Hi OOW members!

France Winddance Twine has a book (NYU press) available for pre-order with a discount through this website.

SUMMARY: An inside account of gender and racial discrimination in the high-tech industry

Why is being a computer “geek” still perceived to be a masculine occupation? Why do men continue to greatly outnumber women in the high-technology industry? Since 2014, a growing number of employment discrimination lawsuits has called attention to a persistent pattern of gender discrimination in the tech world. Much has been written about the industry’s failure to adequately address gender and racial inequalities, yet rarely have we gotten an intimate look inside these companies. In Geek Girls, France Winddance Twine provides the first book by a sociologist that “lifts the Silicon veil” to provide firsthand accounts of inequality and opportunity in the tech ecosystem. This work draws on close to a hundred interviews with male and female technology workers of diverse racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds who are currently employed at tech firms such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and at various start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. Geek Girls captures what it is like to work as a technically skilled woman in Silicon Valley.

With a sharp eye for detail and compelling testimonials from industry insiders, Twine shows how the technology industry remains rigged against women, and especially Black, Latinx, and Native American women from working class backgrounds. From recruitment and hiring practices that give priority to those with family, friends, and classmates employed in the industry, to social and educational segregation, to academic prestige hierarchies, Twine reveals how women are blocked from entering this industry. Women who do not belong to the dominant ethnic groups in the industry are denied employment opportunities, and even actively pushed out, despite their technical skills and qualifications.

While the technology firms strongly embrace the rhetoric of diversity and oppose discrimination in the workplace, Twine argues that closed social networks and routine hiring practices described by employees reinforce the status quo and reproduce inequality. The myth of meritocracy and gender stereotypes operate in tandem to produce a culture where the use of race-, color-, and power-evasive language makes it difficult for individuals to name the micro-aggressions and forms of discrimination that they experience.

Twine offers concrete insights into how the technology industry can address ongoing racial and gender disparities, create more transparency and empower women from underrepresented groups, who continued to be denied opportunities.

Hi OOW! Check out this new publication from by Elizabeth Hoffmann:

CITATION: Hoffmann, Elizabeth A. “Moralizing the Law: Lactating Workers and the Transformation of Supervising Managers.” Law & Society Review 56, no. 1 (March 2022): 28–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12588.

ABSTRACT: The Lactation at Work Law amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate employer accommodation of employees’ breast milk expression. Interviews with employees, human resource specialists, and supervising managers in nine industries found that some organizations’ supervising managers, who initially perceived accommodations only as a legal mandate furthering managerial goals, over time changed to understanding lactation accommodations through a children’s-health lens that created morality-driven motivations for legal compliance–a “moralization of the law.” Educational discussions with lactating employees not only provided these supervising managers with insights into lactation at work, but also sensitized them to ethical issues surrounding lactation accommodations.

Hi OOW members! Check out this new book by Megan Tobias Neely:

CITATION:

Neely, Megan Tobias. 2022. Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

About the Book:

Who do you think of when you imagine a hedge fund manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? These tropes capture the public imagination of a successful hedge fund manager. But behind the designer suits, helicopter commutes, and illicit pursuits are the everyday stories of people who work in the hedge fund industry—many of whom don’t realize they fall within the 1 percent that drives the divide between the richest and the rest. Hedged Out gives readers an outsider’s insider perspective on Wall Street and its enduring culture of inequality.

Hedged Out dives into the upper echelons of Wall Street, where elite white masculinity is the standard measure for the capacity to manage risk and insecurity. Facing an unpredictable and risky stock market, hedge fund workers protect their interests by working long hours and building tight-knit networks with people who look and behave like them. Using ethnographic vignettes and her own industry experience, Neely showcases the voices of managers and other workers to illustrate how this industry of politically mobilized elites excludes people on the basis of race, class, and gender. Neely shows how this system of elite power and privilege not only sustains itself but builds over time as the beneficiaries concentrate their resources. Hedged Out explains why the hedge fund industry generates extreme wealth, why mostly white men benefit, and why reforming Wall Street will create a more equal society.

Use source code 21W2240 for a 30% discount at UCPress.

