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Where the girls aren't: How firms, families, and educational specialization affect the gender gap in workplace authority
Get PDFThis dissertation is written as three separate, but related, papers. Each paper, examines a different aspect of the gender gap in workplace authority by asking where and how women lose out to men in access to management jobs in corporate America. I interrogate common, human capital arguments that women lack the relevant skills and experience to be managers and find that women's qualifications are not holding them back. Gender roles, stereotypes, and decision makers' biases in predominantly smaller American firms keep highly qualified, college-educated women out of management. In "Where to mind the gap: Variation in gender gaps in management across firms and levels of educational attainment," I examine how higher education affects the differential allocation of men and women into management occupations with different levels of authority across employing organizations of different sizes. Results from logistic regression models using the Current Population Survey March Annual Demographic Supplement (CPS) 2003-2011 show that although gender gaps in managerial authority are wider among workers with bachelor's and master's degrees compared to workers without college degrees, these gaps are narrower in larger firms compared to smaller ones. The gender gap in authority among those with professional degrees is not statistically significant and the gender gap in authority among PhDs favors women in all but the largest firms, where it disappears. The results imply that gender gaps in managerial authority are not ubiquitous, but are contingent upon both educational attainment and the firms where people work. In "A matter of degrees: Educational specialization and the gender gap in authority and returns to authority among American college-graduates," I examine whether business and economics degrees and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees are more likely to lead to jobs with authority in corporate America than bachelor's degrees in the humanities. After finding that college graduates in the private sector are more likely to be managers and supervisors, and that managers and supervisors have more authority and higher earnings, if they have business, economics, science and engineering degrees, I ask if these authority returns to degrees are equal for men and women seeking access to authority positions and for men and women who are already managers and supervisors. I find that gender differences in access to authority are mainly confined to business degrees, bachelor's degrees in economics, and bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering. Gender differences in span of control and earnings within the authority hierarchy are mostly confined to supervisors with business, economics, and engineering degrees. These results imply that women's inroads into higher education in these fields will do little to curb the gender gap in authority, if American corporate culture continues to denigrate feminized fields in the humanities, while venerating masculine prowess at managerial activities that require competence in analytical reasoning and mathematics. In "It's all in the family: How gender differences in working hours, work experience, and family structure explain gender gaps in authority and returns to authority among American college-graduates," I examine why college-educated women are, relative to men, underrepresented in positions of authority in the workplace as managers and supervisors and why they earn less in these positions. Results from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) show that gender differences in working hours, work experience, and the resources imparted by a spouse's employment status explain most of the gender gap in authority and a large portion of the gender gap in financial returns to authority. Men enjoy an authority bonus from traditional family structures - that is, fathers are more likely to have authority in the workplace than non-fathers and men with less career-committed spouses earn higher salaries than men with wives who work full-time. Although motherhood does not directly affect women's workplace authority or their earnings, children exert an indirect negative effect on women's workplace authority by decreasing women's working hours. The negative effect of children on women's working hours is even larger if she has a husband who works full-time
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Three Essays on Legitimacy and Organizational Outcomes
Get PDFThis research demonstrates that CEO dismissal can be one form of activism utilized by a board of directors against CEOs’ prior records of violating institutional logics (i.e., cultural beliefs, norms, and assumptions about appropriate conduct) especially during poor performance. To this end, it examines two organizational outcomes of CEO dismissal and post-dismissal strategic changes in large U.S. Fortune companies between 1984 and 2007. During this period, the field of large firms was characterized by the rise of a shareholder-value logic, in which maximizing shareholder returns was the ultimate goal of the firm and corporate refocusing and employment downsizing were appropriate and necessary means to that end. According to event-history analyses, poor performance generally led to an increase in the CEO dismissal rate, but this effect was even stronger for CEOs who were reluctant to refocus and downsize during their tenures in the position. Moreover, when their predecessors were dismissed, new CEOs were more inclined to refocus and downsize, especially during their early tenures. These results indicate that when firms deviating from logics perform poorly, directors attribute the performance problem to the deviation itself, and thus seek the removal of the CEO as a means of strategically reorienting towards prevailing logics. This study contributes to institutional theory and upper echelon research
