Underrepresentation
Bringing the Boss's Politics In: Supervisor Political Ideology and the Gender Gap in Earnings
Forrest Briscoe & Aparna Joshi
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The gender gap in earnings and rewards remains persistent across many professional and managerial work contexts. In these settings, where there are few objective criteria for performance and organizational mechanisms are weak, we propose that personal political values can serve as a powerful influence on whether supervisors reduce or enhance inequalities in performance-based rewards. We develop theory about how political liberalism versus conservatism affects supervisors' perceptions and allocative decision making. Combining internal personnel and billings data with publicly-available political donation records in a large law firm, we test the effect of political ideology among supervising law firm partners on the performance-based bonuses awarded to male and female subordinate lawyers. We find the male-female gender gap in performance-based pay is reduced for professional workers tied to liberal supervisors, relative to conservative supervisors. We further find this political ideology effect increases for workers with greater seniority in the organization. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the determinants of the gender earnings gap, suggesting that in settings where managers have leeway over rewards and careers, their personal political beliefs have an important influence on outcomes for male and female workers.
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Soft Skills, Hard Skills, and the Black/White Wage Gap
Simon Fan, Xiangdong Wei & Junsen Zhang
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines the relative importance of soft skills versus hard skills across occupations and its impact on the observed wage gap between Blacks and Whites in the United States. It posits that the Black/White pay gap may vary across occupations that require the use of different types of skills. We classify occupations into hard-skill intensive versus soft-skill intensive jobs using the skill content measures of different occupations from the Occupational Information Network (O*Net). We then use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and Current Population Survey (CPS) to investigate the impact of job skill type on the wage gap. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we show that this wage gap in white-collar jobs is smaller for hard-skills jobs than it is for soft-skills jobs. Moreover, we demonstrate that, in response to variations in the wage gap across different occupations, Blacks are more likely to self-select themselves into hard-skills jobs, ceteris paribus. This shows not only that discrimination against Blacks varies across occupations, but also that such discrimination induces the self-selection of Blacks into certain occupations. Moreover, this finding highlights the role played by co-worker/customer discrimination in explaining the racial wage gap in the U.S. labor market.
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Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies
Yanbo Ge et al.
NBER Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
Passengers have faced a history of discrimination in transportation systems. Peer transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft present the opportunity to rectify long-standing discrimination or worsen it. We sent passengers in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA to hail nearly 1,500 rides on controlled routes and recorded key performance metrics. Results indicated a pattern of discrimination, which we observed in Seattle through longer waiting times for African American passengers - as much as a 35 percent increase. In Boston, we observed discrimination by Uber drivers via more frequent cancellations against passengers when they used African American-sounding names. Across all trips, the cancellation rate for African American sounding names was more than twice as frequent compared to white sounding names. Male passengers requesting a ride in low-density areas were more than three times as likely to have their trip canceled when they used a African American-sounding name than when they used a white-sounding name. We also find evidence that drivers took female passengers for longer, more expensive, rides in Boston. We observe that removing names from trip booking may alleviate the immediate problem but could introduce other pathways for unequal treatment of passengers.
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Upward Mobility and Discrimination: The Case of Asian Americans
Nathaniel Hilger
NBER Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
Asian Americans are the only non-white US racial group to experience long-term, institutional discrimination yet today exhibit high income. I reexamine this puzzle. I focus on California, where most Asians settled historically. Asians achieved extraordinary upward mobility relative to both blacks and whites for every cohort born in California since 1920. This mobility stemmed primarily from gains in earnings conditional on education, rather than unusual educational attainment. Historical test score data suggest that low initial earnings for Asians - unlike blacks - primarily reflected prejudice rather than skills. Asian history is consistent with the view that racial earnings gaps driven by contemporary prejudice do not persist in sufficiently competitive labor markets.
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Richard Simon, Ashley Wagner & Brooke Killion
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, forthcoming
Abstract:
Masculinity and femininity have played a substantial role in how social scientists explain the gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. The masculine culture of science is thought to be inconsistent with occupational values associated with feminine personalities, and to create a discriminatory academic environment for those who cannot adapt to it. However, there has been little systematic investigation into the extent to which masculine and feminine personality characteristics are actually correlated with STEM career outcomes, or how the effects of masculine and feminine personality characteristics on STEM career outcomes may be different when embodied in women compared to men. This study tests several hypotheses concerning the relationship of masculine and feminine personality characteristics to occupational values, perceptions of academic climate, and selection of a STEM major in college among a sample of 752 students enrolled at a major public university. We find little support for the hypothesis that masculine personality characteristics are especially rewarded in STEM majors. However, we also find that women pay a femininity penalty in STEM majors, while more abundant feminine personality traits in men render them more likely to major in a STEM field, after accounting for occupational values.
