Race, Gender, and Social Support: A Study of Networks in a Financial Services Organization

Abstract

A wealth of research indicates that social support improves employees' well-being and job performance. What is not well understood is how employees' race and gender influence the receipt of this type of support. I analyze qualitative and quantitative data to understand how race and gender influence the social support that workers receive. The results suggest that neither structural nor relational factors explain why blacks receive social support from fewer network members than whites. There is some evidence that relational factors contribute to gender differences in the receipt of social support, however. Interviews with workers suggest that gender schemata, the sex-typing of networks, reactions to racial discrimination, and differences in the value placed on social support contribute to race and gender differences in social support.

Acknowledgments

I thank China Scherz, Christina Gerkin, and Carol Subiña Sullivan for their comments on this paper. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2009 Meetings of the North Central Sociological Association in Dearborn, Michigan.

Notes

¹Social support includes tangible types of personal help, such as the delivery of goods and services, as well as intangible types of assistance, such as emotional aid and reassurance.

²My relationship with the company began in 1992, when I was hired as a research consultant. After my position was eliminated, I asked the company for permission to conduct a quantitative study (in 1995) and a qualitative study (in 2000) on employees' informal networks, to which they agreed. The company did not finance either study.

³I limited the number of network members to eight in order to minimize respondent fatigue. My questionnaire allowed respondents to list more network members than many other instruments. For instance, the General Social Survey allows respondents to list only up to five network members.

⁴Exempt employees are those who occupy semi-professional, professional, and managerial positions.

⁵The correlation between these two indicators is .52.

⁶All of the descriptive statistics have been weighted to take into account the over-sampling of people of color and women in managerial positions.

⁷There are 37 Asians, 40 Latinos, and 21 “other” racial minorities in the sample.

⁸I also tested an interaction between being male and the number of men in one's networks, which was not significant (results not shown).

⁹A reviewer also raised the possibility that blacks gave more social support than whites because they occupied jobs that prevented them from giving valuable work-related support.