How employers hire (women, immigrants, and the educationally elite) : meritocracy, egalitarianism, and cultural fit in a Silicon Valley high technology firm
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation, organized into three manuscripts, draws from a case study of the software engineering hiring process at InGen, a high technology firm in Silicon Valley. I use quantitative data primarily from in-person interview candidate evaluations and job offer decisions, and qualitative data primarily from semi-structured interviews with interviewers, recruiters, and management, and from participant observation of hiring deliberations. I first focus on the following puzzle: despite ample experimental evidence of cognitive bias in the evaluation of male-typed tasks, organizational studies fail to find a gender penalty in hiring rates for male-typed jobs. I argue that decision-maker discretion under equal opportunity norms helps to explain this puzzle. At InGen, decision-makers use their discretion to override mediocre technical evaluations, and then rationalize their discretion in terms of the candidates' near-future merit, resulting in gender equality in job offer rates. I next focus on the economic penalty that first-generation immigrants (those who attend a foreign university) incur in the U.S. economy. I argue that part of this economic penalty is due to perceived "cultural" differences between immigrants and organizational gatekeepers. At InGen, interviewers systematically perceive first-generation immigrants as socially distant to themselves due to perceived violations of national cultural norms, resulting in a penalty in job offers. Finally, I focus on how employers use and interpret elite educational credentials, taking seriously the systematic difference in perspective between management and peers (e.g., engineering interviewers) involved in the hiring process. I find that management and peers assign different meaning and importance to elite educational credentials according to the candidate uncertainty to which either group is oriented. To avoid internal conflict between the two groups, management establishes the formal rules for how to use elite educational credentials, routinizes recruiters to follow those rules, and segregates the peer review process from the rest of the hiring apparatus.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Chavez, Koji Rafael |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology. |
| Primary advisor | Grusky, David B |
| Thesis advisor | Grusky, David B |
| Thesis advisor | Fields, Corey |
| Thesis advisor | Jiménez, Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto), 1975- |
| Advisor | Fields, Corey |
| Advisor | Jiménez, Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto), 1975- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Koji Rafael Chavez. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Koji Rafael Chavez
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...