Networks as Infrastructure: Who Introduces Whom, and Who Never Gets Introduced

A warm introduction in Kampala is usually a WhatsApp message of four lines: two names, one reason, and the sender’s reputation attached to both. Whoever sends that message decides who travels on the network, which makes the network infrastructure with a person at every junction. How many of AVODA’s own introductions went to women? Nobody here has counted. In a recruitment experiment in Malawi, men free to refer anyone sent a woman 23% of the time, and when asked for a woman they referred qualified women just as readily. Where women founders in East Africa are introduced less, the evidence points first at the choices of the people holding the contacts, and a broker can change hers this week.

Key Takeaways

An introduction is a loan of the sender’s reputation. Brokers lend where they know the borrower best and where the social return is highest, which in practice means people like themselves.
In the Malawi experiment (Lilongwe and Blantyre, 2011), 77% of men given a free choice referred a man. Asked specifically for a woman, they made referrals at the same 84% rate, and the women they named qualified as often.
Women referring women is a real help with a ceiling: women referred women 43% of the time, which still fell short of offsetting the men’s choices.
In Uganda, pairing women cotton farmers with a productive woman who was a stranger to them raised yields by 98 kg per acre, against 67 kg under formal training, at a quarter of the cost.
The Introduction Audit is a twenty-row check any broker can run on her own phone: who she introduced, to whom, what followed, and how many of them were women.

What the book says about networks

Women in the Technology and Innovation Ecosystem: From Movers to Makers in America (CRC Press, 2026), edited by Manleenjot Kaur, Melissa Hyunh and Tilottama Singh, returns to networks in almost every chapter. Rashmi Singh, Anuja Shukla and Sushil Kumar write in chapter 8 that networks supply knowledge, moral support and “critical business opportunities,” and that women are kept out of male-dominated circles. Jyoti Suri, Praveen Kumar Pandey and Mohd Asif Shah observe in chapter 9 that leadership grows “through informal channels,” and that early women leaders lacked sponsors who would speak for them. Amy Amann, describing her return to the United States after years abroad, calls the web of colleagues and contacts “professional infrastructure” that had to be rebuilt from scratch.

That phrase is the right one, and this essay takes it at its word. Roads get built where somebody decides to build them, and a network grows the same way, one introduction at a time.

The book’s remedies are mostly rooms and programs: organizations adopting mentorship procedures, women’s networks such as Women Techmakers and AnitaB.org, and conferences like the Grace Hopper Celebration. Its evidence for the network gap also comes from a particular place. The chapter 8 claim rests on McGowan and colleagues (2012), a study of women entrepreneurs in Northern Ireland. The chapter 9 claim cites Ibarra, Carter and Silva in the Harvard Business Review (2010), built on a Catalyst survey of more than 4,000 corporate high potentials. That source draws the line the book’s prescriptions skip past: “Only sponsorship involves advocacy for advancement.” It found women more often mentored than men, and less often sponsored.

A mentor gives advice. A sponsor, like an introducer, spends her own name.

An introduction is a loan of reputation

In the book’s own country, introductions are the main gate to venture money. A 2016 survey of 885 American venture capitalists at 681 firms, by Paul Gompers, William Gornall, Steven Kaplan and Ilya Strebulaev, found that over 30% of deals came through the investors’ professional networks, 20% were referred by other investors and 8% by portfolio companies. Only 10% arrived inbound from the founders themselves. Close to six in ten deals began with somebody vouching.

The person who vouches carries the risk. If the founder she introduces wastes the investor’s afternoon, her next introduction is read more slowly. So brokers ration, and they ration toward the people they can judge most confidently. Beaman, Keleher and Magruder modeled this trade in their Malawi study: a referrer weighs what the employer gains against the social benefit she gets from the person she names, and she sees the social benefit clearly and the ability only dimly.

The Malawi results fit that model closely. The researchers ran a hiring drive for survey enumerators with Innovations for Poverty Action in Lilongwe and Blantyre between June and August 2011. Applicants were randomly told they could refer a man, a woman, or anyone. Given a free choice, men referred women 23% of the time. Told to refer a woman, they made a referral at the same rate as men told to refer a man, 84%, and the women they named were just as likely to qualify. Performance pay left the pattern in place. The authors also report that male referrers had better information about the men they knew than about the women, which is the reputation loan at work: a broker lends where she can see.

