Tag: gender

New Publication: “Workplace Productivity: Gender, Parenthood, and Career Consequences in the United States”

On By Jessica UrzúaIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Yavorsky, Jill, Yue Qian, and Rebecca Glauber. 2025. “Workplace Productivity: Gender, Parenthood, and Career Consequences in the United States.” Gender, Work & Organization 1–21. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gwao.70027

Main Findings: Using a novel survey experiment fielded among 975 US managers, we find that managers more severely penalize mothers, compared to fathers, when their job productivity decreases due to childcare issues outside their control. This result was primarily driven by men managers who gave fathers a greater benefit of the doubt when it came to their decreased productivity. 

Abstract: Many dual-earner parents face ongoing challenges to securing reliable and accessible childcare, which potentially affect their productivity at work and consequential career rewards. Although productivity can ebb and flow, limited research has examined how productivity changes influence parents’ access to organizational rewards, especially when productivity changes result from childcare issues outside their control. The answer to this question is crucial for understanding gender inequality given that childcare issues are more likely to affect mothers’ productivity and employers could enact gender biases toward mothers (or fathers) when their productivity changes. Using a novel survey experiment fielded among 975 US managers, we assessed how a parent’s productivity changes (because of childcare issues outside their control) influenced managers’ recommendations of future organizational rewards (pay, promotions, etc.) to the parent. First, we find that managers assigned lower career rewards to workers whose productivity decreased, relative to workers whose productivity increased or stayed constant. Second, managers more severely penalized mothers, compared to fathers, when their productivity decreased. Third, exploratory analyses suggested that the widened gender gap in career rewards among parents whose productivity decreased was driven by men managers who penalized fathers less than women managers, primarily because men managers did not view fathers’ decreased productivity as evidence of reduced competence, professional commitment, or interest in advancement. By revealing pro-male biases that help explain the greater penalties faced by mothers relative to fathers when their productivity declined, our findings expose potential long-lasting impacts of parents experiencing disruptions to childcare on gender inequality in the workplace.

Authors:

Jill Yavorsky is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Organizational Science at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

Yue Qian is a Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia.

Rebecca Glauber is a Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire.


Recent Publications from OOW Scholars

On By Jessica UrzúaIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Birced, Elif. 2025. “Empowered by Consumers: How Content Creators Use Relational Labor to Resist Labor Control.” Socio-Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf064

Abstract: Researchers often discuss consumers as a means of labor control. In contrast, I ask how workers leverage consumers to resist control over their labor process. Focusing on sponsored content creation as a case, I explain how creators prioritize audience interests to resist sponsors’ control over their creative decisions. Using semi-structured interviews with 39 content creators and observations of a conference session, I show that the managerial practices of sponsoring brands contradict audience expectations due to the relational labor that creators perform to build a sense of community, authenticity, and trustworthiness in the eyes of audiences. Second, I document the role of part-time content creation and YouTube’s paid channel memberships in enhancing creators’ capacity to be selective with sponsorship requests and resist brand interventions that may ultimately lead to a decline in audience engagement. I extend the literature by theorizing when consumers enable workers to resist labor control.

Elif Birced earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University in 2025 and is a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Schwarzman College of Computing during the 2025-26 academic year. 

Carter, Carrie. 2025. “Fight Like a Girl: Fitness Testing as Gendered Organizational Logic in the U.S. Army.” Gender, Work & Organization. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.70048

Abstract: Organizational logics related to excellence and equity are changing rapidly in contemporary workplaces, yet limited research examines the impacts of specific policy initiatives, including why some fail—or even backfire. This study examines one such recent policy case: a temporary period of gender-neutral fitness testing in the United States Army. Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews with U.S. soldiers who served during this failed policy change, I examine how the historic and seemingly gender egalitarian practice of sex-normed fitness testing may reinforce inequality in this highly male-dominated organizational context. By comparing soldiers’ narratives about what it takes to be fit for service with the new organizational logics about combat readiness, I highlight how a masculine-typed “ideal soldier” is (a) embedded in the structure of sex-normed fitness standards, (b) reproduced in interactions among soldiers in the process of “doing gender,” and (c) ultimately internalized in soldiers’ evaluations of their own and others’ fitness for service. Findings expand our understanding of how interacting gendering processes may influence workers’ perceptions of organizational change, potentially producing paradoxical outcomes.

