Search

The two main axes of inequality in the U.S. labor market—occupation and workplace—have increasingly consolidated. In 1999, the largest share of employment at high-paying workplaces was blue-collar production workers, but by 2017 it was managers and professionals. As such, workers benefiting from a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from membership in a high-paying occupation. Drawing on occupation-by-workplace data, we show that up to two-thirds of the rise in wage inequality since 1999 can be accounted for not by occupation or workplace inequality alone, but by this increased consolidation. Consolidation is not primarily due to outsourcing or to occupations shifting across a fixed set of workplaces. Instead, consolidation has resulted from new bases of workplace pay premiums. Workplace premiums associated with teams of professionals have increased, while premiums for previously high-paid blue-collar workers have been cut. Yet the largest source of consolidation is bifurcation in the social sector, whereby some previously low-paying but high-professional share workplaces, like hospitals and schools, have deskilled their jobs, while others have raised pay. Broadly, the results demonstrate an understudied way that organizations affect wage inequality: not by directly increasing variability in workplace or occupation premiums, but by consolidating these two sources of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational theory scholars typically see organizations as race-neutral bureaucratic structures, while race and ethnicity scholars have largely neglected the role of organizations in the social construction of race. The theory developed in this article bridges these subfields, arguing that organizations are racial structures—cognitive schemas connecting organizational rules to social and material resources. I begin with the proposition that race is constitutive of organizational foundations, hierarchies, and processes. Next, I develop four tenets: (1) racialized organizations enhance or diminish the agency of racial groups; (2) racialized organizations legitimate the unequal distribution of resources; (3) Whiteness is a credential; and (4) the decoupling of formal rules from organizational practice is often racialized. I argue that racialization theory must account for how both state policy and individual attitudes are filtered through—and changed by—organizations. Seeing race as constitutive of organizations helps us better understand the formation and everyday functioning of organizations. Incorporating organizations into a structural theory of racial inequality can help us better understand stability, change, and the institutionalization of racial inequality. I conclude with an overview of internal and external sources of organizational change and a discussion of how the theory of racialized organizations may set the agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women earn better grades than men across levels of education—but to what end? This article assesses whether men and women receive equal returns to academic performance in hiring. I conducted an audit study by submitting 2,106 job applications that experimentally manipulated applicants’ GPA, gender, and college major. Although GPA matters little for men, women benefit from moderate achievement but not high achievement. As a result, high-achieving men are called back significantly more often than high-achieving women—at a rate of nearly 2-to-1. I further find that high-achieving women are most readily penalized when they major in math: high-achieving men math majors are called back three times as often as their women counterparts. A survey experiment conducted with 261 hiring decision-makers suggests that these patterns are due to employers’ gendered standards for applicants. Employers value competence and commitment among men applicants, but instead privilege women applicants who are perceived as likeable. This standard helps moderate-achieving women, who are often described as sociable and outgoing, but hurts high-achieving women, whose personalities are viewed with more skepticism. These findings suggest that achievement invokes gendered stereotypes that penalize women for having good grades, creating unequal returns to academic performance at labor market entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has progress toward gender equality in the workplace and at home stalled in recent decades? A growing body of scholarship suggests that persistently gendered workplace norms and policies limit men’s and women’s ability to create gender egalitarian relationships at home. In this article, we build on and extend prior research by examining the extent to which institutional constraints, including workplace policies, affect young, unmarried men’s and women’s preferences for their future work-family arrangements. We also examine how these effects vary across education levels. Drawing on original survey-experimental data, we ask respondents how they would like to structure their future relationships while experimentally manipulating the degree of institutional constraint under which they state their preferences. Two clear patterns emerge. First, as constraints are removed and men and women can opt for an egalitarian relationship, the majority choose this option, regardless of gender or education level. Second, women’s relationship structure preferences are more responsive than men’s to the removal of institutional constraints through supportive work-family policy interventions. These findings shed light on important questions about the role of institutions in shaping work-family preferences, underscoring the notion that seemingly gender-traditional work-family decisions are largely contingent on the constraints of current workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While great progress has been made in documenting that organizational practices affect workplace inequality, little is known about how managers in particular may shape the careers of the employees below them. Using unique longitudinal personnel data on managers and their subordinates, this study identifies and tests for evidence of three distinct mechanisms by which managers potentially influence the assessment of employee performance in the workplace: (1) social network influence between employees’ current and former managers; (2) manager–manager (horizontal) homophily; and (3) manager–employee (vertical) homophily. I find evidence of the independent effects of all three mechanisms of managerial influence on the outcome of disagreement in the performance evaluation ratings of the same worker between former and current managers. In particular, my results stress that both managerial network influence and horizontal homophily affect the process of employee performance assessments, over and above the well-studied vertical homophily mechanism. I conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of these findings for future research regarding the interactional aspects of workplace inequality within contemporary organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the great paradoxes of inequality in organizations is that even when organizations introduce new programs designed to help employees in traditionally disadvantaged groups succeed, employees who use these programs often suffer negative career consequences. This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature by investigating how local employer practices can enable employees to successfully use the programs designed to benefit them. Using a research approach that controls for regulatory environment and program design, we analyze unique longitudinal personnel data from a large law firm to demonstrate that assignment to powerful supervisors upon organization entry improves career outcomes for individuals who later use a reduced-hours program. Additionally, we find that initial assignment to powerful supervisors is more important to positive career outcomes—that is, employee retention and performance-based pay—than are factors such as supervisor assignment at the time of program use. Initial assignment affects career outcomes for later program users through the mechanism of improved access to reputation-building work opportunities. These findings have implications for research on work-family programs and other employee-rights programs and for the role of social capital in careers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Women have made significant inroads into management in recent decades, yet remain underrepresented in leadership positions in large firms. In this article, I assess the critical but seldom analyzed role that widespread corporate restructuring may play in generating these inequalities. I build on social-cognitive research and the opportunity structure for discrimination framework to develop contrasting predictions of the effects from two forms of restructuring—reductions in force and reorganization of human resource management systems—on sex differences in managerial promotion. Analyses of longitudinal personnel records from a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm—a firm that restructured multiple times over the period examined—are consistent with the opportunity structure for discrimination framework and suggest that the firm responded to gender equity pressures to promote women when afforded the opportunity to do so. Women's promotion rates were higher than men's during restructuring, relative to previous years, with a greater difference at higher-status job levels. Importantly, however, few women transitioned into upper management positions in the firm during the restructuring period because (1) reductions in force slowed promotion rates for all managers, (2) women began their careers in lower-status jobs to begin with, relative to men, and (3) women's promotion advantages were often short-lived. I conclude by discussing implications of my findings for research on organizational dynamics and gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]