life. Men in powerful positions tend
to promote men because they are similar to them. And many occupations and forms
of entrepreneurship are seen as archetypically male, suggesting that parents
might consider advising their daughters against training to become a plumber or
a computer programmer. Given all these biases, would it be possible for one
more to exist?
Research by Mabel Abraham in Administrative Science Quarterly has uncovered one more form of discrimination in a sample of
entrepreneurs. It is a subtle one, but the effect is strong. Suppose an
entrepreneur wants to initiate a network connection with someone else in order
to start resource exchange -- as a customer, supplier, or collaborator. Would
it matter for a woman whether she initiates that contact directly or whether she
does so by asking another entrepreneur to make a referral? The answer is yes.
If the woman is engaged in a typically male activity, her contacts are much
less likely to refer her to their contacts. Why? Because women would not be the
usual choice for a transaction partner in that activity, and people worry about
how their referrals are judged by others.
Importantly, this effect is specific to women. Men engaged
in typically female activities are just as likely to be referred to contacts as
women. Women and men in neutral activities are just as likely to be referred to
contacts. It is only when referring women to their contacts in typically male
activities that people stop and think: is she the usual choice, or is there
something wrong about a woman doing this occupation or building this kind of
venture? Abraham’s analysis showed that the difference in results was sizable.
If an occupation was between 50 and 60 percent male, a man could expect to get about
5 more referrals than a woman would get each year, and this gap grew wider in
occupations with higher percentages of men (see the graph)
.
This difference is important because selectivity in
referrals occurs before any of the other biases. Once a woman has been referred
to a contact, that contact might still hold beliefs against the suitability of
women as entrepreneurs or might be a male who prefers to interact with other
males. Biased referrals mean that the potential connection can’t even decide
whether to discriminate (or not). The absence of a referral is already a form
of discrimination.
Given these effects, no wonder women entrepreneurs have to
build their own business networks: they are not getting help from others if
their occupation has a majority of men – as most highly paid occupations do. Abraham’s
research showed that when making direct contacts, rather than referrals, there
was no difference between women and men. So contrary to one popular belief,
women aren’t too shy to build networks. Instead, it is sometimes their male network
contacts who are reluctant to refer them to others.