Women generally have less job authority than men. Previous research has shown that human capital, family features and contextual factors cannot fully explain this gender authority gap. Another popular explanation holds that women’s career opportunities are limited because their social networks comprise less beneficial contacts and resources than men’s. Yet, the role of social networks has received little attention in empirical research seeking to explain the gender gap in job authority. This study examines to what extent gender differences in social networks exist and are related to the gender authority gap. Drawing on two strands of social network theory, we develop hypotheses about the role of network diversity and network status. We test these hypotheses using representative longitudinal data from the NEtherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (2009–2013). Results reveal that women generally had less diverse occupational networks in terms of contacts’ occupations and were less likely to know managers than men, network features which are found to be significantly related to job authority. Controlling for these gender differences in networks leads to a reduction of the observed gender authority gap that is statistically significant but modest in substantive terms.

中文翻译：

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工作权威的性别差距：社交网络资源重要吗？

女性通常比男性拥有更少的工作权威。先前的研究表明，人力资本、家庭特征和背景因素并不能完全解释这种性别权威差距。另一种流行的解释认为，女性的职业机会有限，因为她们的社交网络所包含的有益联系和资源不如男性。然而，在试图解释工作权威中的性别差距的实证研究中，社交网络的作用很少受到关注。本研究考察了社交网络中存在的性别差异在多大程度上与性别权威差距有关。借鉴社会网络理论的两个方面，我们提出了关于网络多样性和网络状态作用的假设。我们使用来自荷兰纵向生命历程研究（2009-2013）的代表性纵向数据来检验这些假设。结果显示，就联系人的职业而言，女性的职业网络普遍较少，并且比男性更不可能认识经理，网络特征与工作权威显着相关。控制网络中的这些性别差异可以减少观察到的性别权威差距，这种差距在统计上是显着的，但在实质性方面是适度的。