The old boy network: Gender difference in the impact of social networks on remuneration in top executive jobs’, CEPR Discussion Paper (8623

We investigate gender differences in the impact of social networks on earn-ings using a dataset of over 22,000 senior executives and non-executive board members of European and US firms. There is a large positive impact on exec-utive men’s remuneration of the number of currently influential individuals they have previously worked with. The impact on executive women’s re-muneration is significantly weaker: on average women gain around half the benefit that men gain from larger networks. We use a placebo technique to show that our measures reflect genuine connections and not merely unob-served characteristics