Prior research surrounding intragroup appraisal, networks, and interaction (Melamed and Simpson 2016; Webster and Sobieszek 1974; Webster, Whitmeyer, and Rashotte 2004), work team integration and the potential reduction in biases and group divisions it may afford (e.g., Ely 2004; Kalev 2009; Payne et al. A well-known and gender-specific argument is found, to be sure, in the now classic work of Acker (1990; also see Martin 2004), who argued that both normative and structural dimensions of employment amplify gender’s salience as a status and insure the maintenance of patriarchy. Baseline effects of poor supervisory relations persist across the board but are elevated even further for those of other nonwhite racial groups experiencing racial discrimination and mitigated somewhat, although not entirely, for women experiencing sexual harassment. Audit and experimental analyses, for instance, have generated compelling and worthwhile insights on biases in the hiring process specifically, usually in relation to race or gender (e.g., Correll, Benard, and Paik 2007; Gaddis 2015; Pager 2003, 2007; Pedulla 2018; Yavorsky 2019). I do not close off the possibility that holding a supervisory position may generate greater vulnerability. Specifically, coworker cohesion reduces the likelihood of all four outcomes and reaches statistical significance for three of the four. Cancio, A. Sivia, Evans, T. David, Maume, David J. Correll, Shelley J., Benard, Stephen, Paik, In. Some of the observed effects of high occupational position are relatively direct and negative. How to File a Charge. Sharing links are not available for this article. His research has focused on inequality, workplace dignity, culture, social movements, and educational mobility. This required a series of interaction tests between status attributes and occupational status and workplace relations, the final results of which are reported in trimmed form.11 Especially notable in these regards is that (1) greater vulnerability to discrimination is observed for women and aging workers who occupy higher occupational positions, suggestive of greater closure pressures higher in the occupational distribution; (2) effects of occupation position are not observed for minority encounters with racial discrimination or for women relative to sexual harassment; results that imply largely uniform vulnerability across the occupational hierarchy; and last, (3) the likelihood of discrimination varies conditionally in several important ways depending on proximate vertical and horizonal relations in the workplace; specifically, there is some protective cover afforded by good coworker relations (when it comes to women and gender discrimination and older workers and age discrimination) and additional exposure to injustice when supervisory relations are poor (when it comes to other nonwhite minorities and racial discrimination). Good coworker relations, a scale indicator (α = 0.6), ranges from 0 to 6. *Spanish versions coming soon. Table 3. Thus, it could be that the significance of age on gender discrimination in the 2016 data may be because respondents are including sexual harassment in their conception of gender discrimination. High occupational position is derived from the GSS measure SEI10 (range = 10.6–92.8). Future data collection efforts and analytic designs, for instance, could be more sensitive to issues of temporal sequence and causality, one of the limitations of my analyses. First, I use logistic regression to assess the degree to which status distinctions by race, gender and age affect vulnerabilities to workplace discrimination and sexual harassment. The workplace context, in fact, is an arena suffused by power relations, and just how these power relations play out has important consequences for not only material livelihoods but also justice and personal dignity (Hodson 2001). Table 2. Some work has begun to capture intersectional processes preceding what seem to be, at face value, otherwise similar objective workplace outcomes (Chavez and Wingfield 2018; Harnois 2015; Ortiz and Roscigno 2009) and/or unique assumptions and rationales underlying unequal actions by gatekeepers (Berrey et al. Pavalko, Eliza K., Mossakowski, Krysia N., Hamilton, Vanessa J. Payne, Julianne, McDonald, Steve, Hamm, Lindsay. 12Younger workers often and report age discrimination in firsthand and survey accounts, and this is no less true with the GSS data. The general point, however, is that they also have important parallels when it comes to their use in everyday interaction and/or inequality creation. Although largely relegated to life-course scholarship and gerontological studies, there is now good evidence from both surveys of employers and case materials that age as a status and the essentialized beliefs undergirding it (i.e., aging bodies, brains, and capabilities) are often invoked in ways that generate hiring exclusion (Roscigno et al. Notably, there are no clear or statistically significant effects of occupational position on either racial discrimination or sexual harassment, suggesting that these two forms of workplace injustice operate uniformly across the occupational hierarchy. By offering opportunities, undoing biases toward others, and encouraging a sense of common fate, good coworker relations can provide protective cover for those who might otherwise be status vulnerable. The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming . Rather than higher occupational status serving as a safeguard (as suggested by hypothesis 3, above), there is an alternative possibility: Hypothesis 4: Vulnerabilities to and the likelihood of discrimination and sexual harassment will be amplified for those in higher occupational positions given that mobility contests and pressures toward social closure will arguably be more intense. The most important part of the curvilinear relationship, legally speaking, is that for workers 40 years and older, something earmarked in the figure I present. 