For Women, Female Peer Groups Are Crucial for Career Advancement‌‌

In her speech conceding the 2008 presidential race, Hillary Clinton famously spoke of the need to crack the nation’s “highest, hardest glass ceiling.” The corporate world has its own high, hard glass ceilings—ones that have proven nearly as stubborn as those in politics. Among S&P 1500 companies, for instance, women make up 40% of the workforce but just 6% of CEOs. ‌

There are many possible explanations for the gender gap in senior management. New research co-authored by Yale SOM’s Menaka Hampole highlights one important and underdiscussed factor: peer groups. When women have more female peers in their MBA programs, the study finds, they are significantly more likely to reach senior management roles. The reason? Women guide other women toward firms with female-friendly policies, such as generous maternity leave and flexible schedules, that make it possible to balance career ambitions with caregiving obligations. ‌

The research shows that “social capital and networks are gendered and they’re consequential,” Hampole says. For that reason, “women really benefit from having other female classmates,” especially in the formative years of business education. ‌

The study, a collaboration with Francesca Truffa of the University of Michigan and Ashley Wong of Barnard College, has two parts. The first uses data from an MBA program to map students’ business school peer groups and subsequent careers. The second consists of a qualitative and quantitative survey of women from the program aimed at understanding how they use their peer networks. ‌

For the first part of the study, the researchers focused on students at a top MBA program in the United States from 2000 to 2018. Each year, students are divided into eight sections that take core classes together. Section assignments are mostly random. While program administrators make small adjustments to ensure that ethnicities and undergraduate institutions are represented within each group, the gender composition across sections remains effectively random, with some sections containing significantly more women than others. ‌

For Hampole’s team, this assignment process inadvertently created ideal conditions for their study: “This is as close as you can get to an organized experiment, which is not common for [this type of research] at all,” she says. ‌

Next, the researchers traced students’ post-MBA careers using LinkedIn. They used titles such as “manager” and “supervisor” to identify first-level managers, and titles such as “director,” “vice president,” “senior vice president,” and “chief” to identify senior managers. In addition, the researchers gathered data on the students’ employers, including company size, compensation, and employee ratings of female-friendliness. ‌

The data revealed a tightly narrowing path toward leadership for women: 96% of the MBAs in the study held management roles within 15 years of graduation. But women were 24% less likely than men to reach senior management roles within that time frame. ‌

The outlook was rosier for women with larger female peer groups, however. In fact, a very modest increase in the share of women in their sections—4 percentage points—translated to an 8.4% increase in the probability of women reaching senior management roles. (For men, the gender makeup of their MBA sections did not have any effect on post-graduation career prospects.) ‌

To understand why these peer networks were so important, the researchers took a closer look at the women who successfully rose to senior management roles and the companies they chose. “[It’s] not the case that women moved to smaller firms,” where climbing the corporate ladder might be easier, Hampole says. In addition, “there’s really no difference…in terms of compensation, which was surprising.” ‌

Instead, the research showed, women with more women peers were more likely to join female-friendly firms with work environments that have been rated highly by female employees. They tended to transition to these firms about 6 to 10 years after graduation—years when they were also likely to have young children.‌

In other words, women with more women peers in business school were more likely to choose firms that are more supportive of women, which in turn increased their likelihood of reaching senior management positions. These effects were especially pronounced for women in male-dominated industries, which suggests that MBA peer groups are a particularly vital source of career guidance when other female peers may be hard to find. ‌

The survey results helped illuminate exactly how female peer groups lead to improved career prospects. For example, women reported relying heavily on female peers to provide information about firm culture, which explains why women with larger female peer groups are more likely to end up at companies with female-friendly policies. As one respondent put it, “If I receive an offer, I’m comfortable talking to a [female] friend…. I’d ask how maternity leave works or generally what the female community looks like and what the support is. I probably wouldn’t ask those questions [of a hiring manager].” ‌

In addition to this practical guidance, women also reported turning to their female peers for emotional support and inspiration. Watching other women from their classes succeed, respondents explained, motivated them to do the same. ‌

Surprisingly, women who had more women in their sections also reported receiving more support from their male peers, both in and after their MBA programs. Hampole and her colleagues “really did not expect that at all,” she says. They still don’t exactly know what explains the phenomenon—perhaps women felt more confident when they were surrounded by other women, or perhaps men’s attitudes changed when they had more female classmates —but whatever its source, this pattern appears to benefit women in their later careers. ‌

Together, the quasi-experimental and survey data reveal the power of career networks for women. For MBA programs, “investing in structured women’s networks is very important, because women really took advantage of their female alumnae networks.” ‌

There is also a lesson in the study for companies: female-friendly policies can have an outsized impact on women’s careers. “These policies can really benefit women’s productivity and also the firm’s productivity,” Hampole says. “If you make it a little bit easier for women to accommodate all the other responsibilities that they have, … [it] can work very well for women’s career advancement and success.” ‌