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Studies have shown that women's professional networks are often less powerful and effective than men's in terms of exchanged benefits, yet the motivations that underlie the networking behaviours remain less well understood. Based on an interview study of 37 high-profile female leaders working in large German corporations, we found that not only the extrinsic barrier of structural exclusion from powerful networks, but also the intrinsic barrier of women's hesitations to instrumentalize social ties are key to answering our research question: Why do women build less effective networks than men? Our analysis points to the existence of structural exclusion resulting from work-family conflict and homophily. With regard to personal hesitation, we identified two elements that were associated with under-benefiting from networking: moral considerations in social interactions and gendered modesty. Our study makes two important contributions. First, by highlighting personal hesitation as an intrinsic barrier, it extends the understanding of women's motivations for networking based on social exchange theory. Second, based on structural barriers and personal hesitation, it develops a grounded theory model of networking that offers a holistic understanding of

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Although we can observe noticeable progress in gender diversity on corporate boards, these boards remain far from gender balanced. Our paper builds on social identity theory to examine the impact of corporate elites-men and women who sit on multiple corporate boards-on board diversity. We extend the main argument of social identity theory concerning favouritism based on homophily by suggesting that boards with men with multiple appointments are unwilling to include female board members to protect the monopoly value generated by their elite status. The empirical analysis, based on DAX 30 firms in the period of 2010-2015, shows that the presence of multi-board men is negatively associated with women's participation, while the presence of multi-board women and other women on management boards is positively related to gender diversity on boards. Furthermore, robustness tests support and confirm our conclusion that multi-board men have a significant association with board diversity, even with small size (i.e. 1 or 2). Additionally, we find a significant effect arising from pressure related to the introduction of gender quotas in Germany, effective in 2016, indicating the effectiveness of gender quota policies for board gender diversity.