Who Says Women Shouldn't Network? Mindsets That Predict and Reduce Bias Against Female Networkers

ABSTRACT Given the growing recognition that women's professional networks tend to be less effective than men's, understanding what barriers impede women from building and leveraging social capital is an important agenda for workplace equality. Drawing on research documenting pervasive gender bias that penalizes women for engaging in instrumental networking, we designed four experiments to examine questions that have eluded sustained inquiry in the literature on gender and networks: who holds bias against women who network, why, and how to debias them. We find that gender bias does not occur uniformly but depends on the mindsets people hold about networking: people who view networking ability in terms of a person's fixed attributes like demographics or personality traits (fixed theorists) are more likely to view female networkers as stereotypically cold than those who attribute networking to effort (growth theorists). This was the case whether people described a male or female networker they knew in person (Experiment 1), read about a male versus female networker (Experiment 2), or interacted with a “bogus stranger” who engaged in professional networking (Experiment 3). Finally, experimentally inducing growth theories mitigated the backlash (Experiment 4). Based on these findings, we discuss how taking lay perspectives on the nature of agency in networks informs our understanding of how to combat bias against female networkers.