Tag Archives | Work

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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.

This 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.

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

"Was It Me or Was It Gender Discrimination?" How Women Respond to Ambiguous Incidents at Work

By Parker Webservices on September 11, 2023 in Articles

Laura Doering, Jan Doering, András Tilcsik

Sociological Science September 11, 2023
10.15195/v10.a18

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Research shows that people often feel emotional distress when they experience a potentially discriminatory incident but cannot classify it conclusively. In this study, we propose that the ramifications of such ambiguous incidents extend beyond interior, emotional costs to include socially consequential action (or inaction) at work. Taking a mixed-methods approach, we examine how professional women experience and respond to incidents that they believe might have been gender discrimination, but about which they feel uncertain. Our interviews show that women struggle with how to interpret and respond to ambiguous incidents. Survey data show that women experience ambiguous incidents more often than incidents they believe were obviously discriminatory. Our vignette experiment reveals that women anticipate responding differently to the same incident depending on its level of ambiguity. Following incidents that are obviously discriminatory, women anticipate taking actions that make others aware of the problem; following ambiguous incidents, women anticipate changing their own work habits and self-presentation. This study establishes ambiguous gendered incidents as a familiar element of many women’s work lives that must be considered to address unequal gendered experiences at work.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Laura Doering: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
E-mail: laura.doering@rotman.utoronto.ca

Jan Doering: Department of Sociology, University of Toronto
E-mail: jan.doering@utoronto.ca

András Tilcsik: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
E-mail: andras.tilcsik@rotman.utoronto.ca

Acknowledgements: For their feedback on previous drafts, we thank Anne Bowers, Clayton Childress, Stefan Dimitriadis, Angelina Grigoryeva, Wyatt Lee, Sida Liu, Ryann Manning, Kim Pernell-Gallagher, Lauren Rivera, Patrick Rooney, Sameer Srivastava, and Ezra Zuckerman, and the Toronto Group of Seven, as well as seminar audiences at Cornell University, McGill University, and the University of Toronto. We gratefully acknowledge research assistance from Abigail Alebachew, Claire Corsten, Pablo Guzmán Lizardo, Branchie Mbofwana, Kristen McNeill, Priyanka Saini, and Vincent Zhang. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Institute for Gender and the Economy.

Citation: Doering, Laura, Doering, Jan, and Tilcsik, András. 2023. “‘Was It Me or Was It Gender Discrimination?’ How Women Respond to Ambiguous Incidents at Work” Sociological Science 10: 501-533.
Received: March 8, 2023
Accepted: April 29, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a18

The Religious Work Ethic and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religiosity and the Gender Gap in Working for Its Own Sake, 1977 to 2018

By Parker Webservices on March 9, 2022 in Articles

Landon Schnabel, Cyrus Schleifer, Eman Abdelhadi, Samuel L. Perry

Sociological Science March 9, 2022
10.15195/v9.a4

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Societal beliefs about women’s work have long been a metric for gender equality, with recent scholarship focusing on trends in these attitudes to assess the progress (or stalling) of the gender revolution. Moving beyond widely critiqued gender attitude questions thought to be the only available items for measuring change over time, this article considers women’s and men’s views toward their own work over the last half century. Traditional gender scripts frame women’s labor force participation as less than ideal, something to do if financially necessary but not because work is intrinsically rewarding. Historically, this gender frame was reinforced by religion. We examine the gender gap in working for its own sake over time and whether and how religious involvement moderates these trends. Overall, the gender gap has declined to the point where it is now virtually nonexistent. However, religious involvement acts as a countervailing influence, bolstering the gap such that frequently attending men and women have not yet converged in their desire to work. Although the most religious Americans have not yet converged, men’s dropping desire to work and women’s rising desire to work are society-wide trends, and even the most religious Americans could be expected to converge at some point in the future. Traditionalist institutions contribute to unevenness in the gender revolution, but preferences cannot explain the persistent society-wide precarity of women’s work: Women now prefer to work for work’s sake at the same rate men do.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Landon Schnabel: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: schnabel@cornell.edu

Cyrus Schleifer: Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma
E-mail: cyrus.schleifer@ou.edu

Eman Abdelhadi: Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
E-mail: abdelhadi@uchicago.edu

Samuel L. Perry: Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma
E-mail: samperry@ou.edu

Acknowledgments: Direct correspondence to Landon Schnabel, Department of Sociology, Cornell University, 323 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. Email: schnabel@cornell.edu. The authors would like to thank Paula England, Brian Powell, and participants in the Cornell Center for the Study of Inequality Discussion Group for helpful feedback.

Citation: Schnabel, Landon, Cyrus Schleifer, Eman Abdelhadi, and Samuel L. Perry. 2022. “The Religious Work Ethic and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religiosity and the Gender Gap in Working for Its Own Sake, 1977 to 2018.” Sociological Science 9: 75-101.
Received: October 26, 2021
Accepted: January 6, 2022
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v9.a4

Is There a Caring Class? Intergenerational Transmission of Care Work

By Jesper Sorensen on September 30, 2015 in Articles

Maria Charles, Corrie Ellis, Paula England

Sociological Science, September 30, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a25

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Most research on intergenerational social reproduction has been concerned with upward and downward movements across rank-ordered, “big-class” categories or along continuous gradients of status, income, or skill. An exception is the more nominal conceptualization of the social structure offered in recent research that focuses on qualitative differences in life conditions across occupational “micro classes.” The present analysis broadens this nominal approach by considering social reproduction across an important qualitative dimension that bridges multiple occupations: whether or not one’s work centrally involves care. Based on data from the U.S. General Social Surveys, results provide little evidence that care work is transmitted from parents to children. While women and men whose parents worked in care are more likely to do so themselves, this association is attributable to a general tendency for people to work in the same detailed occupation as their parents. Parents pass along their vertical status positions, and sometimes their specific occupations, but not care work as such. Parent–child similarity in caring outcomes likely reflects transmission of values, skills, knowledge, and network ties that are specific to detailed occupations, rather than attributable to care work broadly defined.

Maria Charles: Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara Email: mcharles@soc.ucsb.edu

Corrie Ellis: Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara Email: corrieellis@umail.ucsb.edu

Paula England: Department of Sociology, New York University Email: pe22@nyu.edu

Acknowledgements: Equal authors, listed alphabetically. This research was funded by a grant to England and Charles from the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF Project #85-12-05). We thank Alicia Cast, Erin Cech, Bridget Harr, Alexandra Hendley, Sarah Thebaud, and Catherine Weinberger for comments and suggestions, and Guadalupe Soto for research assistance.