Julie A. Kmec

Washington State University | WSU · Department of Sociology

Why do some label employers’ actions discrimination, while others do not? We explore whether beliefs about work, family, and gender are associated with labeling an employer’s denial of a promotion because of parental leave-taking—an illegal form of family responsibilities discrimination—discriminatory. Data from 702 respondents who evaluated a fict...

On top of working longer hours in paid employment and spending more time actively caring for children, parents, especially mothers, also feel pressured to safeguard the health of their children and the planet through their food consumption choices. Surprisingly, little evidence identifies whether the health value and environmental impact of food co...

We investigate the way norms regarding the connections between work and family influence the career consequences of being a dual-career academic. We pay special attention to “gender deviants”—men who indicate that their career is secondary to that of their wife’s career, and women who say their career is primary to that of their husband’s. Analyses...

Women’s underrepresentation in management is a persistent social problem. We take a new approach to understanding the lack of managerial gender diversity by investigating how U.S. state equal employment opportunity laws are related to women’s presence in upper and lower management. We draw on data from 2010 EEO-1 reports documenting managerial sex...

We explore one way family caregiving shapes inequality at work by analyzing the evaluations of men and women who took employment leave to care for a newborn or elderly parents or to recover from a personal injury. Roughly 500 undergraduate students evaluated the employability, qualifications, responsibility, and adherence to leave policies of a fic...

What factors are associated with variation in the racial/ethnic composition of hospital health care professionals? Institutional theories suggest that organizations react to external environmental and internal structural pressures for the racial/ethnic integration of workers. Using an institutional framework, we bring to bear new insight into how h...

Research has confirmed a motherhood penalty and fatherhood bonus at work. Employers, it appears, regard mothers and fathers differently from one another and differently from non-parents. We have yet to systematically explore whether mothers exhibit fewer pro-work behaviors than fathers and non-parents or whether fathers engage in more of them than...

This article reviews recent research on the effects of social networks on access to job information and getting a job in the United States. Drawing on network ties from friends, family members, acquaintances, employers, or coworkers can improve the job search because individuals gain access to and make use of their network’s social capital. While t...

This article highlights the extent to which finding a job without actively searching (“nonsearching”) sustains workplace sex segregation. We suspect that unsolicited information from job informants that prompts fortuitous job changes is susceptible to bias about gender “fit” and segregates workers. Results from analyses of 1,119 respondents to the...

Do men and women differ in the extent to which they work beyond the level required by their jobs? Does this gender difference vary across national contexts? The authors answer these questions using survey data from the United States and Britain. Multivariate ordered logistic regression models reveal no gender difference in self-reported discretiona...

Using data from 84 hospitals linked to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission discrimination-charge data, we consider how four human resource (HR) structures affect hospitals’ receipt of discrimination charges. HR structures that establish accountability (affirmative action plans, EEO units) are marginally related to charges. Structures that moder...

This article investigates how social network use to find work affects pay. Analyses using the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality consider the extent to which a network contact's influence level affects a job applicant's pay, whether this effect differs for white, black, and Latino contacts, and how workplace racial context moderates this relation...

This article revives the debate over whether women's upward mobility prospects decline as they climb organizational hierarchies. Although this proposition is a core element of the "glass ceiling" metaphor, it has failed to gain strong support in previous research. The article establishes a firm theoretical foundation for expecting an increasing fem...

This article identifies the factors associated with variation in the complexity of formal equal employment opportunity (EEO) structures across a sample of Washington and Oregon hospitals. Understanding such variation provides insight into two key organizational processes: commitment to workplace equality and response to external pressures for equal...

To what extent do organizational hiring practices contribute to the variation in men's share of hospital registered nursing (RN) positions? The answer to this question provides key insight into the process of workplace sex segregation in a traditionally feminine field. To that end, the present analyses examine how informal and formal hiring practic...

Across three decades in both Britain and the United States, surveys indicate that women must work harder than men do. Using data from the 1997 Skills Survey of the Employed British Workforce (U.K.) and the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce (U.S.), the authors investigate two possible explanations for this gap in reports of required effo...

This article seeks to clarify the role of race and social networks in job turnover. Analyses using the personnel records of roughly 300 entry level workers in a private organization investigate the extent to which social networks in the job attainment process affect turnover. Specifically, I examine what occurs when the social network contact is fr...

Prevailing accounts of variation in race–sex hiring largely emphasize applicants’ characteristics and, to some extent, employers’ preferences. In contrast, this study considers how organizational practices, workplace formality, and job characteristics influence the race and sex of white hiring agents’ most recent hires. Analyses using data from rou...

The employment of women in female-dominated occupations and men in male-dominated occu- pations (sex traditional employment) is a fundamental source of economic sex inequality. Despite this, we know little about how organizational practices and policies link workers to sex traditional jobs. The author tests theoretically hypothesized determinants o...

We investigate how neighborhood socioeconomic conditions (SES), family resources during adolescence, and high school completion are related for a sample of at-risk youth. Borrowing from the "neighborhood effects" and family literatures, we investigate whether the effects of family economic resources, connections to the community, school, and religi...

▪ 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...

This article explores wage inequality resulting from the segregation of minorities and whites into different jobs. Specifically, my analyses investigate the relationship between workplace minority concentration and the hourly wages of blacks and Latinos relative to whites. Using individual-level data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality li...

Employer-worker matched data, data containing information about workers and their employing establishments, provide a beneficial data source for organizational sociologists. Researchers can use matched data to investigate how organizational contexts and individual attributes affect work outcomes and to identify the causal mechanisms that produce wo...

This dissertation uses a labor market stratification and organizational demography approach to investigate labor market inequality. The focus is on how features of work establishments shape race inequality. Data come from two primary sources: the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality and the Multi-City Telephone Employer Survey. The first half of th...

In this paper, I examine the effects of respondents' job and family attributes on work-family conflict. This paper builds on previous research by examining three different types of job-to-home spillover: job responsibilities preventing workers from 1) doing usual housework, 2) attending family occasions and 3) caring for a sick child or relative. T...