Carrie Carter is a sociology Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University specializing in gender, work and organizations. Her research explores how organizational policies, practices and culture impact equity and effectiveness, with a particular focus on the U.S. military.

Prechel, Harland, Amber Blazek, and Ernesto F. L. Amaral. 2025. “Toward Theory Consolidation: Stratification, Organizational, and Political-Legal Effects on Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” Energy Research & Social Science 128:104330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2025.104330

Abstract: The purpose of this research is to understand the relationship between dimensions of the social structure and greenhouse gas emissions in U.S. fossil fueled electrical power plants. While environmental scholars have made important contributions to understanding society-environmental relations, theoretical growth and therefore the capacity to affect environmental policy is hampered by the lack of integration among different middle range perspectives. To address this issue, we adopt Robert Merton’s observation that theoretical advances require the ‘consolidation of groups of special [middle range] theories.’ We develop a conceptual framework and conduct an empirical analysis that includes core dimensions of the component parts of the social structure. Our geographic information systems analysis shows that electrical energy producing plants are disproportionately located near poor and minority communities. While controlling for physical characteristics of plants, our regression analysis shows that poor communities, region of the U.S. where the plant is located, subnational state environmental policies, ownership of the plant by another corporation, plant size, and the interaction between plant size and subnational state environmental policies all affect greenhouse gas emissions. We present graphs with predicted values from our regression model to illustrate the expected gas emissions, based on values of key independent variables, making complex statistical results more interpretable and meaningful.

Harland Prechel is Professor of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts Cornerstone Fellow, and Energy Institute Fellow at Texas A&M University. His primary areas of research are the corporation, economic sociology, political sociology, and environmental sociology. 

Ernesto F. L. Amaral is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. His research is related to social demography, migration, and public policy analysis. 

New Book: Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights by Katherine Eva Maich

On By Neha JangetiIn Announcements, new book, Newsletter Content, PublicationsLeave a comment

Maich, Katherine Eva. 2025. Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Description: The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer’s home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home, Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

Katherine Maich is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Her research and teaching interests include law, gender, labor informality, domestic work, ethnography, and the Global South. Her research examines dynamics of inequality in the workplace and the extent to which external factors such as law, regulation, and policy mitigate those dynamics, and with what consequences.

With funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Inter-American Foundation, her book, Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights, draws from over 24 months of ethnography in Lima, Peru and New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, and analysis of legislative transcripts. Through a Global South/North comparison, it focuses on the home as a site of paid labor and as a microcosm of social and symbolic boundaries, bringing feminist theory, race, gender, and migration into conversation with law and labor legislation.

One of her current projects (with Hilary Wething of the Economic Policy Institute) explores the effects of paid family leave on maternal mental health and time use for new mothers, and the second project (in collaboration with Oxfam America and Rural Sociology colleagues at Penn State) examines the reproduction of gender and racial inequality for migrant poultry plant and meatpacking plant workers.

She previously worked as a consultant for the International Labour Organization and the International Domestic Worker Federation by conducting fieldwork in Uruguay, Hong Kong, and South Africa on the complexities of domestic worker organizing at the international level. Drawing connections from community-based, local, and global social movements in practice provides inspiration for my own research and writing.

Announcement: Summer 2025 Gender, Professions, and Organizations Writing Workshop at ASA Annual Meeting

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Summer 2025 Gender, Professions, and Organizations Writing Workshop at ASA Annual Meeting

Register for the semi-annual Gender, Professions, and Organizations Writing Workshop at the ASA Annual Meeting on Friday, August 8. Spots are limited; sign up here.

The semi-annual Gender, Professions, and Organizations Writing Workshop is back this summer from 9 am to 5 pm on Friday, August 8, 2025 – the day of pre-conference activities for the ASA annual meeting in Chicago. 

The Summer 2025 GPO organizing team welcomes anyone working on gender, professions, and organizations (broadly defined; if you’re unsure if your work applies, it likely does). Our goals are to foster connection and collaboration, build community across career stages, and dedicate time for writing. We encourage new and returning participants! 

