Network and net worth. A longitudinal study of women’s and men’s social networks in Swedish business education and their effect on career outcomes.
Despite increased gender equality and a healthy representation of women among business graduates, few women reach the absolute top of the corporate world. Research in this area has highlighted women s and men s unequal access to essential social networks as an important cause of the underrepresentation of women. Women seem to have both inferior access to networks and less advantage of the networks they create. However, there is still a lack of precise answers to how such network differences arise, and how they evolve over time.
In this research project, we study how gender differences in career networks arise and develop among students in elite business education, as well as the significance of these differences for women s and men s early career development. The study will be conducted at the Stockholm School of Economics, where we follow two cohorts of Master s students from the time they start their education until they become established in the labour market. We combine a quantitative survey of students networks – through annual web-based surveys and social media analysis – with in-depth interview studies focusing on qualitative aspects of their networking. We then relate these insights to early career outcomes, such as job position and salary.
The project aims to increase knowledge about how gender differences in business elites arise and are reproduced, and the effects thereof. The results are therefore of utmost relevance for both scientific and public debate.
Final report
The purpose and development of the project.
Despite increased equality and good representation of women among graduates in business and economics, few women reach top positions in business. Research in the field has highlighted women’s and men’s unequal access to important social networks as an important explanation for women’s underrepresentation. Women seem to have both poorer access to important networks and less benefit from the networks they create. However, knowledge is still lacking about how such network differences arise and how they develop over time.
The present research project aimed to study gender differences in career-promoting networks among students at a top-ranked economics education, and what significance these possible differences have for women’s and men’s early career development. The study was planned to be carried out at the Stockholm School of Economics, where we would follow two cohorts of master’s students from the start of their education until they established themselves in the labor market. We have combined a quantitative survey of students’ networks - through annual web-based surveys where we asked a large number of questions about background, study results, personality, engagement and not least a network module where we asked students to identify which of their fellow students they spent time with - with in-depth interview studies that focus on qualitative aspects of students’ networking, where we asked questions about students’ experience of education and their thoughts on networking.
About the implementation
The project has largely followed a defined research plan, with a number of adjustments:
1. We investigated bachelor’s programs instead of master’s programs. This is because it turned out that the most important networks are formed at the basic level.
2. We started a year later. We had a cooperation agreement with HHS from 2017, but when GDPR won legal force in May 2018, it meant that HHS internally needed to straighten out question marks about the study in relation to their new GDPR policy. This was done in a good way, but since our design is completely focused on studying the first two months of education, we missed the 2018 cohort and had to start in 2019 instead.
3. We have added two more schools compared to the original plan. In the uncertainty about whether HHS would need to withdraw, additional elite education was recruited for the study: Industrial Economics (Indek) at KTH and the economics program at the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg. In a separate project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, we also studied the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki and made a comparison with the Swedish educations.
4. The corona pandemic affected students’ ability to interact with each other, especially cohorts 2020-2021, and thus our ability to market the study.
5. The project would originally also have included a sub-study that for validation purposes would have studied students’ networking in social media. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out in 2018 and Facebook banned the data collection tools that we had planned to use in its wake, we assessed it as impossible to continue with it.
Below we describe the three most important results from the study:
1. Female and male economics students’ networking differs. Men have larger networks than women. Overall, female students experience studies as more stressful and significantly doubt their own ability to cope with them than men. Qualitatively, we have also been able to distinguish gender differences in network strategies. The students who apply the most network-conscious strategy - “super-networkers” - and consciously work to move between different groups and be nice to everyone for future gain, as well as those who apply the least network-oriented strategy - those who are completely study-focused - are exclusively men. Female students seem to apply different types of hybrid strategies, where they constantly weigh the social against the academic dimensions of education, albeit to varying degrees.
2. The students at the Stockholm School of Economics stand out. SSE students have significantly larger social networks than students in other programs. This difference remains stable over time and seems to be related to higher interpersonal trust between students at the school. In ongoing analyses, we are therefore working with the hypothesis that the power of socialization is stronger at SSE than at other schools and examining various factors, both qualitative and quantitative. Furthermore, SSE students express higher life satisfaction but also significantly greater stress over study results and are more often a student type that goes under the working title “neurotic overachievers”. Furthermore, SSE students show significantly more signs of narcissistic traits.
