Getting down to [net]work

Imagine yourself at a meeting of 40 women assembled in a hall on the Tel Aviv University campus. You have coffee and cake, hear a lecture, then stay for a while to talk. The only slightly unusual ritual: occasionally, a woman will pull out business cards and hand them around the table. The other women then respond in kind. You hand out your card, and suddenly find yourself talking about your work to an interested group. Suddenly, you’re networking.

“If you ever find yourself thinking ‘How can I help this person,’ or ‘How can this person help me,’ you’re networking,” says senior marketing consultant at marketing and sales company MarkeTecht Rebecca Rachmany, who also serves as co-chairperson of Digital Eve Israel, the local branch of an international women’s organization, Digital Eve, a global, non-profit organization for women in new media and digital technology. “The difference is how you steer the conversation, how you present your own expertise, and what kind of help you ask for. Women are socialized to talk more about other people than business and finance. I think Digital Eve serves an important role because it gives an anchor to the conversation it gets you started on presenting your expertise as a professional, and learning about other people’s professional expertise. It makes it legitimate and even required for women to talk to one another about their careers.”

“It’s not that women have to network more than men they just have to network at least as much as men do. We have to work harder at it, because we’re at a disadvantage from the outset,” says Prof. Asya Pazy, organizational behaviorist and associate dean of the Faculty of Management at Tel Aviv University (TAU).

The disadvantages to women include not serving in Israel Defense Force (IDF) combat units, and the putting aside of education and career for marriage and family. And even though some alternate networking venues exist, like the all-powerful nursery school list, gym, synagogue, and hairdresser, these are only as good as the neighborhood in which you live. Also, unlike their male counterparts, many women feel that these places aren't appropriate for bringing up the subject of work.

Women Industrialists Forum chairperson Ronit Sklar says, “We build our career and family under the same timetable and don’t understand the importance of networking as part of career building. We think that if we work hard, we will be rewarded for our performance. But only after our second or third position do we begin to understand that this isn’t true. In addition to everything else, you have to create a network of contacts and it is something that must be carefully constructed.”

The Forum's stated goal, therefore, is to put networking at the top of its agenda, “to deepen contacts between its members by means of meetings and conferences, in order to strengthen their business, professional and social ties.”

The desire to weave a safety net that is invisible yet strong as steel has given rise to number of groups devoted to the idea. On one end of the scale is the Jewish Agency for Israel’s businesswomen’s club program, established together with MATI Business Development Centers for women with small business, cottage industries, working at home or self-employed.

Jewish Agency head of programs for target populations, Israel department Dr. Dalia Fishman says the program started on a regional basis. “Ashkelon was the first, in 1994, followed by other towns. After that, we decided that we needed to create inter-regional connections. Then, we began to think about a national network and organize conferences on an Israel-wide basis.” The Jewish Agency also organized several networking conferences with Diaspora Jewish businesswomen, and now has plans to turn the Israeli program into a national organization.

Fishman herself has been involved in educating newly minted entrepreneurs even before coming to Israel in 1990. In 1985, after the fall of the USSR, she served as vice-rector of the Baku Institute of Management. Somewhere in the middle of the scale sits Digital Eve Israel. The Israel chapter has extended the original reach of the organization beyond high-tech to include women, mostly middle managers or self-employed, in the free trades, marketing and communications (marcom), and human resources.

There is also Women On Line, a Hebrew-language women’s networking site, which got its start in 1997. That was when only 14% of Israeli women surfed the Net, points out WOL’s Ilana Cohen, as compared with 38% today. Cohen together with co-founders Galia Albin and Bilha Kalisher Hazaz, want to provide an online interactive networking platform. The site has several active discussion forums, an extensive list of women’s organizations, a business guide, and recently made a deal with job site Drushim.net to send 400 job offers per week to subscribers’ via e-mail.

On the other end of the scale sits a new organization called Women Promoting Women (Nashim Mekadmot Nashim). Sponsored by LAHAV, the Executive Education Center at TAU’s Faculty of Management, the International Women's Forum (IWF) Israel chapter, and the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women at the Prime Minister’s Office, Women Promoting Women is intended for only for women senior executives and owners of medium and large companies.

LAHAV managing and academic director Dr. Ora Setter who established Women Promoting Women, together with Pazy and IWF Israel chapter Ziva Patir, says their original idea was to create a mentoring program for women. “We held a conference, attended by about 100 top women managers, and what came out of it was: ‘We need something first for us, and then we can mentor others’; a definite need for women in top positions to have a network for themselves.”

Women Promoting Women’s events, which are by invitation only, are lectures and panel discussions about business related issues, but aren’t directly about doing business. “It’s about promoting our colleagues and subordinates. We care about the second tier.” The organization will serve an as advisor to the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women at the Prime Minister’s Office this coming year.

With so many organizations appealing to women at each level of the business world, why would Israeli women feel “disadvantaged” (to use Pazy’s phrase) in terms of professional networks? For one thing, the numbers are still small: the Jewish Agency’s businesswomen’s clubs number 2,000 members; Women Industrialists Forum 650; LAHAV’s Women Promoting Women - 400; Digital Eve Israel 400-600 (400 discussion group members, 600 mailing list members). Even a driving force like the Israel Women's Network (IWN) numbers only 5,000 members, many of whom belong to at least one other organization.

