Gender Gaps in Online Social Connectivity, Promotion and Relocation Reports on LinkedIn
Ghazal Kalhor, Hannah Gardner, Ingmar Weber, Ridhi Kashyap

TL;DR
This study analyzes how gender influences online social connectivity and career mobility on LinkedIn, revealing disparities in connections and reporting behaviors, with social connectivity significantly impacting women's promotion and relocation prospects.
Contribution
It provides novel insights into gendered online networking behaviors and their effects on career outcomes using large-scale LinkedIn data from the UK and US IT sectors.
Findings
Women are less connected to Big Tech on LinkedIn.
Women report more recent promotions than men.
Social connectivity benefits women more for promotions and relocations.
Abstract
Online professional social networking platforms provide opportunities to expand networks strategically for job opportunities and career advancement. A large body of research shows that women's offline networks are less advantageous than men's. How online platforms such as LinkedIn may reflect or reproduce gendered networking behaviours, or how online social connectivity may affect outcomes differentially by gender is not well understood. This paper analyses aggregate, anonymised data from almost 10 million LinkedIn users in the UK and US information technology (IT) sector collected from the site's advertising platform to explore how being connected to Big Tech companies ('social connectivity') varies by gender, and how gender, age, seniority and social connectivity shape the propensity to report job promotions or relocations. Consistent with previous studies, we find there are fewer…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsImpact of Technology on Adolescents · Social Media and Politics · Knowledge Management and Sharing
