Getting it Right: Sex and Race Inequality in Work Organizations

One of sociology's major accomplishments in the last quarter of the twentieth century was establishing that race and gender matter at work. We have been far less successful in explaining why workers' sex and race affect their employment outcomes, however, especially why jobs are segregated by sex and race, and why whites outearn people of color and men outearn women. When sex segregation first attracted attention, its high level of incidence led scholars to hypothesize universal explanatory processes: gender-role socialization, the domestic division of labor, patriarchal impulses by employers, male workers' responses to competitive threat. Because most readily available data were for workers, researchers concentrated on individual-level explanations. Despite a growing body of research on why the sexes aspired to, pursued, and abandoned more or less sex-typical occupations, and why race and sex were related to earnings, neither line of research has illuminated why race and sex inequality exists to varying degrees across work organizations. A few researchers recognized that understanding on-the-job inequality required studying work organizations. From them we learned why some California establishments were more or less segregated in the 1960s and 1970s (although there wasn't a lot of variability to explain; Bielby it occurs through the acts and the failures to act by the people who run and work for organizations. The first challenge for the twenty-first century in this area of sociology is to formulate empirically realistic accounts of how a range of jobs are filled in a cross-section of organizations. These accounts must be based on interviews with informants at multiple levels in the organization. Researchers must learn what if any organizational constraints determine how the opening came about, who specifies the necessary qualifications, and who can authorize exceptions? Who