Women's networks have to start doing the business

While men are approachable and willing to help, women tend to view networking with suspicion, says Orna Mulcahy

AT A women's networking breakfast earlier this week, I couldn't help noticing that a lady at the next table still had one of those white security tags attached to the jacket of her black suit.

God knows it's not easy to get out of the house for a 7.30am start and be perfectly groomed into the bargain - and that's the kind of thing that happens when you have to get dressed in the dark.

Many of the 190 or so women present had managed to arrive on time and in full make-up; your correspondent was not among them. I had to overcome a simmering resentment to be there in the first place: breakfast time, for all the seven minutes that it lasts, is family time, not networking time. To have to give it up, and look respectable into the bargain was hard going, even if there were useful contacts to be made.

"I know . . ." said a partner in a law firm clucking sympathetically as we grappled with our name tags (designed for stiff lapels, rather than fluttery layers). "I hate leaving the children before breakfast. Last time I left

this early it was so chaotic one of them texted me to say 'Dad's gone psycho'."

We'd been invited to the inaugural breakfast of the Women's Executive Network, an organisation that aims to get women mingling with intent.

Members, it says, will get to "interact with some of Ireland's most powerful women". There will be online seminars, delivered direct to "the busy manager's desk", and these regular breakfasts for the ritual picking at fruit salad and forging of connections.

Clearly there's an opening, judging by the packed room at the National Gallery where the event was held, and an inspiring talk from Special Olympics chief Mary Davis got things off to a cracking good start.

Still, I have my doubts. Women are not natural networkers. Sure we like talking to each other, and at length, but the art of conversation as a career move does not come easy.

Women are cellular beings. We like to get on with a job and work through lunch. We tend to keep things to ourselves. The idea of calling up a stranger to ask for advice, or for an introduction to a contact, or even to invite them for lunch, well it's not what we do.

We're suspicious creatures, jealous of our own jobs, determined to guard our patches and afraid of appearing incompetent. Watch men together at a conference or a meeting and the first thing they do is smoothly produce their cards and slide them over.

Women are often left scrabbling around in their enormous handbags saying: "I have a card in here somewhere" and then end up having to write their number on the back of a receipt for a pair of Spanx. At the risk of letting down the sisterhood, I'll say this: it's easier to cold-call a man to ask for a steer or a story. It's not just that there are more men in positions that count than women, but simply that they can be more approachable and more willing to help.

There's an understanding with men that a favour will come back to them. If they can help, they will. Cold-call a woman and she will almost certainly be guarded, ultra-cautious and sometimes downright cold.

Women are less inclined to take you at face value and will often be thinking, what does this person really want and will it come back to haunt me.

Mary Davis talked brilliantly about how networking had helped her in organising the games in Dublin in 2003.

For instance, they needed thousands of walkie-talkie sets for the volunteers and she managed to wangle them from a US army general she had met at a cocktail party some months earlier. A male general, that is. Would a female general (and the US army has them) have thought "the cheek of her!" or "I'll never get those headsets back and it will be all my fault?"

"The truth is that men help women more than women help women," said one consultant after the breakfast. That's been her experience after 30 years in a business that relies heavily on making new contacts, and extracting information and, ultimately money from them.

The New Yorkermagazine ran a story last week that explained Sarah Palin's nomination as vice-presidential candidate. Apparently, she hosted a couple of lunches in Wasilla for influential Washington folk on a whistle-stop tour of Alaska. All of them were men, and they went back to Washington and talked her up a storm.

"Frankly, I think I'd rather go to a men's networking breakfast," said another hard-boiled businesswoman at the event. She finds that her e-mail gets clogged up with chain letters from women about charity events, hard luck stories and ludicrous jokes that take ages to download.

"We're used to sharing information about plumbers and beauty therapists and the like, but we need to get better at sharing business information," she said.

Even if it does mean getting up very early in the morning.