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Erik Girvan et al.
School Psychology Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
To improve our understanding of where to target interventions, the study examined the extent to which school discipline disproportionality between African American and White students was attributable to racial disparities in teachers' discretionary versus nondiscretionary decisions. The sample consisted of office discipline referral (ODR) records for 1,154,686 students enrolled in 1,824 U.S. schools. Analyses compared the relative contributions of disproportionality in ODRs for subjectively and objectively defined behaviors to overall disproportionality, controlling for relevant school characteristics. Results showed that disproportionality in subjective ODRs explained the vast majority of variance in total disproportionality. These findings suggest that providing educators with strategies to neutralize the effects of implicit bias, which is known to influence discretionary decisions and interpretations of ambiguous behaviors, may be a promising avenue for achieving equity in school discipline.
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Irregularly-shaped school attendance zones and racial integration
Salvatore Saporito
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates how much the geographic shapes of school attendance zones within urban school districts are associated with levels of attendance zone racial segregation (while holding constant levels of residential segregation). Based on an analysis of 304 school districts, findings show that more irregularly-shaped school attendance zones are correlated with lower levels of racial segregation in attendance zones after accounting for residential segregation. In fact, not one school district contains both highly irregularly-shaped attendance zones and unusually high levels of attendance zone racial segregation - although there are several school districts with irregularly-shaped zones and unusually high levels of racial integration. These findings undermine recent claims that irregularly-shaped attendance zones generally serve to segregate students by race. In addition to these empirical findings, this paper introduces a variation of the spatial information theory segregation index View the MathML source that is useful for predicting segregation in school attendance zones and other types of geographic boundaries containing roughly equal populations.
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An Asymmetrical Portrait: Exploring Gendered Income Inequality in the Arts
Danielle Lindemann, Carly Rush & Steven Tepper
Social Currents, December 2016, Pages 332-348
Abstract:
While a large body of work has focused on gendered income inequalities in other fields, virtually no literature has explored this phenomenon within artistic careers. We use the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) - a nationwide survey of 33,801 individuals who have received degrees in the arts - to assess the gendered earnings gap for artists and for nonartists. We find that the gendered earnings gap is comparable for artists and nonartists, and that artistic careers are subject to some of the same social forces that drive disparity in other occupational realms. Yet in the arts, we do not find the wage penalty to motherhood that has been documented in virtually every other field. Broader implications for scholarship on gender and work, as well as suggestions for further research and policy, are discussed.
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Gene Hern et al.
Academic Medicine, November 2016, Pages 1546-1553
Method: The authors surveyed all applicants from U.S. medical schools to residency programs in all specialties in 2012-2013. The survey included questions about the prevalence of potentially illegal questions, applicants' level of comfort with such questions, and whether such questions affected how applicants ranked programs. Descriptive statistics, tests of proportions, t tests, and logistic regression modeling were used to analyze the data.
Results: Of 21,457 eligible applicants, 10,976 (51.1%) responded to the survey. Overall, 65.9% (7,219/10,967) reported receiving at least one potentially illegal question. More female respondents reported being asked questions about gender (513/5,357 [9.6%] vs. 148/5,098 [2.9%]), marital status (2,895/5,283 [54.8%] vs. 2,592/4,990 [51.9%]), or plans for having children (889/5,241 [17.0%] vs. 521/4,931 [10.6%]) than male respondents (P < .001). Those in surgical specialties were more likely to have received a potentially illegal question than those in nonsurgical specialties (1,908/2,330 [81.9%] vs. 5,311/8,281 [64.1%]). Questions regarding their commitment to the program were reported by 15.5% (1,608/10,378) of respondents. Such potentially illegal questions negatively affected how respondents ranked programs.
Conclusions: Two-thirds of applicants reported being asked potentially illegal questions. More women than men reported receiving questions about marital status or family planning. Potentially illegal questions negatively influence how applicants perceive and rank programs. A formal interview code of conduct or interviewer training could help to address these issues.
