Achieving Social Influence Across Gender and Time: Are Dominance and Prestige Equally Viable for Men and Women?

The dual framework of social rank allocation discusses dominance and prestige as two viable routes to status or social influence. In doing so, this literature has largely neglected findings demonstrating backlash against men and women for behaving in gender-incongruent ways. Likewise, it remains unclear if dominance and prestige continue to be effective means to status over time. This study investigates the viability of dominance or prestige in contributing to an individual’s social influence, conditional on their gender and across time. Using a stereotype-neutral context of an online social network, I unobtrusively tracked individuals’ changes in social influence among their network members on Twitter. By analyzing almost 230,000 tweets, it was found that men’s influence increased with greater dominance, whereas women’s decreased. At the same time, women’s influence increased with greater prestige, whereas men’s decreased. Network centrality (in-degree centrality) explained this differential interaction pattern. Additionally, longitudinal analysis provided a more nuanced understanding. Over time, role incongruence effects dampened, dominance became less effective, even for men, and prestige became viable for both men and women. Thus, by jointly considering the role of gender and time, this research offers key theoretical caveats to the dual rank framework.