The full-day workshop is organized into two standalone sessions, each with time for connecting and writing, and a lunch break in between. Participants are welcome to join for the morning, afternoon, or both. 

Anyone registered for ASA is welcome to join the workshop at no additional cost; however, space is limited. Participants should bring their own charged laptop computers (and possibly an extension cord) and snacks to share, as additional funding is not available. 

Please contact one of the current organizers with any questions. Register by July 27, using this form. 

Kristen McNeill (kristen.mcneill@graduateinstitute.ch, Assistant Professor, Geneva Graduate Institute)

Former organizers: Sharla Alegria, Melissa Abad, Ethel Mickey, Elizabeta Shifrin, Rodica Lisnic, Kathrin Zippel, Laura Kramer, Christina Falci, Laura Hirshfield, Julia McQuillan, Enobong Hannah (Anna) Branch, Shauna Morimoto, Firuzeh Shokooh Valle

New Publication: “Location Matters: Everyday Gender Discrimination in Remote and On-Site Work” by Laura Doering & András Tilcsik

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Doering, Laura, and András Tilcsik. 2025. “Location Matters: Everyday Gender Discrimination in Remote and On-Site Work.” Organization Science 36(2):547–71. doi: 10.1287/orsc.2022.16949.

Read Article: https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16949

Abstract: Remote work has dramatically transformed professional environments, sparking considerable scholarly interest in its impact on employees and organizations. Contributing to this burgeoning literature, we investigate how remote versus on-site work affects women’s experiences of gender discrimination. Given that work location can alter the gendered nature of interactions, we focus on everyday gender discrimination: slights and offenses that occur in interactions and are perceived by recipients as reflecting gender bias. Integrating gender frame theory and scholarship on virtual work, we argue that the gender frame tends to be less salient in remote settings. Thus, we predict that women experience less everyday gender discrimination when working remotely than on-site. Moreover, because the gender frame is likely to be more salient during on-site work for younger women and those who work with mostly men, we expect that these women experience a particularly pronounced reduction in everyday gender discrimination when working remotely. To test these predictions, we developed a new measure of everyday gender discrimination and conducted an original survey of 1,091 professional women who work in the same job both remotely and on-site. We find that women consistently report less everyday gender discrimination in remote versus on-site work. This effect is particularly pronounced for younger women and those who interact mainly with men. Overall, this study advances research on how work location shapes workers’ outcomes and experiences, enriches the literature on the trade-offs women face in virtual and on-site settings, and extends scholarship on the contextual factors shaping workplace discrimination.

New Publication: “Does Wanting Diversity Mean Racial Diversity? How Race and Gender Influence Support for Corporate DEI Policies.” by Adia Harvey Wingfield & Antonia Roach

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Wingfield, Adia Harvey and Antonia Roach. (2025.) “Does Wanting Diversity Mean Racial Diversity? How Race and Gender Influence Support for Corporate DEI Policies.”Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Online first.

Abstract

In the wake of recent social movements, cultural changes, and emerging organizational norms, decisive majorities of White workers now agree with the premise that companies should strive for workplace diversity. That support rarely translates into an interest in race-conscious programming, yielding what sociologists describe as a “principle/policy gap.” Yet most of the research identifying principle/policy gaps relies on predominantly White samples. In this article, we draw from a sample of 85 Black, White, Asian American, and Latinx workers in the financial sector to examine whether the principle/policy gap is present among both White workers and those of color. Our interviews reveal mixed evidence of principle/policy gaps when it comes to race-based diversity programming. We also find that respondents’ preferences (or lack thereof) for race-conscious diversity are informed by intersections of race and gender, rendering race-based programming more attractive for some groups and gender-based initiatives more appealing for others.

SER Cafe: Gender disparities in the workplace on 1/24 

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Join us for an engaging SER Café event featuring a thought-provoking discussion with SER authors, Anne-Kathrin Kronberg, Anna Gerlach, Marta Fana, Davide Villani, and Martina Bisello.

