How female academics can turn network awareness into advancement
You may also like
Networks structure much of academic life. As in many professions, achievement depends on more than isolated work, talent and persistence. Professional connections shape collaboration and the exchange of ideas and information, and they influence which scholars gain access to opportunities. Crucially, these effects depend not only on having the right connections but on understanding how those connections are structured.
Academic networks are not evenly connected. They are organised into dense clusters, such as disciplines, departments and research groups, with relatively few connections between them. This structure runs deep, appearing within institutions, faculties or even departments, where academics tend to form close-knit and cohesive networks within their disciplinary areas but interact less frequently across them.
- Why ECRs should have the courage to contact their academic heroes
- Beyond overexposure: how academics can reclaim agency on LinkedIn
- Why employability gaps widen as academic identity deepens
Connections with academic colleagues who are not directly connected can be particularly valuable, as research has long shown. What is less often recognised is that perceiving these patterns of connection and disconnection depends on how individuals mentally represent social networks. Academics need to understand not only their own professional ties but also how others are connected to each other, or not connected at all, to identify potentially meaningful disconnections in the social structure.
Gender differences in network perceptions
How this “network awareness” varies by gender is examined in my recent study, co-authored with Matthew Brashears of the University of South Carolina, Helena González-Gómez of Neoma Business School and Raina Brands of UCL. We find that women are, on average, more accurate than men at recalling who is connected to whom in their professional environment.
This pattern, however, is contingent on network structure. In closed, cohesive networks, such as tightly knit departments or labs, women map relationships with notable accuracy. By contrast, this advantage fades in more open networks marked by “structural holes”, where relationships are sparser and less interconnected. In these settings, women and men are equally accurate in recalling connections.
Why does this matter? Open networks, which span otherwise disconnected people across disciplines, institutions or regions, are characteristic of positions associated with brokerage, visibility, access to new ideas and career-accelerating opportunities. As a result, women’s advantage in cohesive networks does not automatically translate into advantage in these more open environments where influence and opportunity tend to grow. This helps explain why women are consistently found to be less likely than men to occupy such brokerage positions, despite often demonstrating strong relational awareness.
The challenge of recalling disconnections
The challenge both men and women face, then, is not only to develop relationships but to understand where relationships matter. This requires being aware of disconnections: recognising where collaborations or exchanges simply don’t exist, which implies forming an accurate understanding of where these gaps lie. If women’s relational advantage – their strength in mapping cohesive networks – doesn’t extend to these more open structures, they may be less likely to identify or occupy them. As a result, they risk losing visibility and influence in precisely those parts of the network where careers tend to accelerate.
In short, before individuals can act to create connections or build bridges, they need to learn to see the gaps, to recognise opportunity structures before deciding how to respond to them.
Why perception matters
Our research suggests that gender differences in network perception are not a matter of ability but of mental schemas – cognitive shortcuts people use to make sense of complex social environments. Individuals who are frequently exposed to tightly connected settings, such as cohesive research teams or small departments, tend to develop expectations of dense and closed networks. These schemas facilitate accurate perception in cohesive environments.
However, the same mental schemas are less suited to open networks characterised by many disconnections. In these contexts, relying on expectations of cohesion can obscure structural holes rather than reveal them. As a result, accuracy in perceiving open networks does not automatically follow from experience in closed ones.
Practical steps for women academics
- Map your own network. Identify your close and more distant collaborators and the relationships among them. Pay attention to the disconnections between the people who are part of your network.
- Confirm with observation. Observe the connections among your collaborators directly or indirectly to confirm your perceptions.
- Revise and map iteratively. Update the map based on your observations, keeping it as a dynamic record of the social world around you.
- Identify opportunities created by disconnections. Having an accurate representation of a professional network is a prerequisite for recognising where disconnections exist. These disconnections may point to coordination challenges, missed collaborations or brokerage positions, and open the door to a range of appropriate responses.
From awareness to advancement
Taken together, these findings suggest that network awareness alone does not guarantee career advantage. Women often demonstrate high accuracy in perceiving cohesive, tightly knit networks, yet this advantage does not automatically extend to more open network structures where many career-relevant opportunities arise.
Because individuals can only act on the networks they perceive, systematic differences in network perception can have downstream consequences for visibility, influence and access to opportunity. When open networks are harder to perceive accurately, they are also harder to navigate strategically.
This perspective shifts attention away from individual deficits and towards the alignment between cognitive strengths and the network structures that academic careers tend to reward. Persistent gender inequalities may therefore reflect not only differences in access or behaviour but also differences in how network structures are perceived and cognitively managed.
Eric Quintane is associate professor of organisational behaviour at ESMT Berlin.
If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.
