The Gender of Social Capital

Legitimacy affects returns to social capital. I begin with the network structure of social capital, explaining the information and control benefits of structural holes. The holes in a network are enterpreneurial opportunities to add value, and persons rich in such opportunities are expected to be more successful than their peers. Accumulating empirical research supports the prediction. However, women here pose a puzzle. The entrepreneurial networks linked to early promotion for senior men do not work for women. Solving the gender puzzle is an occasion to see how network models of social capital can be used to identify people not accepted as legitimate members of a population, and to describe how such people get access to social capital by borrowing the network of a strategic partner.