Research Findings

On Tuesday, October 8^th 2019, the Supreme Court heard arguments for the first time regarding whether the federal laws that have banned employment discrimination on the basis of sex can also be applied to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) workers. 

Essentially, the question that is now before the court is whether it is legal for LGBTQ workers to be fired or denied jobs on the basis of their sexual orientation and/or gender expression. Given recent social science scholarship documenting persistent patterns of discrimination against sexual and gender minority workers, it is hard to over-estimate the importance of a favorable ruling for current and future generations of LGBTQ-identifying working Americans. 

A common goal in the existing literature on LGBTQ workers is to uncover mechanisms, such as hiring discrimination, that prevent LGBTQ workers from accessing or entering into certain jobs and occupations. Thus, much attention has been paid to the factors impeding LGBTQ workers’ access to certain jobs and occupations. A Supreme Court ruling making such discrimination illegal, many advocates say, would go a long way to addressing these disadvantages. 

Our research suggests that banning discrimination for the hiring and promotion of LGBTQ workers may not act as the great equalizer many have hoped for. In a study of LGBTQ workers who already enjoy anti-discrimination protections, we find that those workers still face a myriad of biases in their workplaces on a day-to-day basis. 

Most readers of this blog probably live in countries where a pharmaceutical regulatory agency decides what medical treatments are made available. Following the paradigm of the US Food and Drug Administration, for the last fifty years these agencies have been testing new treatments for safety and efficacy with a standardized experimental design called randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Historians of medical experimentation (like the late Harry Marks) claim that RCTs were adopted because they implemented controls that warranted the impartiality of the experiment. 

There is an open debate over how the experiments bear relevance to the world in which regulatory decisions play out. But regulatory agencies have trusted evidence from well-designed RCTs as the most impartial ground to decide on the safety and efficacy of a new treatment. 

A clinical trial often generates major conflicts of interest because the sponsoring pharmaceutical company wants its treatment to succeed in the trial and patients often have preferences on treatments even before enrolling in the trial. Blinding all participating stakeholders is a device to control the experiment and prevent interferences. If neither physicians nor patients know whether they are receiving the experimental treatment or a placebo, their preferences will not influence the outcome of the trial. 

At least one good thing has come out of Amazon warehouses. The horror stories about the company’s working conditions—including sonic wristbands that follow employees’ every move—have increased public concern about the potential dangers of workplace surveillance. Beyond Amazon, workers across a range of industries are already being tracked and monitored.

In a recent article, I focus on the digital surveillance of fast fashion retail workers. Fast fashion chains such as Zara and H&M are known for selling a tremendous amount of trendy, cheap clothing. Less well known about these companies is the extent to which they too rely on a vast amount of data—tracking customers and workers alike—to keep their stores running.

Between 2015 and 2018, I immersed myself in this industry. I worked as a sales associate at two major fast fashion retailers in New York City, interviewed twenty other retail workers, volunteered with a retail workers’ center, and attended corporate retail conferences where the latest technologies were on display.

One of the most vexing political and social science problems is the persistence of the gender wage gap. In a recently published article in the American Journal of Sociology, we argue that looking at an organization’s choices is crucial to understanding the gender pay gap. Studies that focus on pay as a result of individual worker choices (such as assuming women choose lower paying jobs to accommodate family) are missing that organizations also make choices about pay. 

Our article offers a new approach to analyzing the gender pay gap, examining how different organizations pay women less than men using multiple mechanisms at the organization level. These organizational-level processes are often hidden, and harder to see than individual choices, but may be more powerful. 

Because we were looking at workers in the federal government in the US, initially we assumed that the federal general schedule (GS)—the system of pay grades tied to job requirements, responsibilities, education, and tenure—would effectively reduce most pay inequality between similarly qualified workers. 

Who would you entrust your car to? Many of us who drive entrust our cars to parking valets, exchanging the keys for a small ticket handed to us by a company employee, often stationed behind a kiosk where prices are shown. We find comfort in knowing that if the car were to be stolen, we could always call the police to handle the matter. We might also entrust our cars to friends or family members. Since they are close to us, we expect them to take good care of the vehicle. 

These two scenarios roughly correspond to the two predominant explanations that the social science literature offers about what makes trust possible. In the first case, reliable institutions make trust possible; in the second, group dynamics—and particularly, the recognition of others as members of our same group (homophily)—do. 

