WEQUALITY · Professional social media platforms and women’s career advancement: factors impacting women’s career equality without backlash. A management research perspective

WEQUALITY will reveal new knowledge on the effects professional social media platforms have on women’s career advancement in the workplace. It will analyze to what extent professional social media contributes to increasing women’s self-promotion and networking opportunities and/or mitigates the discrimination women face when they self-promote or network. WEQUALITY will also assess interventions that women and other stakeholders (mentors, leaders, coworkers) can implement to promote the use of professional social media to advance gender equality. Integrating robust open science methodologies for studying gender in the workplace that includes both field and experimental designs with ≈3,525 participants, WEQUALITY will provide new, scalable, evidence-based findings for use by academia, policymakers, and business. Its interdisciplinary nature ensures that the project will impact research in management, applied psychology, communications, and technology literatures and have implications both inside and outside academia. Coming at a time when research at the intersection of virtuality in the workplace and gender inequality is in its infancy, WEQUALITY helps situate Europe at the vanguard of scientific work exploring (1) the dynamics of the “push out” and “opt-out” sides of the problem, and (2) the complexities involved in the career-influencing usage of virtual platforms by women. My career development training, supervised by Dr. Marta Elvira (who has successfully mentored past MSCAs recipients) at the world-renowned IESE Business School, will catapult me to the forefront of research on management and the career-based use of virtual platforms by women. It will also enable me to capitalize on a wide range of emerging academic and non-academic opportunities, particularly in consultancy and policy advice.