Gwen Moore

Structural Determinants of Men's and Women's Personal Networks

Mens and womens personal networks often differ in composition, with womens more focused on family and mens on nonkin, especially coworkers. Using data from the 1985 General Social Survey, I find that these gender differences arise in part from dissimilar social structural locations of men and women, which lead to distinct opportunities for and constraints on the formation of close personal ties. Most gender differences in network composition disappear or are considerably reduced when variables related to employment, family, and age are controlled. However, some gender differences remain. Women have a larger number, higher proportion, and greater diversity of kin ties in their personal networks than men, even when compared with men in similar social structural positions.

The Structure of a National Elite Network

This paper addresses a long-disputed issue: the degree of integration among political elites in the United States. This issue is examined through an investigation of the structure of an elite interaction network as revealed by recently developed procedures for network analysis. The data, taken from the American Leadership Study conducted by the Bureau of Applied Social Research in 1971 and 1972, consist of interviews with 545 leaders of major political, economic and social institutions. The studys wide institutional representation, sociometric data, and focus on major issues of the early 1970s make it virtually unique for examining elite integration.

Elite Social Circles

We describe a method for locating the denser, or more cohesive, parts of networks. The method starts from the identification of cliques, or maximal complete subgraphs. Since there are numerous such subgraphs in most networks, they are then aggregated when they overlap sufficiently. The resulting aggregated subgraphs are frequently large, not necessarily disjoint, and comparatively denser regions of the full network; frequently, they have the characteristics of social circles. Applied to an interaction network containing nearly 900 individuals from the American Leadership Study, we identify a number of these denser regions, most of which are small cliques, based on the shared interests and institutional locations of their members. One large central circle also results, and we discuss its interpretation in terms of integration of the overall network.

Women in elite positions: Insiders or outsiders?

Formal institutional locations and informal participation in elite networks are examined for women and men occupying principal decision-making positions in powerful institutions in three advanced societies: the United States, West Germany, and Australia. In all three countries, the few women are concentrated in a small number of elite positions, especially those set aside for women. Social backgrounds vary, with women coming from somewhat higher status and class origins than their male counterparts. Further, network analyses reveal that men are more integrated than women in informal elite networks in all three nations. The results suggest that women in formal positions of power remain outsiders on the inside.

Elite Integration in the United States and Australia

Taking its point of departure in the elitist paradigm and the much-discussed relationship between elite integration and stable democratic political systems, this article offers a typology of fragmented and integrated national elites and investigates the structure of the “consensually integrated” elite type. It is hypothesized that “consensually integrated” elites have largely similar structures consisting of personal interaction networks which are more inclusive and less class-based, and which contain more extensive and centralized connections among all major elite groups, than the plural elite, power elite or ruling class models of elite structure separately depict. Support for these hypotheses is found in a comparison of the network structures of two consensually integrated national elites, the American and Australian, as these structures are revealed by issue-based sociometric data taken from closely comparable elite samples and studies in the two countries.

Gender and Networks in a Local Voluntary-Sector Elite

Focusing on gender inequality in a local community elite, we investigate the role of gender in access to and participation in networks of nonprofit trustees in Louisville, Kentucky. We examine two types of network relations: participation in the network of overlapping board memberships (the “structural network”) and interpersonal ties of collegiality and friendship (the “social network”). Asking whether the gender hierarchy found in most private and public sector organizations is mirrored in this inner circle of trustees, with men occupying the most influential positions in the structural and social networks, we find some male advantage in the structural network. Men predominate in holding most board seats, occupying multiple board seats, and in having slightly greater network centrality. By contrast, women hold the edge in the social network, with slightly greater centrality and higher levels of social integration. Womens disadvantage in the structural network is at least partly counterbalanced by their prominence in the social network of trustees in Louisville. Results indicate that the local nonprofit sector includes a small number of women (but no people of color) in leadership roles.

Social Capital: Mentors and Contacts

Many social and personal factors contribute to the achievement of an elite position. Informal factors are examined in this chapter, specifically mentors and personal contacts. For the women in top positions and men in comparable posts in the sample, it is asked whether social capital, in the form of personal contacts with powerful actors, has been equally important to women and men in elite positions. Gender differences and similarities in the presence of mentors and in the breadth of elite contacts is also examined. The expectation was that men would have more social capital of both types. In the case of mentors, however, women generally reported having more mentors of varying types than did their men peers. On the second measure of social capital, elite contacts in the past year, men generally reported wider ranges of personal contacts with other elites in the political, economic and civil society spheres.

Mommies and Daddies on the Fast Track in Other Wealthy Nations

Social and cultural contexts, as well as public policies, shape the experiences of women and men in demanding occupations. This article compares work-family themes in the conference papers to research outside of the United States, especially to a mid-1990s survey of twelve hundred women and men holding the highest positions in elected politics and business in twenty-seven capitalist democracies, the Comparative Leadership Study. Analyses show that most leaders in the comparative study have married and are parents. Family responsibilities fall disproportionately on the women in top leadership positions. Marriage and parenthood impinge on women’s careers to a far larger extent than they do on similarly situated men’s. An international perspective on work-family conflicts highlights ways in which the United States is similar to and different from comparable countries. In many ways, the United States differs little. Yet the Nordic countries appear more successful in lessening work-family conflicts, even for top leaders.