Reacción a "Women executives must build broader and more influential networks than men to reach positions of power"

The research conducted by Yuhao Zhou, Wenhao Chen, Matthew Davison and Cristián Bravo, from the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at Western University (Canada), together with María Óskarsdóttir, from the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom) and the Department of Computer Science at Reykjavík University o(Iceland), analyses the relationship between professional networks and gender disparities in board appointments, focusing on publicly listed Canadian companies. The study confirms the existence of a glass ceiling effect: women serving on these boards need to build broader and more influential networks than men in order to reach comparable positions of influence—even when, and this strengthens both the study and its findings, their demographic characteristics and professional trajectories are similar. It is also important to highlight the prominent role of connections among women in their mutual advancement. As the authors note, this study contributes to a broader debate on corporate governance and gender diversity, emphasising the need for inclusive networking and mentoring initiatives to reduce existing barriers.

To draw these kinds of conclusions and propose inclusive initiatives aimed at social transformation and improvement, it is essential that the objectives are clearly defined and that the methodology is appropriate and rigorous. In this article, all these conditions are met and articulated in a well-supported and innovative manner. On the one hand, the authors use data on more than 19,000 senior executives and board members across more than 700 companies over a period of more than twenty years (2000–2022). On the other hand, they combine social network analysis with a causal learning framework and long short-term memory (LSTM) models, using artificial intelligence to examine how networks act as facilitators and/or barriers to achieving gender diversity in leadership.

The fact that this article has been published in Patterns also attests to its quality, as the journal is highly selective and seeks to publish work that offers significant advances and has broad interdisciplinary interest. Moreover, the article aligns closely with the journal’s aims, as Patterns promotes the publication of computational, data-driven research from all fields, including work engaging with issues related to ethics, philosophy and science policy.

Finally, and by no means a minor detail, I would like to highlight how the title itself captures the content of the article, its results and its conclusions in a precise and revealing way. Indeed, the authors uncover gender disparities in corporate board career trajectories through the use of deep learning. In this respect, the study provides an excellent basis for designing interventions that can facilitate better gender representation in leadership. This work represents a significant step forward in leadership studies in general, and in gender research in particular. As we noted in an article published a decade ago, the leadership capacity shown by women does not stem from supposed 'feminine' traits, but rather from a process of early learning and educational success in which the phenomenon often referred to as sisterhood plays an important role. In this study, that sisterhood is evidenced through the connections women establish with one another to support their own advancement and that of other women.