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Organizational Identity Safety Cue Transfers
Kimberly Chaney, Diana Sanchez & Jessica Remedios
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, November 2016, Pages 1564-1576
Abstract:
Traditionally, researchers have focused on identity-congruent safety cues such as the effect of gender diversity awards on women's sense of inclusion in organizations. The present studies investigate, for the first time, whether identity safety cues (e.g., organizational diversity structures) aimed at one stigmatized group transfer via perceptions of the organization's ideology (social dominance orientation), resulting in identity safety for individuals with stigmatized identities incongruent with the cue. Across four studies, we demonstrate that White women experience identity safety from organizational diversity structures aimed at racial minorities (Studies 1 and 2), and men of color experience identity safety from organizational diversity structures aimed at women (Study 3). Furthermore, while White men similarly perceive the organization's ideology, this does not promote identity safety (Study 4). Thus, we argue that individuals view organizations commended for diversity as promoting more egalitarian attitudes broadly, resulting in the transference of identity safety cues for stigmatized individuals.
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The Importance of Minority Teachers: Student Perceptions of Minority Versus White Teachers
Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng & Peter Halpin
Educational Researcher, October 2016, Pages 407-420
Abstract:
The demographic divide between teachers and students is of growing public concern. However, few studies have explicitly addressed the common argument that students, and particularly minority students, have more favorable perceptions of minority versus White teachers. Using data from the Measure of Effective Teaching study, we find that students perceive minority teachers more favorably than White teachers. There is mixed evidence that race matching is linked with more favorable student perceptions. These findings underscore the importance of minority teacher recruitment and retention.
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Economic Freedom and Racial Differences in Entrepreneurship: Evidence from US States
John Deskins & Amanda Ross
Public Finance Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the relationship between economic freedom and black versus white entrepreneurship rates. An extensive literature examines why black entrepreneurship rates lag behind white, focusing on socioeconomic characteristics, intergenerational knowledge transfers, work experience, and credit access. Another literature examines how regulations affect entrepreneurial behavior, finding that a more heavily regulated economy deters start-ups. We combine these literatures and use the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity and the Economic Freedom of North America Index to examine whether state-level variation in economic freedom causes differences in entrepreneurial behavior across races. Overall, we find that blacks and whites differ in their entrepreneurial response to public policy. One interesting finding is that more economically free labor markets, due primarily by a lower minimum wage, diminish black entrepreneurship but does not affect whites. This is important if an unintended consequence of the minimum wage is to reduce black entrepreneurship, thereby increasing the black-white entrepreneurship gap.
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Affirmation effects on math scores: The importance of high school track
Amanda Bancroft, Jenifer Bratter & Kristie Rowley
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Stereotype threat has been shown to affect academic performance of minority racial groups. Minority girls may experience the burdens of both race and gender - a "double bind" theorized to affect the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. A randomized controlled trial focused on alleviating stereotype threat in three high schools in a large U.S. metro demonstrates the effects of affirmative writing interventions, which have previously shown positive effects for minority and female students. Results indicate effects for these groups were insignificant. However, results also show that student track is highly significant at p < 0.001, and interactive analyses suggest that the intervention may help alleviate threat for higher-achieving students.
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Catherine Riegle-Crumb, Chelsea Moore & Jenny Buontempo
Journal of Research on Adolescence, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study builds on research on the power of counter-stereotypical cues, as well as intergroup contact theory, to consider whether interactions with a female teacher and female peers in a high school engineering classroom decrease male students' gender/science, technology, engineering, and math stereotypical beliefs and whether this varies according to the initial strength of their stereotypical views. Analyses reveal that among male students who initially reject stereotypes of male superiority, more female peers in the classroom leads to a further decrease in their stereotypical views by the end of the year. In contrast, boys who held strong stereotypical beliefs became less stereotypical by the end of the course when they had a female teacher. Implications for future research and current educational reforms are discussed.
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College Enrollment and Completion Among Nationally Recognized High-Achieving Hispanic Students
Oded Gurantz, Michael Hurwitz & Jonathan Smith
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hispanic high school graduates have lower college completion rates than academically similar white students. As Hispanic students have been theorized to be more constrained in the college search and selection process, one potential policy lever is to increase the set of colleges to which these students apply and attend. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of the College Board's National Hispanic Recognition Program (NHRP), which recognizes the highest-scoring 11th-grade Hispanic students on the PSAT/NMSQT, as a mechanism of improving college choice and completion. The program not only informs students about their relative ability, but it also enables colleges to identify, recruit, and offer enrollment incentives. Overall, we find that the program has strong effects on college attendance patterns, shifting students from two-year to four-year institutions, as well as to colleges that are out-of-state and public flagships, all areas where Hispanic attendance has lagged. NHRP shifts the geographic distribution of where students earn their degree, and increases overall bachelor's completion among Hispanic students who traditionally have had lower rates of success. These results demonstrate that college outreach can have significant impacts on the enrollment choices of Hispanic students and can serve as a policy lever for colleges looking to draw academically talented students.