What does a woman like me do in a network like this? Gendered self-regulation in professional networking

Why do women managers constrain their own networking, even when they recognize its professional value? Drawing on feminist institutionalism, we conceptualize professional networking as a gendered informal institution governed by legitimacy norms. We develop the concept of gendered self-regulation, an anticipatory process through which internalized informal rules shape behavioral inhibition before any overt sanction occurs, based on a gendered logic of appropriateness. We rely on a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design combining multigroup structural equation modeling on a sample of 313 managers in Spain (191 women and 122 propensity-score-matched men) and 33 in-depth interviews with women managers in a leadership program. The quantitative findings show that moral conflict and modesty operate as normative orientations with gender-asymmetric, networking domain-specific behavioral consequences. These two normative orientations constrain women's networking but not men's, particularly in networking domains where relational instrumentality and visibility signaling are most salient. By contrast, extroversion predicts networking similarly for women and men, supporting the claim that the observed pattern is specific to internalized informal norms rather than sociability as a trait. The qualitative phase identifies four gendered self-regulation mechanisms through which women navigate legitimacy pressures across networking domains, namely backlash avoidance, authenticity concerns, internalized meritocratic ideals, and positional self-doubt. This study advances feminist institutionalism by specifying how informal institutional norms become behaviorally consequential at the individual level, not primarily through external enforcement but through gendered self-regulation.