Tag Archives | Intersectionality

Can't Catch a Break: Intersectional Inequalities at Work

Kristen Harknett, Charlotte O’Herron, Evelyn Bellew

Sociological Science March 25, 2024
10.15195/v11.a10


The labor market is the site of longstanding and persistent inequalities across race and gender groups in hiring, compensation, and advancement. In this paper, we draw on data from 13,574 hourly service-sector workers to extend the study of intersectional labor market inequalities to workers’ experience on the job. In the service sector, where workers are regularly expected to be on their feet for long hours and contend with intense and unrelenting workloads, regular break time is an essential component of job quality and general well-being. Yet, we find that Black women are less likely than their counterparts to get a break during their work shift. Although union membership and laws mandating work breaks are effective in increasing access to breaks for workers overall, they do not ameliorate the inequality Black women face in access to work breaks within the service sector. A sobering implication is that worker power and labor protections can raise the floor on working conditions but leave inequalities intact. Our findings also have implications for racial health inequalities, as the routine daily stress of the service sector takes a disproportionate toll on the health of Black women.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kristen Harknett: Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California San Francisco
E-mail: kristen.harknett@ucsf.edu

Charlotte O’Herron: Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Harvard University
E-mail: charlotteoherron@fas.harvard.edu

Evelyn Bellew: Harvard Kennedy School
E-mail: evelyn@bellew.net

Acknowledgements: The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the National Institute on Aging (Grant No. R01AG066898), the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Grant No. U19OH012293), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We received excellent research assistance from Connor Williams and Elizabeth Kuhlman. We are grateful for feedback from members of the California Labor Lab, Laura Dresser, and other participants in the Labor Employment Relations annual meeting.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: Data and code for replication are available at Harvard’s Dataverse repository, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NJABRM.

  • Citation: Harknett, Kristen, Charlotte O’Herron and Evelyn Bellew. 2024. “Can’t Catch a Break: Intersectional Inequalities at Work.” Sociological Science 11: 233-257.
  • Received: April 28, 2023
  • Accepted: September 29, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Filiz Garip
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a10


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