The Role of Online Socialization at the Workplace : Impact on Reducing Gender Disparity

Socializing and informal communications among co-workers is known to play an important role at the workplace, as it can enhance work-related outcomes. As an increasing number of firms now have jobs that are fully or partially compatible with remote work after the pandemic, it is important to understand if online avenues of socializing would produce similar benefits. In addition, there are well-known gender disparities in reaping the work-related benefits of socializing in offline settings. However, whether these disparities would manifest with online socialization is unclear. Intrigued by these questions, we undertook an empirical effort to study the impacts of participating in online social groups on subsequent work-related participation levels, and whether online socializing had a greater effect on certain user groups. To empirically test this, we relied on the user-level participation data from an ESM software company that is used by thousands of companies. A difference-in-difference approach was used to contrast the change in workgroup participation of treated users who participate in social groups to the workgroup participation of control users who do not join social groups. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we used various matching methods and constructed appropriate control groups to difference-out selection effects that are inherent in our context. Our results reveal that participation in social groups has a positive spillover on user participation in workgroups. We find that women tend to experience a larger spillover effect, indicating that online social groups help to connect female employees to others, which in turn spur them to contribute more to work related discussions. At the same time, the spillover effect has a greater impact among lower-ranked employees, suggesting that social group participation can alleviate participation concerns stemming from hierarchy asymmetry. We further find that the effect of social groups are greater among small groups and indirect participation (via post liking and favoriting) can also improve workgroup participation among a select set of users. Study implications are discussed