Telosaes.it

February 2012, Year IV, n. 2

Paul Seabright

Women and Men. Anthropology of a conflict.

Telos: Your latest working paper tackles the topic of the gender difference in remuneration of top executives, but with a specific analysis of the role of social networks. Could you please tell us more about it?

Paul Seabright: For this paper, with Marie Lalanne, we assembled a dataset that enabled us to see from executives’ CVs how many other top executives and non-executive board members they have encountered during their career. We can’t tell from this whether they have in fact developed strong links with these other people, but we can see whether they have had opportunities to network with them. We find that these opportunities to network have a real payoff in terms of these individuals’ careers: individuals with larger networks have higher salaries ... more

Editorial

In the rarefied world of Big Companies’ Boards, networking matters. Wordof-mouth advertising often decisively influences the recruiting process: it’s easier to have your candidacy taken into account when you have good connections. And the last research conducted by Prof.Seabright together with Marie Lalanne suggests that men know how to take advantage of their network better than women do ... more