New Publication: “The Gendered Returns to Power”

On September 28, 2026 By Jessica UrzúaIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Mishra, S., J. Melin, L. J. Kray, and C. Anderson. 2026. “The Gendered Returns to Power: How Gender, Structural Power, and Perceived Resource Sufficiency Shape Meritocracy Perceptions in Organizations.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.70122.

Abstract: Why do women remain underrepresented in positions of power? The present work leverages four studies (N = 99,293) spanning archival, qualitative, and experimental methods to surface one novel antecedent to this gender gap. Men (vs. women) tend to perceive their organizations as more meritocratic as a function of their structural power (Studies 1–2). This gender difference is statistically accounted for by the fact that men’s power is more often accompanied by perceived resource sufficiency, or the appraisal that one has adequate instrumental and material resources to meet role demands and exercise authority effectively (Studies 1–3). A preregistered experiment finds that higher (vs. lower) perceived resource sufficiency increases meritocracy perceptions, which in turn increase career investment intentions but weaken support for equity-enhancing initiatives (Study 4). Together, these findings reveal that structural power’s psychological consequences are not uniform across gender but depend on whether authority is accompanied by the resources needed to exercise power. The gender gap in power may thus reproduce itself, as women become less convinced that the system rewards their effort, whereas men with the authority to change organizational systems become least likely to see the need for change.

New Publication: “The Inauthenticity of Organizational Diversity Initiatives: Perspectives from the Tech Industry”

On June 13, 2026 By Jessica UrzúaIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Wilcox, Annika and Neeraj Rajasekar. 2026. “The Inauthenticity of Organizational Diversity Initiatives: Perspectives from the Tech Industry.” The Sociological Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2026.2644528

Abstract: Organizations often use diversity initiatives to craft an image of moral goodness while doing little to address workplace inequalities. This disconnect is intensified in the U.S. technology industry, where companies attempt to claim identities as progressive diversity supporters despite obvious patterns of inequality and discrimination. How do tech employees make sense of this contradiction? This study combines the sociology of diversity, sociology of organizations, and organizational authenticity literatures to analyze, via 31 in-depth interviews, how employees of a large U.S. tech company evaluate diversity initiatives in the U.S. tech industry. Results show that tech workers question the authenticity of high-tech diversity programs: they frame technology companies as lacking commitment to diversity, overemphasizing conformity to diversity-related norms, and demonstrating dubious inconsistency in their approach to diversity. Nonetheless, they moderate their criticisms by noting that tech companies do “try” to take responsibility for diversity. Interviewees voiced these impressions similarly across race and gender. We therefore argue that the (in)authenticity of diversity initiatives can be a unifying concern amongst individuals with differing social identities. As diversity initiatives exist largely due to social pressures, they will need to overcome issues of inauthenticity in order to survive widespread sociopolitical critiques.

Annika Wilcox is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice at East Stroudsburg University. Her research examines how organizational inequalities are reproduced and challenged, primarily focusing on diversity/DEI discourse and initiatives. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Social Science Research, Sociological Forum, and Research in the Sociology of Work.

Neeraj Rajasekar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Sociology/Anthropology department at University of Illinois, Springfield. He completed his PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2021. He has written scholarly articles and book chapters about diversity discourse, diversity attitudes, racial attitudes, racial inequality, and the history of multiculturalism in the United States. His publications have appeared in Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Social Currents, Sociological Forum, and other journals.

New Publication: “The Foundational Role of Legal Status Categories in Stratifying Job Loss Outcomes”

On May 15, 2026 By Jessica UrzúaIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

Protasiuk, Ewa. 2026. “The Foundational Role of Legal Status Categories in Stratifying Job Loss Outcomes.” Social Problems. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spag014

Abstract: Job loss is a common, stratifying experience in the contemporary labor market, but scholars have undertheorized its relationship to a major axis of inequality: legal status. To bridge this gap, this paper uses qualitative data from interviews and participant observation to compare outcomes after job loss among 76 restaurant workers in three different legal status categories (U.S.-born citizens, immigrants who are legally authorized to work, and immigrants without this authorization). Situated amidst a discussion of unemployment regulations and legal status categories as sites of governance and stratification, my findings point to two mechanisms of legal status-based stratification among unemployed workers. First, legal status directly determines eligibility for unemployment relief. Second, legal status divergently shapes interactions with the unemployment relief system due to differing risks of legal violence associated with distinct statuses. I show that, through these mechanisms, legal status stratifies workers’ agency over the timing and conditions of their return to work after job loss. I also discuss gendered patterns within legal status categories. These findings extend the framework of unemployment as a socially stratifying institution, integrate legal status into theories of gender in unemployment stratification, and contribute to literatures on immigrant job loss as well as immigration and stratification.

Author: Ewa Protasiuk is an incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

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

On November 9, 2025May 15, 2026 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 October 17, 2025October 17, 2025 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 June 24, 2025 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

On June 3, 2025 By Neha JangetiIn Announcements, Chicago 2025, WorkshopsLeave a comment

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

On April 30, 2025 By Neha JangetiIn Announcements, PublicationsLeave a comment

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.

Organizations, Occupations and Work

Tag: gender