3. The Covid pandemic had important network consequences. Our three institutions applied different restrictions for physical attendance, but the average networks shrink for all students during the pandemic compared to before. Women’s networks shrink less than men’s during the pandemic. The importance of students’ political views for networking also swings significantly during the pandemic. While political sympathies did not seem to matter for network size in 2019, we see during the pandemic years 2020 and 2021 a development where students with sympathies in the middle and to the right of the political spectrum tend to have smaller social networks.
Possible new research questions.
The pandemic’s effects on economics students’ networks require more analysis. Although our empirical instruments have been able to capture differences, we did not have theoretical knowledge of how exogenous shocks can affect network structure and quality. Here we have received project grants from the Crafoord Foundation and Handelsbanken’s research foundations for corona-specific analyses of our dataset during 2023 and 2024.
A question that has arisen in connection with the project is whether different schools have different capacities to “create” elites. What characteristics and types of capital can organizations give their students? How can education affect students’ values, interaction styles and hobbies, and sense of belonging to an “elite”? Our upcoming book is built around these thoughts.
Another question is career choices and career outcomes but also in the long term how the networks formed at these schools are used in the long run. Students from these programs often get leading positions. Our long-term hope is to be able to follow our cohorts for as long as possible to follow the development of networks.
Finally, we would also like to return to our original idea of a study of what networks look like on social media by doing a “retroactive” study of how networks on platforms such as LinkedIn predict career outcomes."
How the project group has disseminated research and results and whether and how collaboration has taken place.
Our main channel for disseminating research is our publications. Contact with the universities and students at these has been very important to us, both to create legitimacy for the project and to be able to continuously provide feedback on our results. We are deeply grateful for the help we have received through university management, program management, student unions and individual efforts. The internationalization of research was complicated by the pandemic, but we have collaborated with, among others, the elite network group at Copenhagen Business School, led by sociologists Anton Grau Larsen and Christoph Houman Ellersgaard. We are in the process of co-authoring several different articles together with external researchers, including Professor Jannie Tienari (Hanken) on comparisons between Finnish and Swedish students’ elite networks, and with doctoral student Hilma Lindskog (GU), where we focus on students’ political values. Two master’s theses in business administration have been written as part of the project, one at Hanken on gender-specific preferences in choice of master’s program (VT 19) and one at UU on students’ social strategies during the first semester of education (VT23). Results from research will also be presented in 2023 at Sunbelt, APSA Annual Meeting and in Helsinki. Finally, we have had great pleasure from our Advisory Board - Lars Engwall, Stefan Svallfors, Charlotte Holgersson and Christopher Edling - who have consistently supported us and provided feedback on texts and ideas.
Despite increased equality and good representation of women among graduates in business and economics, few women reach top positions in business. Research in the field has highlighted women’s and men’s unequal access to important social networks as an important explanation for women’s underrepresentation. Women seem to have both poorer access to important networks and less benefit from the networks they create. However, knowledge is still lacking about how such network differences arise and how they develop over time.
The present research project aimed to study gender differences in career-promoting networks among students at a top-ranked economics education, and what significance these possible differences have for women’s and men’s early career development. The study was planned to be carried out at the Stockholm School of Economics, where we would follow two cohorts of master’s students from the start of their education until they established themselves in the labor market. We have combined a quantitative survey of students’ networks - through annual web-based surveys where we asked a large number of questions about background, study results, personality, engagement and not least a network module where we asked students to identify which of their fellow students they spent time with - with in-depth interview studies that focus on qualitative aspects of students’ networking, where we asked questions about students’ experience of education and their thoughts on networking.
About the implementation
The project has largely followed a defined research plan, with a number of adjustments:
1. We investigated bachelor’s programs instead of master’s programs. This is because it turned out that the most important networks are formed at the basic level.
2. We started a year later. We had a cooperation agreement with HHS from 2017, but when GDPR won legal force in May 2018, it meant that HHS internally needed to straighten out question marks about the study in relation to their new GDPR policy. This was done in a good way, but since our design is completely focused on studying the first two months of education, we missed the 2018 cohort and had to start in 2019 instead.
