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 women compared to men on LinkedIn in IT. Furthermore, female users are less likely to be connected to Big Tech companies than men. However, when we further analyse recent promotion or relocation reports, we find women are more likely than men to have reported a recent promotion at work, suggesting high-achieving women may be self-selecting onto LinkedIn. Even among this positively selected group, though, we find men are more likely to report a recent relocation. Social connectivity emerges as a significant predictor of promotion and relocation reports, with an interaction effect between gender and social connectivity indicating the payoffs to social connectivity for promotion and relocation reports are larger for women. This suggests that online networking has the potential for larger impacts for women, who experience greater disadvantage in traditional networking contexts, and calls for further research to understand differential impacts of online networking for socially disadvantaged groups.

翻译：在线职业社交平台为战略性扩展人脉以获取工作机会和职业晋升提供了机会。大量研究表明，女性的线下人脉网络相比男性处于劣势。LinkedIn等在线平台如何反映或重现性别化社交行为，或在线社交连接如何因性别差异导致不同结果，目前尚不明确。本文分析了从英国和美国信息技术（IT）行业近1000万LinkedIn用户的广告平台收集的汇总匿名数据，探讨与大型科技公司的社交连接（“社交连接”）如何因性别而异，以及性别、年龄、资历和社交连接如何影响用户报告工作晋升或调动的倾向。与先前研究一致，我们发现在IT行业LinkedIn上女性用户少于男性。此外，女性用户与大型科技公司建立连接的可能性低于男性。然而，在进一步分析近期晋升或调动报告时，我们发现女性报告近期工作晋升的比例高于男性，这表明高成就女性可能自行选择加入LinkedIn。但即便在这一正向选择的群体中，男性报告近期调动的可能性仍更高。社交连接成为晋升和调动报告的显著预测因子，且性别与社交连接之间的交互效应表明，社交连接对晋升和调动报告的回报对女性更大。这表明在线社交对在传统社交网络中处于更大劣势的女性可能具有更大影响，并呼吁进一步研究在线社交对社会弱势群体的差异化影响。