New Insights into Gender Inequality

Nir Halevy, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and WHU Chairholder Prof. Yuval Kalish, chair of Leadership, Networks, and Organizations at WHU, explore brokering differences in their new research entitled “Broadening versus deepening: Gender and brokering in social networks”.  In this article, published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, Haveli and Kalish examine whether men and women differ in their tendency to introduce members of their network to others  – i.e., broker relationships. In two experiments, they found that compared to men, women are more likely to deepen their network by introducing their strong ties (friends) to others and less likely to broaden their network by introducing their acquaintances to others. Results may help illuminate one of the social processes that sustain gender inequality.