3. We have added two more schools compared to the original plan. In the uncertainty about whether HHS would need to withdraw, additional elite education was recruited for the study: Industrial Economics (Indek) at KTH and the economics program at the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg. In a separate project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, we also studied the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki and made a comparison with the Swedish educations.
4. The corona pandemic affected students’ ability to interact with each other, especially cohorts 2020-2021, and thus our ability to market the study.
5. The project would originally also have included a sub-study that for validation purposes would have studied students’ networking in social media. When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out in 2018 and Facebook banned the data collection tools that we had planned to use in its wake, we assessed it as impossible to continue with it.
Below we describe the three most important results from the study:
1. Female and male economics students’ networking differs. Men have larger networks than women. Overall, female students experience studies as more stressful and significantly doubt their own ability to cope with them than men. Qualitatively, we have also been able to distinguish gender differences in network strategies. The students who apply the most network-conscious strategy - “super-networkers” - and consciously work to move between different groups and be nice to everyone for future gain, as well as those who apply the least network-oriented strategy - those who are completely study-focused - are exclusively men. Female students seem to apply different types of hybrid strategies, where they constantly weigh the social against the academic dimensions of education, albeit to varying degrees.
2. The students at the Stockholm School of Economics stand out. SSE students have significantly larger social networks than students in other programs. This difference remains stable over time and seems to be related to higher interpersonal trust between students at the school. In ongoing analyses, we are therefore working with the hypothesis that the power of socialization is stronger at SSE than at other schools and examining various factors, both qualitative and quantitative. Furthermore, SSE students express higher life satisfaction but also significantly greater stress over study results and are more often a student type that goes under the working title “neurotic overachievers”. Furthermore, SSE students show significantly more signs of narcissistic traits.
3. The Covid pandemic had important network consequences. Our three institutions applied different restrictions for physical attendance, but the average networks shrink for all students during the pandemic compared to before. Women’s networks shrink less than men’s during the pandemic. The importance of students’ political views for networking also swings significantly during the pandemic. While political sympathies did not seem to matter for network size in 2019, we see during the pandemic years 2020 and 2021 a development where students with sympathies in the middle and to the right of the political spectrum tend to have smaller social networks.
Possible new research questions.
The pandemic’s effects on economics students’ networks require more analysis. Although our empirical instruments have been able to capture differences, we did not have theoretical knowledge of how exogenous shocks can affect network structure and quality. Here we have received project grants from the Crafoord Foundation and Handelsbanken’s research foundations for corona-specific analyses of our dataset during 2023 and 2024.
A question that has arisen in connection with the project is whether different schools have different capacities to “create” elites. What characteristics and types of capital can organizations give their students? How can education affect students’ values, interaction styles and hobbies, and sense of belonging to an “elite”? Our upcoming book is built around these thoughts.
Another question is career choices and career outcomes but also in the long term how the networks formed at these schools are used in the long run. Students from these programs often get leading positions. Our long-term hope is to be able to follow our cohorts for as long as possible to follow the development of networks.
Finally, we would also like to return to our original idea of a study of what networks look like on social media by doing a “retroactive” study of how networks on platforms such as LinkedIn predict career outcomes."
How the project group has disseminated research and results and whether and how collaboration has taken place.
Our main channel for disseminating research is our publications. Contact with the universities and students at these has been very important to us, both to create legitimacy for the project and to be able to continuously provide feedback on our results. We are deeply grateful for the help we have received through university management, program management, student unions and individual efforts. The internationalization of research was complicated by the pandemic, but we have collaborated with, among others, the elite network group at Copenhagen Business School, led by sociologists Anton Grau Larsen and Christoph Houman Ellersgaard. We are in the process of co-authoring several different articles together with external researchers, including Professor Jannie Tienari (Hanken) on comparisons between Finnish and Swedish students’ elite networks, and with doctoral student Hilma Lindskog (GU), where we focus on students’ political values. Two master’s theses in business administration have been written as part of the project, one at Hanken on gender-specific preferences in choice of master’s program (VT 19) and one at UU on students’ social strategies during the first semester of education (VT23). Results from research will also be presented in 2023 at Sunbelt, APSA Annual Meeting and in Helsinki. Finally, we have had great pleasure from our Advisory Board - Lars Engwall, Stefan Svallfors, Charlotte Holgersson and Christopher Edling - who have consistently supported us and provided feedback on texts and ideas.