The Impact Of Social Capital On Women’s Career Repositioning In Business
Women seeking to make career changes around their larger life contexts have faced numerous challenges for decades. The influence of social capital on women’s careers has been a concern of researchers, particularly within the contexts of women’s underrepresentation in businesses’ higher organizational ranks and societal expectations for women. This research builds on previous career studies and improves the understanding of women’s career repositioning with consideration of their social capital measures and behaviors, career satisfaction measures, and family life stage. The research question is: To what degree does social capital impact women’s ability to reposition their careers in business? This quantitative study was developed on three constructs: 1) social capital, 2) objective and subjective measures of career success, and 3) family life stage. Control variables implemented in the study included personal brand value, education, employer size, field of work, organizational level, and age. A quantitative study was conducted via an online survey of over two hundred women working within nearly fifty companies in a southwestern New York and northwestern Pennsylvania region. Quantitative analyses included frequency distributions, analysis of variance and covariance, crosstabs, and linear regression. The findings suggest that social capital diversity and connections to those in higher organizational ranks impacted women’s ability to make desired career changes. No relationship was found between women’s family life stage and their social capital measures, social capital behaviors, or their ability to make desired career changes. Future implications suggest investigating the activities women use to develop and maintain their career-related social capital networks with specific consideration of women with children under age six.
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