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Youth Sexual Risk-Taking in Latin America: Implications for Public Health and Policy in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala
Get PDFThis research investigates the principal factors that influence youth sexuality, exploring the multi-faceted forces that shape young people's sexual knowledge, attitudes, and practices. Seeking to shed light on the diverse social, cultural, and structural forces that contribute to youth sexual risk-taking, I conducted a quantitative study of 1686 high school students between the ages of 18 and 24 who live in the Mesoamerican region of southern Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. My survey includes 95 multiple choice and open-ended questions that explore a broad range of factors, including: personal relationships and plans; knowledge and sources of information about sex, contraception, and HIV prevention; sexual experience and contraceptive use; attitudes and beliefs concerning sexuality; perceived risk and experiences with HIV; and social and demographic variables.Conducted between May 2007 and July 2009, this study is informed by the 2008 Mexico City Ministerial Declaration `Prevenir Con Educacion' (Preventing Through Education), a regional policy initiative that seeks to expand youth access to comprehensive sexuality education and services throughout Latin America. Within this policy context, I explore the ways in which school-based sexuality education influences young people's sexual knowledge, attitudes, and practices, in addition to examining how social norms shape youth sexuality across diverse cultural contexts in Latin America. To contextualize this research, I integrate sociological theories of gender and sexuality that are framed within the context of economic development and globalization. Further, I incorporate empirical findings from public health research and programmatic models concerning the connections between knowledge, behavior, risk-taking, and policy interventions. Using multivariate analysis, I begin by separately examining the study results from Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, analyzing the influence of the most salient independent variables within each national context. To best understand the ways in which these influences remain constant or diverge throughout the region, I then compare and contrast the results across the three countries. These study findings demonstrate that four principal factors influence youth sexual behavior in Mesoamerica - school-based sexuality education, relationships and communication with parents and peers, church attendance, and ethnicity. My findings validate the efforts of the Mexico City Ministerial Declaration by highlighting the need to provide Mesoamerican youth with comprehensive school-based sexuality education and services in order to reduce high rates of unwanted pregnancy, adolescent childbearing, and HIV/AIDS throughout the region. I conclude with recommendations concerning how the Ministerial Declaration could more effectively achieve its principal goals of improving adolescent sexual and reproductive health outcomes in Latin America
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Ascription at Work: Essays on Discrimination, Networks, and Employment Histories
Get PDFThis dissertation consists of three essays examining ascriptive inequality in the labor market. In the first two essays, I draw on an original, two-wave experiment with a sample of white hiring agents to advance the sociological understanding of the determinants of employers’ discriminatory behavior and the consequences of jobseekers’ racially-segregated networks. First, I examine what motivates employers to discriminate. I find implicit (largely unconscious), but not explicit, racial attitudes predict employers’ evaluations of white applicants, and of black applicants relative to white applicants. Thus, instead of deliberately rejecting black jobseekers, hiring agents’ behavior appears to be driven by largely unconscious biases. Further, in open-ended responses, hiring agents justify their racially-motivated evaluations without invoking race, suggesting the ambiguity of the hiring process enables them to maintain and portray an egalitarian image. Second, I analyze how white hiring agents reward employee referrals. I find that in the most prevalent real-life conditions—black applicants referred by black employees, and white applicants referred by white employees—black applicants’ referrals were significantly discounted relative to white applicants’ referrals. Indeed, black applicants only benefited from having a referral when two conditions were met: the referring employee was white and the hiring agent was relatively low-prejudiced. Thus, in addition to their disadvantage in access to employee referrals, black jobseekers suffer from a disadvantage in returns to these referrals. In the third essay, I use the rich week-by-week measures of work experiences from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) to examine the role of labor market experiences—specifically, employment histories—in explaining the intergenerational transmission of economic status. I document a strong association between parental income and employment histories for men without a college degree. Among this group, men from higher-income families accumulate more work experience and tenure, and less unemployment, throughout their careers than men from lower-income families. In contrast, regardless of parental income, college graduates quickly settle into stable, long-term employment. Thus, a college degree appears to be a powerful resource that leaves little room for family background effects on employment histories. Consequently, for non-college graduates (but not for college graduates), employment histories mediate approximately one-third of the effect of parental income on earnings. Ultimately, these essays highlight the enduring effect of race and family background in the labor market