Women referrers chose women 43% of the time, close to the share of women among ordinary applicants. Their referrals qualified slightly less often, so the qualified pool from referrals ended at 28% women against 35% among those who walked in through the normal channel. A women’s network adds roads. On its own it carried less traffic than the men were directing.

Kampala’s introductions travel by handset

The remedies in the Kaur, Hyunh and Singh volume assume large employers, professional associations and conference circuits, where a woman can be placed in a program or sent to an event. Most introductions in Kampala travel person to person through a phone, sent by a hub manager, a banker, an established founder or a pastor with a long contact list. The binding point is the sender’s choice and the handset it travels on.

The handset itself is uneven. The GSMA’s Mobile Gender Gap Report 2025 found that in Uganda in 2024, 37% of men and 24% of women used mobile internet. Women micro-entrepreneurs in Uganda were 32% less likely than men in the same position to own a smartphone. An introduction forwarded on WhatsApp reaches only the founders who are on it, and the gap sits on the channel introductions now use.

The more hopeful evidence also comes from Uganda. Kenneth Leonard and Kathryn Vasilaky, working with the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab, took women cotton farmers in the least productive 30% and paired each with a productive woman farmer from her own village who was a stranger to her. The pairs swapped photographs, chose a shared goal and set times to meet through the season. Their yields rose by 98 kg per acre against 67 kg for women given formal extension training, from an average of 180 kg, and the network approach cost $5 per farmer against $20. The brief’s own summary: “the path to better outcomes is contained within their own community.” The productive farmer and the struggling one already lived in the same village, and the program’s whole contribution was the introduction.

A related test reached factory managers. Marcel Fafchamps and Simon Quinn randomly seated managers of manufacturing firms in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia together on judging panels for business plan competitions. The panels created new links, and what moved along them was concrete and current: VAT registration and opening a bank current account, at a time when all three countries were changing their VAT laws. Contact in a room moved the most concrete, time-bound information and little else.

The Introduction Audit

A broker can measure her own junction in under an hour. The Introduction Audit has two ledgers, sent and received, and four columns each.

List your last 20 introductions. Scroll back through WhatsApp and email. For each, write who you introduced, to whom, and the request it answered.
Mark what followed. An order, a hire, a loan, a meeting that led somewhere, or silence. This column keeps the audit honest about your judgment as well as your reach.
Count the women. Divide the women introduced by 20. Compare that share with the share of women among the founders you actually know.
Apply the asked-for-a-woman test. For the next two open requests in your phone, ask yourself the question the Malawi researchers asked their referrers: who is the strongest woman for this? Then send that introduction alongside, or instead of, the one you would have sent, with a single sentence on why and a date you will check back.

The received ledger is for founders. List the last ten introductions that reached you and who made each one. If one person made most of them, your business sits behind a single bridge, and a move, a quarrel or a new job on that person’s side closes your road. Two or three independent brokers make a sturdier route than one generous one.

Job fairs in Addis Ababa: meetings without a voucher

Girum Abebe, Stefano Caria, Marcel Fafchamps, Paolo Falco, Simon Franklin, Simon Quinn and Forhad Shilpi invited 1,006 young job seekers in Addis Ababa to job fairs with formal firms. About three in four who attended met a recruiter or sat an interview. The fairs produced 76 offers and 14 hires, and J-PAL’s summary reports no effect on employment. Firms and job seekers arrived with mismatched expectations about wages and experience.

The concession should be made in full. A room full of strangers produces meetings, and meetings by themselves produce very little. Any program that counts handshakes at a mixer as network-building is measuring the cheapest part of the work, and the job fair evidence says so plainly.

The fair, though, supplied contact without a voucher. Nobody at the fair knew both the firm’s need and the applicant’s ability and stood behind the match. The Ugandan pairing was specific (same crop, same village, a goal and a meeting schedule), and the Malawi referrals made on request came from people who knew the candidate and the job. The audit’s fourth step is built on that difference: one named woman, against one live request, with a reason and a follow-up.

