David S. Pedulla

Can We Finish the Revolution? Gender, Work-Family Ideals, and Institutional Constraint

Why has progress toward gender equality in the workplace and at home stalled in recent decades? A growing body of scholarship suggests that persistently gendered workplace norms and policies limit men’s and women’s ability to create gender egalitarian relationships at home. In this article, we build on and extend prior research by examining the extent to which institutional constraints, including workplace policies, affect young, unmarried men’s and women’s preferences for their future work-family arrangements. We also examine how these effects vary across education levels. Drawing on original survey-experimental data, we ask respondents how they would like to structure their future relationships while experimentally manipulating the degree of institutional constraint under which they state their preferences. Two clear patterns emerge. First, as constraints are removed and men and women can opt for an egalitarian relationship, the majority choose this option, regardless of gender or education level. Second, women’s relationship structure preferences are more responsive than men’s to the removal of institutional constraints through supportive work-family policy interventions. These findings shed light on important questions about the role of institutions in shaping work-family preferences, underscoring the notion that seemingly gender-traditional work-family decisions are largely contingent on the constraints of current workplaces.

The Positive Consequences of Negative Stereotypes Race, Sexual Orientation, and the Job Application Process

How do marginalized social categories, such as being black and gay, combine with one another in the production of discrimination? While much extant research assumes that combining marginalized social categories results in a “double disadvantage,” I argue that in the case of race and sexual orientation the opposite may be true. This article posits that stereotypes about gay men as effeminate and weak will counteract common negative stereotypes held by whites that black men are threatening and criminal. Thus, I argue that being gay will have negative consequences for white men in the job application process, but that being gay will actually have positive consequences for black men in this realm. This hypothesis is tested using data from a survey experiment in which respondents were asked to evaluate resumes for a job opening where the race and sexual orientation of the applicants were experimentally manipulated. The findings contribute to important theoretical debates about stereotypes, discrimination, and intersecting social identities.

Penalized or Protected? Gender and the Consequences of Nonstandard and Mismatched Employment Histories

Millions of workers are employed in positions that deviate from the full-time, standard employment relationship or work in jobs that are mismatched with their skills, education, or experience. Yet, little is known about how employers evaluate workers who have experienced these employment arrangements, limiting our knowledge about how part-time work, temporary agency employment, and skills underutilization affect workers’ labor market opportunities. Drawing on original field and survey experiment data, I examine three questions: (1) What are the consequences of having a nonstandard or mismatched employment history for workers’ labor market opportunities? (2) Are the effects of nonstandard or mismatched employment histories different for men and women? and (3) What are the mechanisms linking nonstandard or mismatched employment histories to labor market outcomes? The field experiment shows that skills underutilization is as scarring for workers as a year of unemployment, but that there are limited penalties for workers with histories of temporary agency employment. Additionally, although men are penalized for part-time employment histories, women face no penalty for part-time work. The survey experiment reveals that employers’ perceptions of workers’ competence and commitment mediate these effects. These findings shed light on the consequences of changing employment relations for the distribution of labor market opportunities in the “new economy.”

Race, Self-Selection, and the Job Search Process

While existing research has documented persistent barriers facing African-American job seekers, far less research has questioned how job seekers respond to this reality. Do minorities self-select into particular segments of the labor market to avoid discrimination? Such questions have remained unanswered due to the lack of data available on the positions to which job seekers apply. Drawing on two original data sets with application-specific information, we find little evidence that blacks target or avoid particular job types. Rather, blacks cast a wider net in their search than similarly situated whites, including a greater range of occupational categories and characteristics in their pool of job applications. Additionally, we show that perceptions of discrimination are associated with increased search breadth, suggesting that broad search among African-Americans represents an adaptation to labor market discrimination. Together these findings provide novel evidence on the role of race and self-selection in the job search process.