2007; Yavorsky et al. They should clearly communicate to employees that unwelcome harassing conduct will not be tolerated. Participation in Heterogeneous and Homogeneous Groups: A Theoretical Integration, Gender and Double Standards in the Assessment of Job Applicants, Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market, Gender, Parenthood, and Job-Family Compatibility, The Structure of Disadvantage: Individual and Occupational Determinants of the Black-White Wage Gap, Estimators of Relative Importance in Linear Regression Based on Variance Decomposition, Race, Ethnicity, Sexuality, and Women’s Political Consciousness of Gender, “Follow the Leader: Mimetic Isomorphism and Entry into New Markets.”, Age Discrimination in Layoffs: Factors of Injustice, The Strength of Weak Enforcement: The Impact of Discrimination Charges, Legal Environments, and Organizational Conditions on Workplace Segregation, The Context of Discrimination: Workplace Conditions, Institutional Environments, and Sex and Race Discrimination Charges, Perceiving Discrimination on the Job: Legal Consciousness, Workplace Context, and the Construction of Race Discrimination, Reliability of the Core Items in the General Social Survey: Estimates from the Three-Wave Panels, 2006–2014, Prestige and Socioeconomic Scores for the 2010 Census Codes, Cracking the Glass Cages? Members of _ can log in with their society credentials below, Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (. For example, you can dedicate the essay on racial discrimination to the issue of prejudice in this sphere. 7Initially, I was concerned that gender discrimination and sexual harassment may significantly overlap. 2007). Although these do little in the way of mediating observed status vulnerabilities, the consistent effects of vertical and horizontal relations are nevertheless noteworthy and thus should be taken seriously future work. Right to know. . 2016) especially when reflecting what proponents of status characteristics theory refer to as “diffuse” characteristics with “general expectation states,” that is, competency expectations that are culturally constructed, differentially assessed and acted upon (by coworkers or gatekeeping actors, for instance) in a manner that generates advantage and disadvantage. It remains unclear, however, as to whether it is women’s positionality as supervisors or their more general location in numerically male-dominated establishments and/or in normatively male occupational fields (e.g., police officer, construction worker) that drive such patterns (see Yavorsky 2019). High occupational status increases the overall likelihood of gender and age discrimination, suggesting heightened status competition in the upper occupational ranks and an intensification of social closure pressures. Access to society journal content varies across our titles. Like supervisory relations, good coworker relations clearly matter in important ways. A simple summary decomposition of the findings reported thus far, derived from separate modeling of controls, status attributes, and occupational position and workplace relational effects, is offered in Table 3.14 Such summary statistics reveal the clear predominance and explanatory power of race, gender, and age but also occupational position and workplace relations compared with the controls. Moreover, and especially pertinent for my purposes, survey-based accounts will tend to be more representative across the occupational hierarchy (because they are not constrained by legal and bureaucratic screening), are more encompassing when it comes to discriminatory experiences, and can offer insight into the character and implications of relational and positional power within the workplace context. Contact us if you experience any difficulty logging in. View or download all the content the society has access to. The representative data and analyses in this article, with pertinent outcomes surrounding discrimination and sexual harassment and rich indicators of status, occupational positioning and workplace relations, contribute to broader, synthetic efforts within the stratification literature to recognize the ongoing and contemporary relevance of status, interactional processes, and proximate power within everyday encounters. 14These summary estimates are derived from staged modeling wherein the three respective clusters are introduced independently. Because of both the temporal character of the 2016 question and the noninclusion of workplace relational indicators in 2016, however, I draw on the 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018 waves. 