In Chapter 6, we argued that differences in the network of contacts that a person has for exchanging resources and learning – their social capital – explain why and how women students are socially isolated and limited in their opportunities to form relationships, produce science, and gain support for their careers. In Chapter 8, we extended the argument to explain the experiences of newly minted women scientists who experience many of the same biases they did as graduate students, compounding the negative effects of their graduate school relationships and laying the groundwork for a perpetuation of the status quo. In the complex and political world of science, exclusion not only decreases a person's ability to acquire the knowledge needed to build a better mousetrap, but also decreases the ability of others to learn about and adopt it.

In this chapter, we use original survey data on the social networks of men and women faculty members to further explicate our argument and show that exclusion and access measurably affect not only perceptions of difference, but also career performance.