Existing research has found that women's networks tend to be less advantageous than those of men, with women often occupying peripheral positions and reaping fewer career benefits from networking. However, past study often conflates gender with sex, and therefore invokes an implicit assumption that female disadvantage equals feminine disadvantage in professional networks. Our study challenges this assumption by disentangling the cultural meaning of gender from sex categories and examining their separate influences on professional network formation. By analyzing the professional networks of executive MBA students, we find that women with more masculine identity elements are more likely to be selected as network contacts, particularly among men. Our follow-on experiment reveals that masculine women are rated higher on competency without suffering likability loss. Our work provides new insights into the role of gender identity in professional network formation and contests the prevailing assumptions of female disadvantage in managerial professional networks. This research highlights the importance of considering cultural perceptions of gender when examining professional networks and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how gendered perceptions of identities shape network outcomes.