1The push for more synthetic or generalizable approaches is not to suggest that specific status vulnerabilities (regarding, for instance, race, gender, or age) are not grounded in unique cultural or ideological beliefs. The Impact of Gender Segregation on Men at Work, Understanding Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Health: Sociological Contributions, Racial Differences in Physical and Mental Health: Socioeconomic Status, Stress, and Discrimination, Pathways to Power: Racial Differences in the Determinants of Job Authority, Race and Loss of Privilege: African American/White Differences in the Determinants of Job Layoffs from Upper-Tier Occupations, Race, Ageism and the Slide from Privileged Occupations, Public Sector Transformation, Racial Inequality and Downward Occupational Mobility, Legal Outsiders, Strategic Toughness: Racial Frames and Counterframes in the Legal Profession, Maintaining Hierarchies in Predominantly White Organizations: A Theory of Racial Tasks, The Production of Racial Inequality Within and Among Organizations, Uneven Patterns of Inequality: An Audit Analysis of Hiring-Related Practices by Gendered and Classed Contexts, Women in the One Percent: Gender Dynamics in Top Income Positions, Race and Job Dismissals in a Federal Bureaucracy, American Sociological Association. ORCID iDVincent J. Roscigno https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8066-9761. 4There is little in the way of missing data overall, with no indicator missing more than 10 percent of responses. Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies, Civil Rights Law at Work: Sex Discrimination and the Rise of Maternity Leave Policies, Changing Work and Work-Family Conflict: Evidence from the Work, Family, and Health Network, Managing Corporate Culture through Reward Systems, When ‘Best Practices’ Win, Employees Lose: Symbolic Compliance and Judicial Inference in Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Cases, Aging Workers and the Experience of Job Loss, Racial Discrimination, Interpretation, and Legitimation at Work, Status Processes and Mental Ability Test Scores, Gender Pay Gap and Employment Sector: Sources of Earnings Disparities in the United States, 1970–2010, Race, Management Citizenship Behavior, and Employees’ Commitment and Well-Being, Going Down: Race and Downward Occupational Mobility in a Changing Economy, Employers’ Responses to Sexual Harassment, Networks of Opportunity: Gender, Race, and Job Leads, Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power, The Social Networks of High and Low Self-Monitors: Implications for Workplace Performance, Status, Faction Sizes, and Social Influence: Testing the Theoretical Mechanism, Strong Ties Promote the Evolution of Cooperation in Dynamic Networks, Organizational Change around an Older Workforce, A Coding of Social Class for the General Social Survey, Rights Realized? I begin with attention to general frameworks on the salience of status for inequality (e.g., Berger et al. Organizational size in the literature is sometimes equated with levels of bureaucracy (e.g., Astley 1985; Havemann 1993) and may also capture demographic implications for workplace experiences and social relations. It is for this reason that I restrict the graphical representation in Figure 1 to those 40 and older, covered the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Implicit bias in the workplace, however, can have very detrimental effects on employees and the organization as a whole. Mehra, Ajay, Kilduff, Martin, Brass, Daniel J. Moen, Phylis, Kojola, Erik, Schaefers, Kate. 2017; Light et al. Restructuring and Ascriptive Inequality at Work, How You Downsize Is Who You Downsize: Biased Formalization, Accountability and Managerial Diversity, Best Practices or Best Guesses? Such scholarship suggests that status vulnerabilities, rather than necessarily mattering in unique, singular ways, might generate compounding disadvantages (e.g., Browne and Misra 2003; Harnois 2015; McCall 2005). . A violation of such normative principles can undercut a sense of justice and fair play, especially when certain individuals or groups are targeted (Rubin and Brody 2011). Vincent J. Roscigno is a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology at The Ohio State University. Deeper immersion in the future, through qualitative and case-specific analyses, would be helpful and likely uncover clearer patterns of intersectional spillover. 3It is important to distinguish my argument regarding status-based social closure via discrimination and sexual harassment, including potential variations in occurrence by high and low occupational positioning, from the more general sociological usage of occupational closure, that is, social and legal barriers around occupations, such licensing, educational credentialing, voluntary certification, association representation and unionization, that restrict the labor supply, enhance demand, boost prestige, and so on (in this regard, see especially Weeden 2002). Likelihood of experiencing age discrimination by respondent age for those 40 and older (covered by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act [ADEA]). Most prominent in my analyses were those surrounding racially/ethnically “other” women and somewhat lower levels of reported gender discrimination