Hi OOW members! Check out this new publication from Michael Wallace, Allen Hyde and Todd Vachon:

CITATION:

Wallace, Michael, Allen Hyde, Todd E. Vachon. 2022. “Political Party Control, Union Strength, and Neoliberalism: Accounting for Rising Income Inequality across the 50 U.S. States since 1950.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2022.100677

ABSTRACT:

This paper uses power resource theory to investigate the determinants of rising income inequality in the U.S. states from 1951–2018. Specifically, we analyze how political party control of national- and state-level government, presidential and gubernatorial election cycles, union strength and state right-to-work laws affect the Gini index and the Theil index—two measures that tap middle-class and upper-tail income inequality. A major contribution is to probe more deeply than previous research the historical and regional contingency of these processes by examining contrasting patterns between the Keynesian (1951–1980) and neoliberal (1981–2018) periods and between the Non- South and the South. We conduct three primary analyses. First, we explore the effects of these determinants over the entire period, net of other covariates. Second, we explore historical contingency by investigating how these effects differ during the Keynesian and neoliberal periods. Third, we explore regional contingency by examining differences in effects between the Non-Southern and Southern regions of the country. We find consistent evidence that political and labor power resources matter in the determination of income inequality; moreover, how they matter differs in substantively and theoretically important ways across period and region. We conclude with a discussion of what the results suggest for future developments in U.S. income inequality.

Hi OOW members! Check out this new book from Joya Misra and Kyla Walters:

Citation: Misra, Joya and Kyla Walters. 2022. Walking Mannequins: How Race and Gender Inequalities Shape Retail Clothing Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 

Summary: In malls across the United States, clothing retail workers navigate low wages and unpredictable schedules. Despite these problems, they devote time and money to mirror the sleek mannequins stylishly adorned with the latest merchandise. Bringing workers’ voices to the fore, sociologists Joya Misra and Kyla Walters demonstrate how employers reproduce gendered and racist “beauty” standards by regulating workers’ size and look. Interactions with customers, coworkers, and managers further reinforce racial hierarchies. New surveillance technologies also lead to ineffective corporate decision-making based on flawed data. By focusing on the interaction of race, gender, and surveillance, Walking Mannequins sheds important new light on the dynamics of retail work in the twenty-first century.

You can buy it here with the source code 21W2240 at checkout for a discount!

Hi OOW! Check out this new article by Letian Zhang:

CITATION:

Zhang, L. Shaking Things Up: Disruptive Events and Inequality. American Journal of Sociology 2021 127:2, 376-440

ABSTRACT:

This article develops a theory of how disruptive events could reduce racial and gender inequality in organizations. Despite pressure from regulators and advocates, racial and gender inequality in the workplace remains high. The article theorizes that because such inequality is often reinforced by organizational inertia, disruptive changes that shake up old hierarchies, break down routines, and shift culture could offer an opportunity for racial minority and women workers to advance. The author tests this theory by examining 37,343 mergers and acquisitions in the United States from 1971 to 2015. Using a difference-in-differences design, the author finds that although acquisitions lead to occupational reconfigurations that favor higher-skilled workers, they also improve the managerial representation of racial minorities and women and reduce racial and gender segregation in the acquired workplace. These findings suggest that certain radical organizational changes could significantly reduce racial and gender inequality.

Hi OOW members! Please check out this new article from OOW member Daniel Auguste, Stephen Roll and Mathieu Despard:

CITATION:

Daniel Auguste, Stephen Roll, Mathieu Despard, The Precarity of Self-Employment among Low- and Moderate-Income Households, Social Forces, 2022;, soab171, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab171

ABSTRACT:

