Gender Difference in Network Homophily By Parental Status Among Faculty at a Research Intensive University

Increasing attention is paid to work-family conflict among faculty fathers. Generally, however, women faculty tend to have a heavier share of family responsibilities and experience greater work-family conflict than men faculty. Previous research suggests that faculty, especially women faculty, are often hesitant to bring up personal life or discuss work-family conflict in the workplace because they are afraid that their colleagues might doubt their commitment to work. The purpose of this study is to better understand the academic work culture by exploring informal (non-work related) social networks of faculty focusing on parental status and gender. Social identity theory predicts that we tend to form homophilous social networks integrating ourselves with those who share status characteristics, such as race, gender, and social class. This is because when we meet someone with the same status characteristic, we expect the person to have similar viewpoints and interests and thus find it easier to talk with them. This study considers parental status as a status characteristic and examines if there is a gender difference in the tendency to have informal social interactions (e.g., discuss personal matters, share free time) with departmental colleagues who share parental status (parents or non-parents). We use social network data on about 380 faculty within the natural and social sciences at a large research-intensive Midwestern university. For the preliminary analyses, we ran OLS with permutation tests and did not find a significant gender difference in parent homophily, which was measured using the point bi-serial correlation (PBSC). The next step is to ran Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) and test the gender difference controlling for dyadic dependence.