Masculinity and the Stalled Revolution How Gender Ideologies and Norms Shape Young Men’s Responses to Work–Family Policies

Extant research suggests that supportive work–family policies promote gender equality in the workplace and in the household. Yet, evidence indicates that these policies generally have stronger effects on women’s preferences and behaviors than men’s. In this article, we draw on survey-experimental data to examine how young, unmarried men’s gender ideologies and perceptions of normative masculinity may moderate the effect of supportive work–family policy interventions on their preferences for structuring their future work and family life. Specifically, we examine whether men’s prescriptive beliefs about what work–family arrangements most people ought to prefer and whether men’s descriptive beliefs about what work–family arrangements most of their male peers actually do prefer influence their responses to supportive policies. Our analysis shows that men’s responses to supportive work–family policy interventions are highly dependent upon their beliefs about what their male peers actually want, rather than on their beliefs about what others should want. Specifically, men who believe that their male peers ideally want gender-egalitarian or counternormative relationships are themselves more likely to prefer a progressive relationship structure when supportive work–family policies are in place. These findings provide novel support for sociological theories of masculinity and hold important implications for designing policies that promote gender equality in the workplace and at home.

Educational Authority in the ''Open Door'' Marketplace.

In recent years, private for-profit education has been the fastest growing segment of the U.S. postsecondary system. Traditional hiring models suggest that employers clearly and efficiently evaluate college credentials, but this changing institutional landscape raises an important question: How do employers assess credentials from emerging institutions? Building on theories of educational authority, we hypothesize that employers respond to an associate’s degree itself over the institution from which it came. Using data from a field experiment that sent applications to administrative job openings in three major labor markets, we found that employers responded similarly to applicants listing a degree from a fictional college and applicants listing a local for-profit or nonprofit institution. There is some evidence that educational authority is incomplete, but employers who prefer degree-holders do not appear to actively evaluate institutional quality. We conclude by discussing implications of our work for research on school to labor market links within the changing higher education marketplace.

The Family and Community Impacts of Underemployment

The consequences of underemployment do not end with the individual. Families are affected when a parent is forced into reduced working hours. Marital strain, difficulties with children, changing relationships with extended family and friends, and material hardship can all follow from underemployment. Communities also suffer when a plant closing forces an entire group of residents into jobs well below their education level. Accordingly, underemployment may impact crime rates and political participation, and put a drain on both material and social resources at the community level.

To Be Young and Unemployed

While every point throughout a worker’s career trajectory is important, the labor market experiences—earnings, benefits, skill development, and job security—of young workers are of particular significance. Early labor market experiences play a central role in shaping earnings and career trajectories—thus, they can have lasting consequences for economic security and patterns of earnings inequality over the life course.2 As Annette Bernhardt and her colleagues succinctly put it: “the majority of lifetime wage growth occurs during a worker’s first ten years in the labor market. To understand how inequality is generated, we need to focus on this formative period during which trajectories of upward mobility are effectively set.”3 Millions of workers are struggling with joblessness, economic inequality has been rising over the past thirty years, and large swaths of America are still feeling the consequences of the Great Recession. However, economic challenges are not shared equally. Certain socio-demographic groups are hit particularly hard, while others remain largely insulated from the difficulties of

Emerging Frontiers in Audit Study Research: Mechanisms, Variation, and Representativeness

Audit studies have gained popularity in the social sciences, producing important insights about discrimination and bias across a range of social statuses, such as race and gender. Yet, important questions persist about why, when, and where discrimination and bias emerge. In this chapter, I suggest that tackling these issues is a central task of audit studies and discuss emerging frontiers of audit study research that are attempting to address these pressing issues. First, audit studies can contribute to our understanding of why discrimination occurs by incorporating strategies to uncover the mechanisms that drive the empirical patterns observed in the data. Second, audit studies can provide insights about when and where discrimination and bias occur by paying attention to theoretically important variation in average treatment effects and clarifying the representativeness of a given set of findings. Throughout, I present evidence from recent audit study research that pushes the boundaries on each of these frontiers and discuss potential paths forward to continue to advance the design, implementation, and contribution of this method to social science research.