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Building a Better Community?: The Role of Banks and Voluntary Associations
Get PDFThis dissertation examines how commercial banks and voluntary associations affect employment in residential communities. The first chapter investigates how the presence of certain types of banks affects employment in residential communities. By providing financial resources to businesses, banks are spurring entrepreneurship and creating jobs. But locally-owned and absentee-owned banks differ in both their lending practices and their dependence on the communities where they operate. Moreover, the effect of banks on community employment is contingent what kinds of businesses exist in those communities. Empirical analysis of every community in the contiguous United States from 1994 to 2007 show that locally-owned banks that have at least one branch in another community contribute the most to local employment growth, while the contribution of absentee-owned banks to employment growth depends on the number of businesses with high levels of tangible assets relative to total assets, and the contribution of locally-owned banks that have all their branches in the focal community to employment growth varies with the number of businesses with low levels of tangible assets relative to total assets. Robustness checks validate these findings.The second chapter investigates how different types of voluntary associations affect the ability of communities to spur the creation of new organizations and to support existing businesses. Voluntary associations allow people with common interests to come together in a non-competitive environment. But voluntary associations vary in the extent to which they facilitate demographic diversity in their members' social networks and the degree to which their members participate in association activities. Empirical analysis of every community in the contiguous United States from 1994 to 2007 show that professional, political and social advocacy associations contribute to increases in the number of establishments, while business, civic and social, and religious associations, and labor unions either decrease or do not affect the number of establishments in communities. The same pattern of results was found when examining the affect of voluntary associations on foundings of locally-owned banks that have all their branches in the focal community. Moreover, in support of the vital role played by these banks, results show that increased presence of these banks results accentuates the effect of voluntary associations that increase the number of establishments in communities and attenuates the effect of voluntary associations that decrease or have no affect on the number of establishments in communities. Robustness checks validate these findings
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Strategic Responses to Stigma and Uncertainty: Three Essays on the Cannabis Industry
Get PDFEssay 1. How can organizations use strategic frames to develop support for illegal and stigmatized markets? Drawing on interviews, direct observation, and the analysis of 2,497 press releases, I show how pro-cannabis activists used distinct framing strategies at different stages of institutional development to negotiate the moral boundaries surrounding medical cannabis, diluting the market’s stigma in the process. Social movement organizations first established a moral (and legal) foothold for the market by framing cannabis as a palliative for the dying, respecting moral boundaries blocking widespread exchange. As market institutions emerged, activists extended this frame to include less serious conditions, making these boundaries permeable.Essay 2. States govern markets through legal regimes. Although prices are central to markets, we know little about their relationship with legal regimes. We build on sociological and legal scholarship to develop two theories of the impact of legal regimes on prices. Both predict that uncertainty created by legal regimes raises prices by increasing costs and increases price dispersion by hindering the development of market norms, but they differ in how legal regimes create uncertainty. The single-level theory predicts that uncertainty results from the lack of clear property rights; the multi-level theory predicts that uncertainty results from conflict about property rights between legal regimes created by different levels of government (federal, state, local). We apply these theories to state-legal markets for medical cannabis in the United States. Consistent with the multi-level theory, we find that conflict between state-level and federal-level legal regimes resulted in higher and more dispersed prices for medical cannabis and that alignment of local-level and federal-level legal regimes resulted in less dispersed prices. We conclude by considering how the multi-level theory of legal regimes might be applied to other markets.Essay 3. Organizations selling stigmatized products persist despite fierce opposition from hostile audiences. Scholars have explained the viability of stigmatized organizations by detailing strategies organizations pursue to decrease public scrutiny and/or develop legitimacy for contested products. These explanations foreground how organizations attempt to conceal their stigma to decrease scrutiny from hostile audiences, but rarely describe how these stigma management strategies affect marketing products to customers. Yet stigmatized markets persist because consumers purchase stigmatized products, inviting further study into how stigma management strategies affect organizational performance. In this paper, I show how seeking legitimacy from critics can hurt organizational performance by delegitimating products in the eyes of customers. Using deep learning for text classification to analyze product descriptions advertised by retailers in Washington State’s recreational cannabis market, I find that organizations pursued three distinct stigma management strategies: diluting stigma, embracing stigma, and commoditization. Most organizations chose not to explicitly address the stigmatized features of their products, instead focusing on the chemical content of their products (commoditization). A few organizations differentiated their products by diluting or embracing stigma. Organizations that diluted stigma performed worse across all contexts than organizations that did not. However, organizations that embraced stigma performed better in areas where stigma was strongest. Together, these findings suggest that stigma could be an asset, not a liability, and that legitimacy-seeking behavior may undermine organizational performance
