Gender Differences and Informal Networks in a Scandinavian Context

The informal networks in organizations have been under increasing scrutiny in the past years, and several aspects of those informal structures have been studied, among those the gender differences. In order to go beyond the intuitive and prejudicial characterization, several researchers have performed empirical analyses using networks theory. This has resulted in a number of well-founded propositions about how male and female managers develop and use different informal networks. One key finding, among others, is the proposition that female managers seem to develop dual networks (one with other women for friendship and one primarily with men for career development), while their male colleagues only develop one, which seems to satisfy both needs. In the empirical part of this paper, data from the Danish Management Barometer are used to gain an insight into the main differences between the most important competencies stated by male and female managers in Danish companies. While the results seem to indicate that there are fewer differences between the genders than might be expected, using a factor analysis indicates that there are some structural differences suggesting that the proposition about the female managers’ dual networks is true