Women’s leadership in the canton of Fribourg: how can managers access advice beyond their usual language network?
In the canton of Fribourg, the agri-food sector, industry and the university community often work across the Sarine, with managers switching between French and German as part of everyday work. For SHR’s “Women’s Leadership” programme, this raises a specific question: how can participants obtain useful advice beyond their usual language circle?
What the literature establishes
Herminia Ibarra (1992, Administrative Science Quarterly) examined women’s and men’s networks in an advertising firm, distinguishing, in particular, instrumental from expressive relationships. Her analysis shows that network composition and access to resources cannot be understood independently of gender and the structure of organisational positions. For managers, counting contacts is therefore insufficient: what matters is also the resources those contacts actually make accessible.
The mechanism: connections between similar people
Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and James M. Cook (2001, Annual Review of Sociology) review research on homophily, the tendency for social relationships to form between similar people. They highlight the role of opportunities to meet and institutional settings, rather than individual preferences alone. In Fribourg, this suggests examining whether established advice networks cross language boundaries, without assuming that language necessarily creates a barrier.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that the solution is simply to encourage women to attend more bilingual networking events. That would shift responsibility onto participants for access that also depends on specialists’ availability, introductions and established patterns of cooperation. The objective is neither a network perfectly balanced between languages nor more social interaction, but access to relevant expertise when a management problem requires it. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot establish
Ibarra’s study concerns a single organisation and does not measure the effect of a training programme. The review of homophily likewise does not establish a disadvantage specific to women in Fribourg’s bilingual networks. These studies support a local assessment of access to advice, but neither generalisations about all participants nor promises of career advancement.
A practical check in Fribourg
Consider a hypothetical situation in Fribourg: a manager in an agri-food business needs to prepare a trial with a German-speaking industrial supplier and a university partner. As part of the “Women’s Leadership” programme, SHR could suggest mapping relevant contacts and then arranging an introduction beyond the participant’s usual language circle. Over one month, each request would be logged with the expertise sought, whether an intermediary was needed and whether the response made it possible to define the next step. Comparing the proportion of requests producing such a response at the beginning and end of the exercise would provide an indicator of access to advice, without by itself demonstrating a causal effect of the training. To go further: explore the Women in Leadership training in Fribourg in the canton of Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Women in Leadership in Fribourg
- women in leadership
- Fribourg
- research
- training fribourg