A letter for Phoebe

Read aloud to the church in Rome, Paul’s letter reaches its final chapter and pauses to introduce a woman from Cenchreae to believers in another city: “I commend unto you Phebe our sister.” It makes a specific request, that they “assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of you,” and gives the basis: she had been a prostatis, a patron, to many, Paul included. The Greek word behind “business” means any matter she brought, so the request is broad and the letter claims only that. Set it beside the reputation-loan model. A rational broker lends where her own return is surest, and the Malawi study found that paying for performance left men referring men, so sharper incentives only sharpen the same choice. Paul cites a different return: what Phoebe had already given to others. His name becomes one more thing held in trust for someone else, which hands the broker a reason the incentive model lacks: to vouch for the woman whose ability she knows even when the social payoff to herself is small. A name used that way is lent on purpose, with a reason given and a request attached.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean to treat a business network as infrastructure?

It means looking at the junctions instead of the rooms. Every introduction passes through a person who decides whether to send it, and those choices set who reaches buyers, lenders and investors. A network grows like a road system, one link at a time, and each broker decides where her next link goes.

Why do men refer fewer women even when qualified women are available?

In the Malawi recruitment experiment, men given a free choice referred women 23% of the time, yet referred qualified women just as readily when asked for one. The authors point to social benefits from referring men and weaker information about women’s abilities. Performance pay left the pattern unchanged.

Do networking events help women founders get customers or investment?

Events create contact, and contact alone converts poorly. Job fairs in Addis Ababa produced many meetings, 76 offers and 14 hires, with no effect on employment. Introductions tied to a specific need, made by someone who knows both sides, have stronger evidence, including a Ugandan pairing program that raised women farmers’ yields.

How do investors find the startups they fund?

In a survey of 885 American venture capitalists, over 30% of deals came through investors’ professional networks, 20% from other investors and 8% from portfolio companies, while only 10% came inbound from founders. Introductions are the main gate, which makes the choices of the people who send them decisive for who gets funded.

What is the Introduction Audit?

It is a four-step check for anyone who makes introductions: list your last 20, mark what followed each, count how many went to women, and answer your next two open requests by naming the strongest woman for each. Founders run the received side to see whether one broker carries most of their introductions.

Next Step

If you run a hub, a fund, a bank desk or a church business fellowship, your phone holds part of Kampala’s infrastructure. Run the Introduction Audit this month, then bring the twenty rows to a strategy call with Joshua and we will work out which two introductions to send first and how to follow them up. Half an hour now saves a year of sending the same people down the same road.

Sources and Evidence

Women in the Technology and Innovation Ecosystem: From Movers to Makers in America (Routledge / CRC Press, 2026), DOI 10.1201/9781003604402: the book’s network chapters (4, 8, 9), its prescriptions and the three short quotes.
Beaman, Keleher and Magruder, “Do Job Networks Disadvantage Women? Evidence from a Recruitment Experiment in Malawi”, Journal of Labor Economics 36(1), 2018: referral shares by gender (23%, 43%, 77%, 84%), qualification rates, performance pay, information about women.
Leonard and Vasilaky, “As Good as the Company They Keep? Improving Farmers’ Social Networks”, World Bank Africa Gender Innovation Lab Policy Brief 15, 2016: the Uganda cotton pairing, yields of 98 against 67 kg per acre, $5 against $20 per farmer.
Abebe, Caria, Fafchamps, Falco, Franklin, Quinn and Shilpi, “Job Fairs for Employment Matching in Ethiopia”, J-PAL evaluation summary: 1,006 invited, 76 offers, 14 hires, no employment effect.
Fafchamps and Quinn, “Networks and Manufacturing Firms in Africa: Results from a Randomized Field Experiment”, NBER Working Paper 21132, 2015: randomized judging panels in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia; diffusion of VAT registration and bank accounts.
Gompers, Gornall, Kaplan and Strebulaev, “How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?”, NBER Working Paper 22587, 2016: deal sourcing shares from a survey of 885 venture capitalists.
GSMA, The Mobile Gender Gap Report 2025: Uganda 2024 mobile internet use (37% of men, 24% of women) and the 32% smartphone gap for women micro-entrepreneurs.
Ibarra, Carter and Silva, “Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women”, Harvard Business Review, September 2010: the book’s source on sponsorship; Catalyst survey of 4,000+ high potentials.
Romans 16:1 to 2, King James Version, Bible Gateway: Paul’s commendation of Phoebe.
Romans 16:2, Greek interlinear, Bible Hub: pragmati (“matter”) and prostatis (“patroness”).