The Name Game or the Gender Game?

It’s all about who you know, right? Well, almost. New research from Mays Business School shows that when it comes to job hunting and salary, who a woman’s potential employer thinks she knows can influence salary more than who she actually knows.

Assistant Professor of Management Maura A. Belliveau’s paper, “Blind Ambition? The Effect of Social Networks and Institutional Sex Composition on the Job Search Outcomes of Elite Coeducational and Women’s College Graduates,” addresses factors influencing salary offers among women graduates of comparable coeducational and single-sex liberal arts colleges.

Belliveau’s paper, published in the March/April issue of Organization Science, shows that women’s college students received lower salary offers (but not fewer job offers) than their coeducational counterparts. In Belliveau’s sample from the 1990s, offers for women’s college graduates were approximately $3,000 lower, even after accounting for qualifications, job characteristics and job search networks.

Belliveau finds that although women are frequently advised to network — particularly with men — to increase their pay, women job seekers only obtain salary benefits from their male network ties when they attended institutions that were coeducational. Employers expect coeducational graduates to have such ties, Belliveau hypothesized, and make offers based on the assumption that these women possess better information about prevailing salary offers because of perceived network gender diversity.

Job seekers attending women’s colleges would not receive a payoff because employers assume these women lack male ties — and the salary information that such ties could provide – even if such ties are developed and used in search.

“If a recruiter believes that you are constrained in who you network with and that as a result you don’t have information on the best offers being made for a given job, they’re not going to give you higher pay,” says Belliveau. “The payoff to networks comes not just when you have those ties, but when people who are recruiting you believe that you have those ties.”

The study took into account factors such as each woman’s academic achievement and profession and whether she had negotiated in the job search process. Belliveau’s analyses showed that employers did not view the women’s colleges as less rigorous or elite than the coeducational school in her sample, nor did the women’s college graduates develop and use job search ties to men less extensively than their coeducational counterparts.

“My finding that all women did not benefit from the hard work they invested in developing and using social network ties is particularly striking,” says Belliveau. That means women being aggressive in networking is not enough. She says they must also demonstrate during recruiting just how much they have networked and convey a thorough understanding of maximum pay ranges within their fields to get the best salary offers.

Because of the practical as well as theoretical importance of this work, Belliveau will continue to research gender and network effects on job search success.

“Practitioners and academics are both very excited about this paper,” says Belliveau, whose expertise on compensation and careers has made her a source for articles in Fast Company, Business Week, Fortune and The Economist. “The paper challenges the existing focus of scholars studying gender and occupational attainment as well as the standard advice provided by individuals who advise women about job search.”

- Alycia C. Zuehlke



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