Yet, in a recently published article, I explore the case of informal car-parkers in Mexico City—often dubbed “viene-vienes”—and their interactions with clients, which defies both of these explanations. Amid the busy streets of Mexico City, with its terrible traffic and limited parking, middle- and high-class Mexicans often entrust their cars—keys and all—to informal car parkers with no institutional affiliations. 

What is the relationship between markets, money and their infrastructures? Economists tell us that the relationship is straightforward: money makes markets “fluid” and adequate infrastructures make them efficient. But ongoing attempts at integrating financial markets in Europe teach us a different story.

In a series of three recently published research articles, I analyze the interlacing problems in present-day Europe of (a) creating an integrated infrastructure for financial markets, (b) rendering financial markets liquid and efficient without producing systemic risks, and (c) drawing a line between money as a tradeable commodity in the market and as a fluidifying medium for markets (an infrastructure).

This nexus of problems reveals fundamental contradictions inscribed in the legal and political foundations for still ongoing European financial market integration processes. Mapping these contradictions can recast our understanding of controversies and debates related to integration processes ranging from bureaucratic disagreements over technical issues to open political conflict in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis of 2009.

The US labor market has undergone major changes in the types of occupations that are in demand over the last fifty years. Since the 1970s, many jobs and sectors traditionally dominated by men have contracted or disappeared. For example, the manufacturing and construction sectors – both heavily male-dominated sectors – were among the hardest hit industries during the Great Recession in terms of job losses, and jobs in the manufacturing sector have had an overall decline of over 50% since the 1970s. 

On the other hand, the demand for jobs traditionally held by women has increased significantly, and these patterns are expected to continue in the future. In fact, women dominate the majority of industries projected to have the highest job growth over the next decade. If the jobs that women currently dominate represent the future occupational landscape, will men enter these jobs? 

Diversity is increasingly recognized as important in the workplace, be it for performance, legitimacy, or social justice reasons, and schools as workplaces are no exception. Three recent trends in education point to the importance of a racially diverse teacher workforce for better student outcomes, especially for racial minority students. 

First, studies in education continually show gains in gifted placement, attendance, and achievement for racial minority students assigned to a racial minority teacher. Second, such “racial matching” is not available to many racial minority students because of racial segregation in schools. While more than 50% of US public school children are nonwhite, only 20% of public school teachers in the US are nonwhite. Third, nonwhite teachers have higher levels of turnover than white teachers.

We need a deeper understanding of not only how schools recruit teachers of color, but also how organizational conditions in schools can better retain teachers of color. These insights can be applied to similar organizational settings where diversity management is consequential for client/customer experiences and outcomes (e.g., hospitals, retail), or to any workplace concerned with racial equity in employees’ access to workplace resources post-hire.

Many people today, spend some of their spare time doing volunteer work in the belief that it will be looked upon favorably by employers and lead to better-paying jobs. 

A recent analysis of longitudinal data from the United Kingdom published in Social Science Research confirms that they are correct, but only for those with jobs in the “salariat” – professionals, managers, administrators and the like – while working class volunteers pay a penalty for their altruism.

This topic is of considerable interest today because recent developments in the economies of advanced industrial societies have changed the social contract between employers and employees. As employment has become more precarious, workers find they can no longer rely on a system where opportunities are defined internally by tenure or rank; instead, they must market themselves. Under constant pressure to prepare for the next job, they are advised to network assiduously, learn new skills by returning to school, and even take classes on writing persuasive job applications and performing well in interviews. In some cases they are advised to take unpaid or marginally paid positions such as internships or to perform volunteer work. 

Every school year, a new cohort of parents faces the challenge of finding the right school for their child – each year with a disheartening result: ethnic minority children tend to end up at schools of lower prestige and quality. Intriguingly, this ethnic stratification across schools affects not only their further school careers, but it profoundly shapes minority students’ identities and their social relationships with their classmates.

Ethnic stratification, the uneven distribution of majority and minority children across schools of different prestige, is widespread: in various countries, at various school transitions, and in various school systems. A substantial share of the ethnic and racial inequalities we observe in modern societies originates from ethnic stratification in the school system.

But schools provide more than grades and certificates. It is here where youth form lasting friendships, where they develop their views, attitudes, and identities. Does unequal school sorting not only create unequal life chances but also produce stronger ethnic boundaries in the minds and relations of youth?