  Online professional social networking platforms provide opportunities to
expand networks strategically for job opportunities and career advancement. A
large body of research shows that women's offline networks are less
advantageous than men's. How online platforms such as LinkedIn may reflect or
reproduce gendered networking behaviours, or how online social connectivity may
affect outcomes differentially by gender is not well understood. This paper
analyses aggregate, anonymised data from almost 10 million LinkedIn users in
the UK and US information technology (IT) sector collected from the site's
advertising platform to explore how being connected to Big Tech companies
('social connectivity') varies by gender, and how gender, age, seniority and
social connectivity shape the propensity to report job promotions or
relocations. Consistent with previous studies, we find there are fewer women
compared to men on LinkedIn in IT. Furthermore, female users are less likely to
be connected to Big Tech companies than men. However, when we further analyse
recent promotion or relocation reports, we find women are more likely than men
to have reported a recent promotion at work, suggesting high-achieving women
may be self-selecting onto LinkedIn. Even among this positively selected group,
though, we find men are more likely to report a recent relocation. Social
connectivity emerges as a significant predictor of promotion and relocation
reports, with an interaction effect between gender and social connectivity
indicating the payoffs to social connectivity for promotion and relocation
reports are larger for women. This suggests that online networking has the
potential for larger impacts for women, who experience greater disadvantage in
traditional networking contexts, and calls for further research to understand
differential impacts of online networking for socially disadvantaged groups.