The paper by Kronberg and Gerlach, “Off to a slow start: which workplace policies can limit gender pay gaps across firm tenure?”, explores the pressing issue of how workplace policies impact gender pay gaps over employee tenure. Fana, Villani and Bisello investigate gender gaps in workplace power and control, finding that women face more control than men within the same job, even after accounting for factors like education and seniority in “Gender gaps in power and control within jobs”.

Together, these papers offer compelling insights into the interplay between workplace practices, organizational culture, and policy interventions in perpetuating or mitigating gender inequalities. As workplace equity remains a pivotal issue, these studies provide a deeper understanding of the structural barriers and potential pathways toward closing gender gaps.

The event will take place on Friday, January 24th, at 8AM PST/ 11AM EST/ 5PM CET. Register at this link!

https://northwestern.zoom.us/meeting/register/03fMIgUpRseoMPjBdjX8GA

As with all SER Café events, this session will prioritize dynamic conversation with the authors over lengthy presentations. Come ready to engage, ask questions, and discuss these critical contributions to the field.

New Publication: “Know Your Place: Fractured Epistemic Privilege among Women in State Organizations” by Tair Karazi-Presler

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Karazi‐Presler, Tair. 2024. “Know Your Place: Fractured Epistemic Privilege among Women in State Organizations.” Sociological Forum. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.13021

Abstract: Based on 67 in-depth interviews, this article explores how women in positions of power in two major organizational fields in Israel—the military and government ministries—develop different types of gender knowledge. In the military, an extremely and publicly gendered organization, the interviewees demonstrate gender reflexivity and pragmatic literacy of power relations. In the government ministries, which tend to conceal and even repress gendered power, the interviewees demonstrate (neoliberal) feminist consciousness and a limited ability to conceptualize power relations. The contribution of this article is threefold. First, it challenges the common view that gender reflexivity and feminist consciousness are causally related by emphasizing fractured epistemic privilege among women in different organizational contexts. Second, it demonstrates that women’s survival practices produce gender knowledge, which in turn produces gender practices in organizational contexts. Third, it argues that different types of gender knowledge develop as a byproduct of the gendered power-relation characteristics of each specific organizational context. Accordingly, this article offers a framework for analyzing emerging forms of gender sociopolitical knowledge in organizations as an additional dimension of gender inequality and a possible basis for transforming it.

New Publication: “Doing Genders: Partner’s Gender and Labor Market Behavior” by Eva Jaspers, Deni Mazrekaj, and Weverthon Machado

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Jaspers, E., Mazrekaj, D., & Machado, W. (2024). Doing Genders: Partner’s Gender and Labor Market Behavior. American Sociological Review, 89(3), 518-541. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241252079

Abstract: Partnered men and women show consistently gendered patterns of labor market behavior. We test whether not only a person’s own gender, but also their partner’s gender shapes hours worked. We use Dutch administrative population data on almost 5,000 persons who had both male and female partners, whose hours worked we observe monthly over 15 years. We argue that this provides a unique setting to assess the relevance of partner’s gender for labor market behavior. Using two-way fixed effects and fixed-effects individual slopes models, we find that both men and women tend to work more hours when partnered with a female partner compared to a male partner. These results align with our hypothesis that a partner’s gender influences labor market behavior. For women, we conclude that this finding may be (partly) explained by marital and motherhood status. Additionally, we discovered that women decrease their hours worked to a lesser extent when caring for a child if they have a female partner. Finally, we found that for men, the positive association between own and partner’s hours worked is weaker when one has a female partner, indicating a higher degree of specialization within these couples.

Call for Papers: Journal of Sociology special issue on inequalities in the gig economy

On By Sarah MosseriIn Calls for Papers, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Special edition of the Journal of Sociology 2019 on inequalities in the gig economy era: gender and generation challenges edited by Brendan Churchill, Signe Ravn and Lyn Craig, University of Melbourne. The special edition will focus on the intersecting implications for gender and generational inequalities in the ‘gig economy’ era, a term which we use to describe the contemporary labour market characterised by precarious employment and new (digital) forms of job seeking and entrepreneurship that expose workers to greater financial risks, social insecurities and inequalities. It will also consider the gendered dimensions of educational participation outcomes in the light of these changed labour market conditions. Deadline for submission of a 300-word abstract for consideration: 8 April 2018. More details: http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/e/gig-economy