Barbara Reskin

• University of Washington

Sociologists’ principal contribution to our understanding of ascriptive inequality has been to document race and sex disparities. We have made little headway, however, in explaining these disparities because most research has sought to explain variation across ascriptive groups in more or less desirable outcomes in terms of allocators’ motives. Thi...

We examine the effects of organizations’ employment practices on sex-based ascription in managerial jobs. Given men's initial preponderance in management, we argue that inertia, sex labels, and power dynamics predispose organizations to use sex-based ascription when staffing managerial jobs, but that personnel practices can invite or curtail ascrip...

The prevalence of nonstandard jobs is a matter of concern if, as many assume, such jobs are bad. We examine the relationship between nonstandard employment (on-call work and day labor, temporary-help agency employment, employment with contract companies, independent contracting, other self-employment, and part-time employment in “conventional” jobs...

To understand the persistence of racial disparities across multiple domains (e.g., residential location, schooling, employment, health, housing, credit, and justice) and to develop effective remedies, we must recognize that these domains are reciprocally related and comprise an integrated system. The limited long-run success of government social po...

Among those who use multiple regression or its offshoots, the dominant method of modeling an interaction effect of two independent variables on a dependent variable is to include a product variable in a linear estimation equation. In this paper, I show how the coefficient for the product variable in these models depends on the causal mechanism that...

The last third of twentieth century witnessed revolutionary reductions in sex and race inequality in the workplace. At the beginning of the 1960s, employers legally could refuse to hire people, assign them to jobs, and set their pay on the basis of their sex and race. The first signs of change were already present: married women had begun to catch...

Affirmative action (AA) addresses individuals' exclusion from oppor-tunities based on group membership by taking into account race, sex, ethnicity, and other characteristics. This chapter reviews sociological, economic, historical, and le-gal scholarship on AA. We first consider the emergence of group-based remedies, how protected groups are define...

Though organizationally driven geographic mobility is a distin- guishing feature of modern careers, accounts of its origin are murky. Drawing on various theories of organization, the authors show how a merger wave exposed competing institutional logics and triggered the elaboration of the modern, mobile, bureaucratic career. Using organizational da...

Both economists and sociologists have documented the association between gender and career outcomes. The challenge for both disciplines lies not in showing that gender is linked to employment outcomes, but in explaining the associations.

Sociologists’ principal contribution to our understanding of ascriptive inequality has been to document race and sex disparities. We have made little headway, however, in explaining these disparities because most research has sought to explain variation across ascriptive groups in more or less desirable outcomes in terms of allocators’ motives. Thi...

Even if we could completely eliminate intentional discrimination, unconscious bias would still remain.

Work organizations vary in the challenges and opportunities they provide for female and minority employees. This variation along with basic research has made it possible for social scientists to increasingly understand what kinds of employment practices are good and bad for equal opportunity at work.

This chapter reviews research on the segregation of women and men in the workplace. After examining ways to measure segregation, I summarize trends in sex segregation in the United States and cross-nationally. Occupational segregation has declined since 1970, but most workers remain in sex segregated jobs. I then evaluate the empirical support for...

▪ Abstract This chapter reviews research on the determinants and consequences of race and sex composition of organizations. Determinants include the composition of the qualified labor supply; employers' preferences, including the qualifications they require; the response of majority groups; and an establishment's attractiveness, size, and recruitin...

One of sociology's major accomplishments in the last quarter of the twentieth century was establishing that race and gender matter at work. We have been far less successful in explaining why workers' sex and race affect their employment outcomes, however, especially why jobs are segregated by sex and race, and why whites outearn people of color and...

Sociologists' principal contribution to our understanding of ascriptive inequality has been to document race and sex disparities. We have made little headway, however, in explaining these disparities because most research has sought to explain variation across ascriptive groups in more or less desirable outcomes in terms of allocators' motives. Thi...

The concentration of people of color and white women in less desirable and less remunerative jobs than those white men hold is a fundamental expression of race and sex stratification. Among the factors that produce these patterns is discrimination. This chapter addresses employment discrimination based on race, sex, and national origin, and the rol...

More than one quarter of all states have toughened bar exam standards in recent years, with other states poised to follow suit. About one-third of exam takers from ABA-accredited schools now fail the bar exam on the first attempt. Many of these students would have passed the bar five years ago, before states started raising their passing scores. Th...

Kanter argued that men's and women's positions in workplace opportunity structures, not their sex, shape their career attitudes. Women attached less importance to promotion than men, according to 1991 General Social Survey data. The authors examine the extent to which this difference stems from the sexes' segregation into jobs with unequal opportun...

We examine the effects of organizations' employment practices on sex-based ascription in managerial jobs. Given men's initial preponderance in management, we argue that inertia, sex labels, and power dynamics predispose organizations to use sex-based ascription when staffing managerial jobs, but that personnel practices can invite or curtail ascrip...

The prevalence of nonstandard jobs is a matter of concern if, as many assume, such jobs are bad. We examine the relationship between nonstandard employment (on-call work and day labor, temporary-help agency employment, employment with contract companies, independent contracting, other self-employment, and part-time employment in "conventional" jobs...

Affirmative action in law faculty hiring continues to provoke controversy. In this Article, Professors Merritt and Reskin seek to inform the ongoing debate by reporting results from the first comprehensive empirical study of the effects of sex and race on tenure-track hiring at accredited law schools. Their analysis controls for educational credent...

