Community Matters: Uncovering the Societal Mechanisms Undergirding Workplace Discrimination and Inequality.

Abstract

With a specific focus on the extent of occupational segregation by race and sex, my dissertation sets out to understand whether—and if so, how—the local social infrastructure of the communities in which firms are embedded affects the nature of workplace discrimination and inequality and, moreover, to uncover the mechanisms by which variation in these inequities are created and maintained across communities. I address two major theoretical limitations of research on discrimination and inequality at work. First, a large body of research identifies disparities in organizations along lines of ascriptive characteristics such as race and gender, but has failed to explain how groups come to be stratified based on these characteristics. Second, when mechanisms are specified, they are largely assumed to be found within firms. This dissertation contributes to theory by speaking exactly to the local social fabric in which organizations are enmeshed and also specify the community-based mechanism driving workplace inequality.

I develop a series of theoretical predictions which are tested using 799,935 establishment-years over four annual panels of data (1993-2008) derived from a variety of sources, but most importantly from data collected annually by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which is protected by federal law. A key takeaway from this dissertation is that communities do indeed matter. Establishments are embedded in different, localized contexts which influence how minorities and women are segregated across occupational categories. Most prominently, establishments located within the jurisdiction of a more progressive appellate court or with greater representation of minorities and women in the district court judiciary experienced lower levels of occupational segregation. However, a qualification of this finding is necessary: Greater representation of minorities in the judiciary led to lower levels of occupational segregation by race, but to greater levels of segregation by sex. A similar pattern of findings was found with the representation of women in the judiciary. This dissertation expands upon previous approaches to workplace discrimination and inequality through the examination of differences across communities in occupational segregation, and provides a basis upon which future research on the relationship between organizations and their local environments can build.