Have you ever wondered how social interactions at work affect your career? Could coffee or fantasy football with the boss tip the scale when you’re up for that next promotion? In a recent study, researchers find evidence that schmoozing with the manager can indeed be consequential for your career. Moreover, they show that this importance of schmoozing can be a disadvantage for women’s advancement at work.

John M Lund Photography Inc/Getty Images

Offices are social places. Employees and managers take coffee breaks together, go to lunch, hang out over drinks, and play in sports leagues. Companies often encourage this socializing, in hopes of fostering strong team bonds that lead to higher performance and less conflict.

But have you ever wondered if these interactions affect your career? Could coffee or fantasy football with the boss tip the scale when you’re up for that next promotion?

In a recent study, we find evidence that schmoozing with the manager can indeed be consequential for your career. Moreover, we show that this importance of schmoozing can be a disadvantage for women’s advancement at work.

Consider the significant gender gap in promotions in companies around the world. McKinsey data shows that, in the United States, 48% of entry-level employees are women, but female representation falls to 38% at middle-management, 22% at the C-Suite level, and 5% at the CEO level. While the gender gap has been closing in other fronts, such as in education attainment, improvement in the promotion gap has been agonizingly slow.

Anecdotal accounts suggest this gender gap arises, at least partly, because men can schmooze with more powerful men in ways that are less accessible to women. This is sometimes referred to as the “old boys’ club.” For example, 81% of women say that they feel excluded from relationship-building at work, and many can’t participate in after-work hours socializing. This limits women’s access to those with the power and influence to support their advancement.

To study the effects of socialization at work, we partnered with a large commercial bank in Asia. We used their administrative records to track the assignments between the employees and managers, as well as the evolution of the employee’s pay grade, effort, and performance. We also conducted a series of surveys to measure other aspects of the employees’ lives, such as whether they take breaks with their managers, or whether they know the manager’s favorite sports team.

We started by measuring the effect that a manager’s gender had on an employee’s career, using what economists call a quasi-experiment. We looked at the naturally occurring rotation of managers between teams, since these transitions were almost as good as random. We then looked at employees’ outcomes in the months and years that led up to and followed the manager switch.

This allowed us to compare, for example, two male employees — one in a unit that switched from a female to a male manager, the other in a unit that switched from a female manager to another female manager. Both of these employees experienced a transition, but only one transitioned to a male manager. According to the old boys’ club hypothesis, the male employee transitioning to the male manager should advance more quickly, because he’d have better access to a valuable network of male leaders.

Our evidence was consistent with this: Male employees advanced further in the organization after they were assigned to male managers, relative to how they would have fared if they were instead assigned to female managers. Two and a half years after the transition, male employees who transitioned to male managers had roughly 13% higher pay, compared to the male employees who transitioned to female managers.

In contrast, the manager’s gender had no effect on female employees’ careers. Female employees assigned to female managers didn’t seem to enjoy the same advantage from socializing that men got from being assigned to male managers. This could mean that female managers didn’t socialize with their employees — or, what our data suggests, that unlike male bosses, female managers socialized equally with male and female employees, thus not giving one gender an advance over the other.

Or perhaps male managers were just better at motivating male employees and getting them to be more productive, and that’s why they were promoted faster? We found no evidence to support this. After transitioning to a male manager, male employees worked a similar number of days, spent a similar number of hours in the office, and had similar sales revenues as everyone else. We also did not see that male managers were any better at retaining male employees.

This brings us back to schmoozing. Were men able to advance faster under male bosses because they were able to schmooze more easily? We have many pieces of evidence suggesting this was the case. For example, the advantage of having a male manager did not materialize immediately. It took about a year for those effects to kick in, which makes sense when you think about schmoozing: Employees needed a bit of time to bond with their male managers and gain their support. We also found that the disproportionate rise in promotions for male employees assigned to male managers only appeared in positions where socializing was more common, such as customer support specialists.

To more directly test this schmoozing mechanism, we also collected survey data on how employees and managers socialized. Did male employees interact with their managers more after they got assigned to a male boss? The data says yes: Male employees were significantly more likely to share work breaks with their manager after this transition. And we found that employees who spent more breaks with their managers were more likely to know certain personal preferences, like their favorite sports team, suggesting that this socializing helped them get to know one another pretty well.

The problem with this male-male advantage is it can generate a self-perpetuating cycle: Men are more likely to be promoted under male managers, hence they are more likely to become managers themselves and pass on the same advantage to their male subordinates. Our back of the envelope calculations suggest that schmoozing with the manager may be responsible for one third of the gender gap in promotions in this organization.

We also wondered if there were other things besides gender that made it easier to schmooze with the boss. After all, men might not have equal access to the old boys’ club. We used another quasi-experiment to explore this, this time looking at smoking breaks.

We analyzed survey data on the smoking habits of male employees and male managers. We conjectured that when a male employee who smokes transitions to a male manager who also smokes, they would spend more time together over smoking breaks. Our survey data confirmed this. Most importantly, we found that after the transition, male employees who smoke were more likely to be promoted than non-smokers and smokers who transitioned to non-smoking managers. This advantage from smoking was similar in timing and magnitude to the advantage from getting a male boss that we documented above.

These findings suggest that yes, getting face time with the boss can make a difference for your career — but maybe only if you’re a man with a male boss. Of course, every organization is unique and thus the findings that we document in this particular organization should be taken with a grain of salt. We hope that future research studies will measure these effects in other contexts.

With those caveats in mind, we do have some advice for employees: Be aware that your relationship with your manager may affect your chances of being promoted. Make an effort to engage with your manager whenever you get the chance, and even create those opportunities if possible. If you are shy, you’ll have to make an effort. If you are a woman, you might have to try even harder.

We also have some advice if you are managing an organization. To run a profitable business, you probably want to promote the employees who are best at their jobs and not just those who are best at schmoozing with their bosses. We hope that future research can provide evidence on the policies that minimize these biases in promotions and pay. In the meantime, we can propose some potential solutions.

First, increasing diversity at the top may help it trickle down to the rest of the organization. Our evidence suggests that, unlike the male managers, female managers treated male and female employees similarly. Thus, increasing the number of female managers would level the playing field for women. Even if the set of managers stays the same, it could help if employees are reviewed by multiple managers for promotions — it may be more difficult to schmooze two or three managers than to schmooze just one.

Second, you can try to create opportunities so that all types of employees can interact with their managers. Are the male managers playing soccer regularly with the male employees? Perhaps you can promote other activities that will engage female employees too.

Last, make sure to use all the objective information you can in your promotions decisions. Are you keeping track of the hours employees spend in the office? What about their sales revenues? How many ideas they brought to the table? Relying on algorithms for performance reviews may still be subject to biases, but at least employees cannot schmooze with algorithms during smoking breaks.