Universities are filled with Gender Equality Plans. Funding bodies require them. Institutions produce them. Managers approve them. Yet, often, the experiences of women, early-career researchers, and anyone who does not fit the dominant mould remain stubbornly unchanged.
A recent study published in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal offers an uncomfortable explanation for this. Researchers Graf, Bleijenbergh and Benschop spent months inside a European STEM research network. They observed meetings, conducted interviews, and asked members to draw maps of their professional relationships. They found a gap between formal intention and informal reality that no policy document had managed to close.
The problem does not lie in the rules; it lies in the relationships
Within the network, collaboration did not occur randomly or equitably. It followed patterns that were largely invisible to those perpetuating them. Members gravitated towards people they already knew. Informal exchanges – the kind that happen over coffee, during breaks, or in side conversations after meetings – remained within tight disciplinary circles, overwhelmingly composed of male natural scientists with pre-existing ties. Technical discussions were dominated by the same recurring profiles: well-connected, senior, male researchers whose authority was treated as self-evident.
The consequence was not explicit exclusion. No one was formally barred from a conversation. However, access to opportunities, information, and visibility – the currency of any career – was distributed unevenly along lines that reproduced existing hierarchies.
The researchers introduce a concept to describe this: hegemonic profiles. Going beyond the familiar idea of hegemonic masculinity, they show how power in networks clusters not only around gender, but also around intersecting characteristics: disciplinary field, seniority, and the depth of prior professional relationships. The most advantaged members were not simply men – they were well-connected male natural scientists working on technology development, whose status was reinforced by the “complicity” of others who deferred to their expertise while downplaying their own.
The paradox at the heart of equality work
What makes this study particularly striking is that the network had done everything it was expected to do. A gender board had been established. Events focusing on women in STEM had been organised. Gender equality had been formally placed on the agenda of general assembly meetings.
Yet, as the researchers document in detail, formal structures intended to promote equality coexisted simultaneously with informal networks that quietly perpetuated inequality. The two operated in parallel, largely without awareness or friction.
This is the paradox. The visible architecture of equality was in place, while the invisible architecture of exclusion remained untouched.
What most Gender Equality Plans miss
The vast majority of equality interventions focus on representation – the number of women in leadership, the composition of committees, the formality of recruitment procedures. These aspects matter, but they often leave unexamined the real engine of professional advancement: who is invited into conversations, who people instinctively turn to for advice, and who is “naturally” included when an informal group forms around a topic or opportunity.
The study documents this with precision. Women in the network were consistently described by colleagues in relational and caregiving terms – as supportive, as good communicators, as important for “the gender issue” – while male colleagues were described in terms of knowledge, achievement, and scientific authority. When one male researcher was asked directly whether gender played a role in his networking map, he paused and only then noticed the near-total absence of women from it.
These are not individual failures of awareness. They are systemic patterns, reproduced in the ordinary texture of daily professional life – in who is added to a paper, who is asked to give a talk, and who is remembered when an opportunity arises.
Small cracks, and what they suggest
The study is not entirely pessimistic. The researchers identify what they call “cracks in the gender order” – moments where hegemonic norms were quietly questioned. A senior male scientist organised his career around being present for his children and explicitly told his research group he expected the same flexibility for them. A group of men, over drinks, acknowledged that alcohol had become the only socially legitimate space to express vulnerability and began to question that arrangement out loud. At a general assembly meeting, a member challenged the default assumption that only leaders should present work, and the network agreed to diversify its speakers.
These moments are small and informal. However, the researchers argue they may matter more in the long run than formal initiatives pursued in isolation – because they touch the relational infrastructure that formal policies cannot reach.
Redesign, not documentation
If the findings of this study can be reduced to a single provocation, it is this: if we do not redesign the dynamics of informal networking, we are not changing the system. We are simply documenting it more carefully.
The question organisations should be asking is not only “Do we have the right policies?” but “Who has access to the network where decisions actually happen?” – and, critically, what are we doing to change the answer.
Because equality, in the end, is not only about rules. It is about relationships. Until we take the informal seriously – until we treat the daily texture of who talks to whom, who is trusted, and who is included as organisational infrastructure worth examining and redesigning – the gap between our equality commitments and our equality outcomes will persist.
AI‑Assisted: Portions of this text were translated from Italian to English and reviewed for English language by AI, which also suggested paragraph headings. The entire content has been thoroughly verified by RB.