Belonging at work : the role of organizational factors and interpersonal interactions in maintaining workplace inequality
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation, comprised of three papers, explores mechanisms operating within engineering and technology work environments at the organizational and interactional levels that help perpetuate societal-level gender and race inequalities. The first paper provides support for the hypothesis that in the absence of intentional action to counteract stereotypes, organizations promote employees into jobs aligned with racialized gendered stereotypes, net of performance and experience. This paper highlights the importance of taking an intersectional approach to the study of gender inequality by demonstrating how analyzing data by gender alone can mask important trends by race, gender, and job and their intersection. The second paper demonstrates that undesirable and inequitable working conditions for women in occupations filled mostly with men contribute to lower retention of women, especially racial minority women, in traditionally masculine, higher paying jobs, contributing to occupational gender segregation, the biggest contributor to the gender pay gap. The third paper describes one way to create more equitable conditions for minority groups, including women, at work. This paper documents the results of a field experiment showing that improving interpersonal interactions in a tech company has an especially positive effect among workers who feel least like they belong at work, a group of workers who are disproportionately women and racial minorities. This paper provides an experimentally validated template for improving interactions, pointing a way toward creating more inclusive organizations that support a sense of belonging for all workers, an important step toward reducing societal gender and racial inequality. Together, these papers contribute new knowledge to our understanding of how gender and race inequalities persist within technical work organizations and suggest ways of mitigating those inequalities. More broadly, this research sheds light on the continual creation and maintenance of inequalities that occur in many settings throughout society through interpersonal interactions and organizational structures and policies.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Corbett, Christianne Marie |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Correll, Shelley Joyce |
| Thesis advisor | Correll, Shelley Joyce |
| Thesis advisor | Pedulla, David S, 1982- |
| Thesis advisor | Ridgeway, Cecilia L |
| Degree committee member | Pedulla, David S, 1982- |
| Degree committee member | Ridgeway, Cecilia L |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Christianne Corbett. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/jx716vb4052 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Christianne Marie Corbett
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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