Nonstandard work arrangements (independent contracting, working for a temporary help agency, contract or on-call work, day labor, self-employment, and regular part-time employment) are growing more common in the United States. In 1995, more than 29 percent of all jobs were in nonstandard work arrangements. A study of these jobs and the characterist...

With more mothers in the work force and greater stresses created by competing demands of work and home, nonstandard work arrangements (NSWAs), which include temporary help agency work, on-call work, day labor, contract work, independent contracting, self-employment, and part-time work, have been suggested as a remedy for this conflict. For the aver...

Although research has established the persistence of occupational sex segregation and shown that race and ethnicity also segregate workers, we know almost nothing about the joint effects of sex, race and ethnicity on workers' distributions across occupations. This paper uses the 1990 census five-percent PUMS data to investigate the combined effects...

The report which follows, prepared by a subcommittee of the Association's Committee W on the Status of Women in the Academic Profession, was approved for publication by Committee W in February 1996 for the information of the profession. Comments are welcome and should be addressed to the Association's Washington Office. 1.

This study investigates whether and how sex and race affect access to and rewards for job authority, using 1980 survey data for 1,216 employed workers. The authors examine whether, net of human-capital characteristics, sex and race affect access to and compensation for job authority. In addition, the authors examine whether the translation of crede...

Explanations for women's historic underrepresentation in managerial jobs include actual or assumed sex differences in relevant qualifications, institutional barriers, and men's desire to retain the advantages afforded by managerial status. To the extent that women's increasing representation in managerial jobs stems from declines in real and stereo...

The well educated are more likely than the poorly educated to engage in work that provides control over one's own work, control over people, and control over money, yet the total effect of education on job satisfaction is null. Using a representative sample of 557 Illinois workers interviewed by telephone in 1982, we find that education increases e...

During the 1970s, women made dramatic inroads into a select number of traditionally male occupations. Although media pundits touted women's gains as dramatic, there is reason to suspect whether these inroads actually represent progress for women. Using a queuing perspective, we examine whether women's gains represent genuine integration, ghettoizat...

Several factors have limited women's inroads into skilled blue-collar jobs. With questionnaire and interview data from employees at a large utility firm, this paper examines whether men's reactions to women who worked temporarily in plant jobs discouraged women from permanently returning to such jobs. Women who held male blue-collar plant jobs duri...

Male supervisors' reactions to women in male blue-collar jobs contribute to understanding women's under-representation in those jobs. Using data for utility employees, we examine supervisors' reactions to women assigned to typically male plant jobs during a strike of unionized workers. Sex stereotypes led supervisors to reassign many women to more...

To reduce sex differences in employment outcomes, we must examine them in the context of the sex-gender hierarchy. The conventional explanation for wage gap—job segregation—is incorrect because it ignores men's incentive to preserve their advantages and their ability to do so by establishing the rules that distribute rewards. The primary method thr...

This study uses data from courtroom observations and posttrial interviews with jurors who served in thirty-eight actual sexual assault trials. It addresses three issues: (1) the effects of several measures of evidence on jurors' judgments of a defendant's guilt, (2) the relative merits of jurors' recollections of the evidence and measures of eviden...

To explain women's higher rates of psychological distress, researchers often argue that sex roles differentially expose the sexes to variables associated with distress or render women and men unequally vulnerable to role-related stress. To test these claims, we use National Center for Health Statistics data on physical symptoms of distress, collect...

Feminists argue that rape laws and their application are explained by social rules requiring women to conform to conservative sex-role norms and defining them as the sexual property of men. We operationalized and tested some of these arguments with data on 360 jurors who served in rape trials. Courtroom observations led us to distinguish trials in...

Scientists' academic sponsors might influence their students' careers through the quality of training they provide and through their ability to transmit to their students a professional status and other ascriptive advantages. Using data for a probability sample of doctoral chemists, this study explores the effects of scientists' Ph.D. departments a...

Data for a group of research chemists are examined to test the hypothesis that marital fertility is associated with lower levels of research productivity and to assess the extent to which the fertility-productivity relationship varies by sex. The results show a negative relationship between fertility and productivity among the scientists; the relat...

Although sex differences in scientists' careers are often explained in terms of hypothesized productivity differences, little is known about the extent or bases of such differences. Comparisons for a sample of chemists indicate that men outpublished women, but to a smaller extent than is commonly supposed. Regression analyses document sex differenc...

Regression analyses of longitudinal data for a probability sample of chemists provide estimates of the causal links between chemists' predoctoral training, early productivity, recognition and organizational context and productivity at the end of the first postdoctoral decade. After identifying certain methodological problems involved in using Scien...

This article compares the status-attainment process for women and men, using career data for a sample of 450 doctoral chemists. The study focuses on the role of the postdoctoral fellowship, a career event that is thought to validate predoctoral performance and foster later professional success. Analyses of covariance show sex interactions for both...

In this paper we apply recently developed models for the estimation of reliability and stability coefficients from panel data to a study of scientific productivity. The models, which assume a first-order autoregressive process among true-score variables, yield either reliability and stability estimates which seem implausible when the statistical fi...

This paper examines the effects of demographic and ecological variables on the distribution of physicians in greater American metropolises. The physicians considered are those in full-time, nonfederal private practice in 1966. By disaggregating the total body of physicians into general practitioners and six medical specially groups it was possible...

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 42-44). Advisor: Barbara Reskin, Dept. of Sociology.