In addition, the pool of women who wield power is also small. “It’s shameful,” says IWN legal department head Adv. Tziona Koenig-Yair. “Only 17.5% of Knesset members are women. Yet over 50% of us are academic graduates, so there's no reason why we shouldn’t be filling senior management positions in Israeli society.”

According to Sklar, who has risen up the ranks to become global new technologies development at Unilever BV, parent company of Israel’s Unilever Bestfoods, “There are very few of us in the management elite. There are very few CEOs and VPs, only 2%. In US its 4-7%, which is better than nothing but is still not good. Moreover, almost none of IDF Women’s Corps former chief officers hold senior posts in industry, yet they reached the pinnacle of military service. Meanwhile all former Chiefs of Staff hold senior positions”.

No one likes to hear it but it’s true. In Israel, it’s all about the army. “Networking for Israeli men begins in the army when you ‘crawl together in the mud with the mess-tin,’ says Sklar “And it goes throughout their careers because they will always remember the friends they started out with. They have reserve duty, and annual get-togethers. This sort of network doesn’t exist for us.

“When someone from the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit 269 (Sayeret Matkal) loses his job, the entire Sayret, all together, generations upon generations, gets on the phone and finds him another one. They will make sure that man does not go a day without a job. There’s no statistics about this. Everyone knows it exists but no one talks about it.”

What’s unique about the Israeli army experience, Pazy says, is that it makes for almost unbreakable bonds. “Because the army is such an intense experience for men, it creates ties that can be categorized as weak, as maintaining them takes very little effort a two-hour reunion once a year, let’s say but at the same time, these ties are burned into their consciousness. For women, the army isn’t so central to their personal identity. Plus, Israel is a unique situation compared with other less ‘male-centered’ countries, because the army is also the social elite”.

Things may be slightly easier in high-tech. Rachmany: “I don’t think it’s right to say that women don’t have the same frameworks as men. Today women serve in the elite intelligence units in the army, and more women than men are graduating universities so we have the same opportunities at the outset.

“What we don’t do as well as men is use those connections to advance ourselves professionally. We might ask our close friends, but networking is about asking people who aren’t your close friends people who you know briefly or through a mutual acquaintance.”

Pazy says that women often don’t understand the benefits of this type of relationship. Citing Mark Granovetter’s classic “Strength of Weak Ties” thesis, according to which, casual ties that bridge social groups often prove more useful in job-hunting or information gathering, Pazy says, “Smart networking requires maintaining weak ties along with strong ones. Women’s networks tend to have more strong ties. On one hand, that’s very comfortable, and reliable. But it comes at the expense of fewer weak ties.

According to preliminary findings of a study conducted by Pazy among 400 MBA students, divided equally by gender, “We found that the proportion of close ties in the women’s networks was much higher than that of the men.” Pazy doesn’t view this as necessarily being a good thing. Strong ties require a huge investment of time and energy, which are precious commodities for working women.

The Internet, faceless and non-committal by nature, may be the perfect place for women to create those all-important weak links. Digital Eve Israel, for example, has an active e-mail list where members, called DEvas, whether male or female post questions ranging from “Can anyone recommend a good graphic designer?” to “I’m changing jobs and looking for my replacement”.

“It has occurred to me that face-to-face networking via meetings and professional gatherings is now just part of what I consider networking,” says marcom consultant and DEva Belinda Gerber. “Online networking has become a very big part of my professional outreach. Every time I send a message with a question or opinion, or answer someone’s question on-list or off-list, I am forging new relationships”. The Internet also operates 24/7, which allows for after-hours and international networking.

Additionally, the web provides a place for people on all points of the salary scale to exchange ideas, with no threat to their authority. This is especially important for women managers, who often feel they can’t forge bonds with lower-ranking women in an organization.

Pazy: “In examining network homogeneity, we asked about the proportion of contacts with juniors, peers and superiors. We found that women’s networks are biased upwards. Women’s networks comprised about 20% juniors, 40% peers, and 40% superiors, whereas men’s networks were more balanced, and divided evenly into thirds.

“This is career naivete. Men understand something that women don’t. In career-building, it is smart to network with superiors, but it’s a mistake to neglect ties with juniors. It’s hard to function in an organization if you close off the ties to those below you.

Pazy speculates that women, as newcomers to the corporate world, may " understand the formal rules of the game, but don’t understand the informal ones. They believe they will be rewarded for performance. They are less sophisticated politically. Part of being less powerful is attempting to make ties with the powerful. But there are other, different assets that can be exchanged with juniors. Ties with juniors are a long-term investment. They give you backing from below. They are a source of information.”

Rachmany backs the idea up. “In order to help someone, usually you need to be in an equal or higher position than that person. Since there are fewer women in top positions, there are fewer opportunities for women to help one another above a certain rank. In order to help one another, we have to know one another, at least by name and position.”

“Women definitely have different issues in the workplace than men do. But Digital Eve doesn’t focus on that. We come with a completely proactive and positive attitude, and that attitude is that we are professional women helping one another make it in the business world.

The author is managing editor of Globes English-language website and a member of Digital Eve.

Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on Wednesday, July 28, 2004