The Dark Side of Networking
“If one person gets a leg up, that’s a leg down for whomever else is competing for those opportunities.”
In 2012, Katherine Milkman, a professor at Wharton who studies judgment and decision-making, co-authored a that sought to determine the role of race and gender in professional advancement. In order to do that, Milkman and her colleagues used 20 names that might be associated with a particular race or gender and assigned them to fictional prospective doctoral students. The researchers used those names to send identical emails to more than 6,000 professors asking to discuss their research and doctoral programs. The responses varied significantly based on the presumed race of the fictional candidate, and
