Working with a team of computer scientists, Ajay Mehra published a paper in the interdisciplinary journal, Social Networks on how gender and rank shape emergent patterns of social interaction on an Enterprise Social Media (ESM) platform. The study, which examined over half a million messages exchanged between 2085 users, found that, despite the affordances of social media that can help democratize interactions between people, emergent patterns of interaction on the social media platform were in fact stratified on the basis of gender and rank. These results fit previous findings of how gender and rank shape more traditional face-to-face social networks.

The study by Mehra and his coauthors suggests that ESM is not a panacea for solving the challenges involved in connecting diverse people at work. A preprint version of the article is available at www.ajaymehra.net/home/research