Female inner circles help women thrive

CHICAGO - Women who communicate regularly with a female-dominated inner circle are more likely to attain high-ranking leadership positions, according to a study by Northwestern University and the University of Notre Dame, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the study, the researchers reviewed the social and communication networks of more than 700 former graduate students from a top-ranked business school in the United States. Each student in the study had accepted leadership-level positions, which were normalized for industry and region-specific salaries.

The researchers then compared three variables of each student's social network: network centrality, or the size of the social network; the proportion of same-sex contacts; and the number of strong versus weak network ties.