and younger workers and greater vulnerability to sexual harassment. Workplace relations, which similarly might amplify or mitigate the likelihood of injustice and/or specific status vulnerabilities, are measured with two scales, one capturing horizonal (coworker integration and cohesion) and the other reflecting vertical (supervisory) relational dimensions of power and the employment experience. Please check you selected the correct society from the list and entered the user name and password you use to log in to your society website. The use of nationally representative survey data on full-time workers across the entire age distribution arguably overcomes some of the reporting bias in these regards. Scholars of aging could certainly make a similar case given what we now know about the disadvantages aging workers face in promotions, job assignments and discriminatory layoffs (Berger 2009; Henry and Jennings 2004; Kelley et al. Future theoretical and empirical work that explicitly grapples with overlap between status-based and occupational closure, especially in relation to female and minority movements into previously segregated occupational domains, would undoubtedly be worthwhile and most likely reveal how mechanisms of closure shift between more bureaucratic and status-based forms as well as how, in fact, they may not be so mutually exclusive. Sexual harassment is an especially poignant case in this regard, not to mention a specific and illegal form of bullying, with research typically assuming and finding that younger women are disproportionately the targets (DeCoster, Estes and Mueller 1999; MacKinnon 1979; Padavic and Orcutt 1997). Earlier it was observed that those in higher occupational positions are more vulnerable when it comes to gender discrimination and age discrimination. This conditional plot, which focuses exclusively on those 40 and older who are covered by civil rights protections and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, reveals a quite mild increase in the likelihood of age discrimination between 40 and 50 years old but with a significant increase and upward slope for those between the ages of 50 and 70.12 This pattern is consistent with prior qualitative work that points to pronounced vulnerabilities between the ages of 50 and 65, often driven by employer efforts to reduce costs by downsizing more highly compensated (i.e., older) employees and minimizing health insurance, pension, and benefits afforded to their workforces (in these regards, see Roscigno et al. 2013). Washington, DC 20507 Spatial Inequality in Future Sociology, Sexual Harassment as a Gendered Expression of Power, Empowerment Redux: Structure, Agency, and the Re-making of Managerial Authority, Status Generalization: A Review and Some New Data, Status Claims, Performance Expectations, and Inequality in Groups, Why Do Some Occupations Pay More Than Others? Studies have shown that 42 percent to 68 percent of LGBT individuals report experiencing employment discrimination (Badgett, 2012; Fassinger, 2007). Although such data are admittedly limited in their cross-sectional character, the measures afforded, described below, are representative and rich on multiple outcomes pertaining to discriminatory experiences, key status indicators, occupational positioning and workplace relational measures, and controls. Tying together such strands of work relative to Ridgeway’s most general argument regarding multidimensionality and the activation of status hierarchies leads to the clear prediction that race, gender, and age within the employment context will be consequential by amplifying vulnerability to discrimination on the job: Hypothesis 1: Women, racial/ethnic minorities, and aging workers will be more likely to experience discrimination than men, whites, and younger and middle-age workers. The second equation for each outcome introduces occupational position and vertical and horizontal workplace relations. Employees should also report harassment to management at an early stage to prevent its escalation. 1977; Correll and Ridgeway 2003; Fiske 2011; Webster and Foschi 1988) are or should be central to the analyses of inequality. GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) COVID-19 is an emerging, rapidly evolving situation. It is derived from the following items, reverse coded: “My supervisor is concerned with the welfare of those under him or her” (0–3, 3 = “not at all true”) and “My supervisor is helpful to me in getting the job done” (0–3, 3 = “not at all true”). Such importance lies not so much in protections but rather as a proximate interaction that, when negative, intensifies vulnerability directly or indirectly for those underneath the supervisor. Horizontal relations with one’s coworkers may likewise matter, and for good reason. Employers are encouraged to take appropriate steps to prevent and correct unlawful harassment. Earlier it was suggested (via countervailing hypotheses) that occupational positioning and workplace relations might either provide cover or bolster the likelihood of discriminatory or harassing treatment. Maume, David J., Rubin, Beth A., Brody, Charles J. McCann, Carly, Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald, Badgett, M. V. Lee. Analyses drawing from alternative data sources, such as official compositional and/or discrimination case materials, partially fill existing gaps by elaborating on multiple discriminatory types (Light, Roscigno, and Kalev 2011; Roscigno 2007), highlighting changes in segregation (Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012), drawing attention to bias in the legal-judicial claims-making process (Green 2016; Krieger, Best, and Edelman 2015), and identifying interventions and their degree of impact (Dobbin, Schrage, and Kalev 2015; Kalev 2014; Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly 2006). 