Despite what your older relatives who tell you to ask a random business' manager for a job might think, finding employment is often a grueling process filled with discouraging non-responses from potential employers.
Although we can sometimes get lucky and find that one of our online applications actually leads to an interview, our expectation that it's not what you know, but who you know can often turn out to be true.
But as a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America seems to suggest, that wisdom can apply to more than just the contacts we make expressly in the hopes of finding work. And that seems particularly true for women.