Many people in the United States have achieved economic stability through self-employment and are often seen as embracing the entrepreneurial spirit and seizing opportunity. Yet, research also suggests that self-employment may be precarious for many people in the lower socioeconomic strata. Drawing on a unique dataset that combines longitudinal survey data with administrative tax data for a sample of low- and moderate-income (LMI) workers, we bring new evidence to bear on this debate by examining the link between self-employment and economic insecurity. Overall, our results show that self-employment is associated with greater economic insecurity among LMI workers compared with wage-and-salary employment. For instance, compared with their wage-and-salary counterparts, the self-employed have 78, 168, and 287 percent greater odds of having an income below basic expenses, and experiencing an unexpected income decline and high levels of income volatility, respectively. We also find that differences in financial endowment and access to health insurance are key drivers in explaining the relationship between employment type and economic insecurity, as being able to access $2,000 in an emergency greatly lowers the odds of budgetary constraint, whereas lack of health insurance increases those odds. These findings suggest that formal work arrangements with wages and benefits offered by an employer promotes greater economic stability among LMI workers compared with informal work arrangements via self-employment. We discuss implications of these results for future research and policy initiatives seeking to promote economic wellbeing through entrepreneurship.

Hi OOW members! Here is a methods article from OOW Member Deni Mazrekaj‘s recent work:

CITATION:

1. Mazrekaj D, Wursten J. Stata tip 142: joinby is the real merge m:m. The Stata Journal. 2021;21(4):1065-1068. doi:10.1177/1536867X211063416

ABSTRACT:

The merge command is one of Stata’s most used commands and works fine as long as the match key is unique in one of the datasets (that is, merge 1:1, 1:m, or m:1 situations). However, when the match key contains duplicates in either dataset, Stata gives an error message saying that the key variable(s) do not uniquely identify observations in master or using dataset. This article offers examples and tools for working with names in a data set on Stata.

Hi OOW members! Check out this new article by Shaul Duke.

CITATION:

Duke, S.A. Deny, dismiss and downplay: developers’ attitudes towards risk and their role in risk creation in the field of healthcare-AI. Ethics Inf Technol 24, 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-022-09627-0

ABSTRACT:

Developers are often the engine behind the creation and implementation of new technologies, including in the artificial intelligence surge that is currently underway. In many cases these new technologies introduce significant risk to affected stakeholders; risks that can be reduced and mitigated by such a dominant party. This is fully recognized by texts that analyze risks in the current AI transformation, which suggest voluntary adoption of ethical standards and imposing ethical standards via regulation and oversight as tools to compel developers to reduce such risks. However, what these texts usually sidestep is the question of how aware developers are to the risks they are creating with these new AI technologies, and what their attitudes are towards such risks. This paper asks to rectify this gap in research, by analyzing an ongoing case study. Focusing on six Israeli AI startups in the field of radiology, I carry out a content analysis of their online material in order to examine these companies’ stances towards the potential threat their automated tools pose to patient safety and to the work-standing of healthcare professionals. Results show that these developers are aware of the risks their AI products pose, but tend to deny their own role in the technological transformation and dismiss or downplay the risks to stakeholders. I conclude by tying these findings back to current risk-reduction recommendations with regards to advanced AI technologies, and suggest which of them hold more promise in light of developers’ attitudes.

Check out this recent article by OOW members Laura Doering and Tyler Wry:

CITATION: Doering, Laura, and Tyler Wry. “The Challenges of Supporting Necessity Entrepreneurs: Understanding Loan Officer Exit in Microfinance.” Journal of Business Venturing 37, no. 2 (March 2022): 106189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2022.106189.

ABSTRACT: Necessity entrepreneurship can serve as a pathway out of poverty for low-income individuals, with microfinance often providing important financial support. Yet the relational lending stra-
tegies common among microfinance institutions may influence loan officer turnover and, in turn,
compromise entrepreneurs’ access to credit. While there is some reason to suspect that relational
lending with poor entrepreneurs will increase retention, we propose that serving the poor may
make loan officers more likely to quit: loan officers in commercial microfinance institutions are
unlikely to have strong commitments to poverty alleviation and may be taxed by the challenging
fieldwork associated with lending in poor areas. Qualitative and quantitative data from a
microfinance bank in Latin America support our expectations, showing that exit becomes more
likely when loan officers’ work involves more poor clients and that the effect is strongest when
such work demands intensive fieldwork in low-income areas. Supplementary analyses of trends
across the global microfinance industry demonstrate that poor clients have a stronger impact on
exit in for-profits than non-profits, suggesting that prosocial motives among non-profit employees
may have a buffering effect. Overall, our study reveals how providing services to necessity en-
trepreneurs can have negative, unexpected consequences for frontline employees