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The Field of Consumption: Statistical Models and Analyses
Get PDFThis dissertation develops a general quantitative model of field structure for analyzing the field theoretic properties of social phenomena. I use core structural principles found in the dominant variants of field theory (Lewin, Bourdieu, Dimaggio and Powell, Martin, and Fligstein and McAdam) to outline and elaborate a broad class of models consistent with the major assertions of field theory. These models use nonparametric local regressions to estimate field effect over multidimensional social space. By using univariate and multivariate statistics, these models enable determination of the existence or nonexistence of the field, the best description for the axes of the field and the complex patterns of variation in field effects over social space.In three distinct analyses based on data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I demonstrate how the organization of consumption as whole has changed over time and how individuals at different points in social space have been affected. Using a synthetic cohort design, I show how lifecycle consumption is differentiated by age, income, and education, and how these effects interact and moderate each other. Finally, I analyze how households changed their consumption in response the Great Recession. I find that cultural change in consumption preferences are a better explanation for changes in consumption than recession-related economic shocks or drops in consumer confidence.This dissertation makes two contributions. First, it attempts to further the development of field theory by outlining and demonstrating a quantitative model of field structure. This model offers an improvement over the current state of field modeling in terms of statistical rigor and flexibility. The model I present here enables more detailed and careful analysis of field structure and transformation and is general enough to help adjudicate between competing claims of conflicting field theories. Second, this dissertation highlights the necessity of considering economic and cultural determinants of consumption in conjunction. Consumption patterns are highly contingent on the specific conditions under which individuals make consumption decisions. While income, wealth, and savings are important, age, education, and family size are equally and frequently more important for predicting variations in consumption
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Geographic scope, scale, and local social structure: Survival of chain and independent retailers in California, 1990-2004
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the effects of governance structure, size and local social structure on the survival of retail establishments in California between 1990 and 2004. Firstly Chapter Two integrates ideas from economic history, urban studies and the culture of consumption to explain the importance of the retail system in the United States. The chapter paints a picture of a retail system positioned at the intersection of commerce, culture and community. The next chapter, using ideas from organizational ecology, proposes hypotheses to explain the differential survival rates of independent retailers (with a focused geographic scope) and chain retailers (with a broader geographic scope). I also predict the separate effects of firm size from establishment size for each of these categories of retailers. Retailers, however, are not one-dimensional organizations. Other considerations besides geographic scope inform how owners and mangers organize their firms. One of these is product breadth. Chapter Four tests the predictions that when independents also commit to a single product category, they survive longer than single-category chain retailers, multi-category chain retailers, and multi-category independent retailers. Finally, considering the position of independent retailers in their communities, Chapters Four and Five propose that local social and built environments positively influence the survival rates of independent establishments. Independent retailers are likely to be a part of the local social fabric and as such benefit from distinctive local character like urbanness, wealth, and racial and age homogeneity. Additionally, independent retailers participate in local logics of action and thereby benefit from historical urban planning arrangements. The hypotheses are tested with an extensive dataset covering fourteen years of life histories of Californian retailers. My findings indicate that local economic and social factors influence the survival of independent, whereas not for chain stores. The results suggest that the larger the scale of an establishment the longer the survival time for a chain store, but not for an independent. Being a multi-category is of particular importance for independent stores, but not chain stores. The findings also support the hypotheses about local development patterns and the survival of independent retailers. The findings offer important contributions to our understanding of the relationships between the local social structure and organizational survival and the multi-dimensional nature of organizations and their survival
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