Boys and Girls Have Different Friends: Gender Differences in CEO Network and Wage Premiums

Abstract

By taking advantage of a new hand-collected dataset on CEO educational networks between 1992 and 2013, this paper studies the association between gender and network connections. First, female CEOs are less likely to be “Influential” (that is, have extremely large networks). Second, while connected male CEOs are significantly rewarded, female CEOs are not. These results provide evidence supporting Paul and Sahni’s (2016) work that women receive lower returns from social capital than men.