9Core sector employment includes industries such as construction, manufacturing, materials and food processing, communications, and transportation. Nonsignificant findings from model 1 are likewise informative and suggest that racial discrimination, generally, affects women and men of various ages more or less uniformly, gender discrimination cuts across black and white individuals and age groups similarly, and age discrimination cuts generally across gender and racial lines. 5In considering causal interpretation, it is also difficult to conceive of a process wherein those of a particular status or those with an inclination to recognize unjust treatment would somehow self-select into workplace environments on the basis of whether good or poor horizontal or vertical relations exist. High-wage service sector employment entails industries such finance and banking, administration, wholesale sales, justice and law, management and scientific consulting, and so on. I caveat any interpretations in these regards, however, with explicit recognition that the outcomes analyzed center on the likelihood of experiencing unjust treatment rather than on how precisely that injustice was experienced or the underlying rationales perpetrators use to justify discriminatory and harassing conduct, important points that I revisit in my conclusions. Interaction modeling further reveals a heightened likelihood of both gender and age discrimination for those in higher status occupational positions but uniform vulnerabilities across the occupational hierarchy when it comes to women’s experiences of sexual harassment and minority encounters with racial discrimination. Sign in here to access free tools such as favourites and alerts, or to access personal subscriptions, If you have access to journal content via a university, library or employer, sign in here, Research off-campus without worrying about access issues. I have read and accept the terms and conditions. Findings from these analyses, presented in abbreviated form in the Appendix, parallel the core findings of my main analyses. Like occupational position, relations with coworkers and immediate supervisors have the capacity to ameliorate or exacerbate both unjust treatment and perceptions of fairness (Maume, Rubin, and Brody 2013; Roscigno et al. Taken together, these questions effectively capture intergroup reliance and interpersonal integration, both of which are arguably central to the work experience (Roscigno et al. Hypothesis 2: Women, particularly those who are younger, will be more likely to experience sexual harassment on the job. Offensive conduct may include, but is not limited to, offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs, offensive objects or pictures, and interference with work performance. 1988; Wharton and Baron 1987), tensions in family-work balance (Bielby and Bielby 1989; Glass and Camarigg 1992; Kelly et al. By continuing to browse This product could help you, Accessing resources off campus can be a challenge. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click on download. Research shows that diversity in the workplace leads to a more talented and competitive workforce. For more information on how to manage workplace exposures, call the Monterey County Health Department's COVID-19 Call Center at 831-769-8700. Log Odds Estimates of Workplace Discrimination and Sexual Harassment among Full-Time Workers by Key Status Attributes and Potential Interactions with Occupational Positioning and Workplace Relations. Her broader case regarding status centrality, multidimensionality and its relational foundations, however, is well taken when one considers how the study of workplace inequality has practically developed into distinct subfields (pertaining to race or gender or age) rather than offering more synthetic treatments.1 There are, of course, exceptions that take on more universal questions regarding equal opportunity and change (Dobbin 2009; Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012), discrimination processes and consequences (e.g., Berrey et al. It is calculated from both earnings (SEI10INC) and the percentage of those who had a college education or higher (SEI10EDUC) within occupational groups (Hout, Smith, and Marsden 2016) and provides a good overall summary indicator of occupational standing and class position (Morgan 2016). the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Along these lines, and as noted earlier, negative supervisory relations can be influential through the shaping of justice perceptions, oversight or lack thereof, or more directly through the sexually harassing behaviors of supervisors themselves (Roscigno 2007). Notable are status-specific effects across discrimination type.