D Tomaskovic-Devey
Biographic Data
| ID | 7920 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Tomaskovic-Devey |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Tomaskovic-Devey |
| SIGNATURE | TOMASKOVIC-DEVEY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3630-1967 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 88 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1476 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 87 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 23 |
My co-workers, my pay, our inequality regime
We conceptualize within job group income distributions as the outcome of claims-making over organizational resources. We examine same job group co-workers by race/gender in all U.S. state and local government workplaces. Findings show that 81% of the time White men earn more than the average worker with whom they share a workplace and job group. Conversely, Black and Hispanic women are disadvantaged respectively 83% and 84% of the time. On averag…
Inertia, Progress, or Regress? Observing and Explaining Heterogenous Tech Firm Demographic Diversity Trajectories
Tech firms are under strong pressure to increase their demographic diversity. While activists and scholars have tended to treat the sector as homogenously hostile to women and racialized minorities, recent theory on organizational inequalities stresses heterogeneity in firm-level inequality regimes. Beginning with an inductive exploration of variation in executive, managerial, and professional workforce trajectories, we find that between 2008 and…
Conceptualizing Job and Employment Concepts for Earnings Inequality Estimands With Linked Employer-Employee Data 1
We examine variations in pay gap estimates and inferences associated with distinct conceptualizations of jobs and employment contexts under legal and comparable worth theories of pay bias. We find that job titles produce smaller estimates of within job pay gaps than job groups, but the inferential importance of job concepts differs across organizational, workplace, and job groups within workplace units of observation. Moving from more to less job…
Intersectional Earnings Inequalities in U.S. Public Sector Workplaces and the Great Recession
The authors examine intersectional earnings inequalities in U.S. state and local government workplaces during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2011. Corresponding to closure and exploitation mechanisms as proposed in Relational Inequality Theory, the authors decompose pay gaps into between-workplace and within-workplace segregation components and within-job disparities. Between-workplace closure mechanisms tend to be absent or weak for all comparis…
Enforcement agencies and an emerging category of law
Scholars have recognized the role that legal intermediaries can play in shaping the law through their interpretations of legal ambiguity and guidance to rule-takers on legal compliance. Although legal intermediaries thus have the potential to effect social change, most research in the area of employment discrimination has focused on the way they facilitate only symbolic compliance with the law. In this article, we examine how the Equal Employment…
The Great Separation
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
Estimating Firm-, Occupation-, and Job-Level Gender Pay Gaps with U.S. Linked Employer-Employee Population Data, 2005 to 2015
Merging 2005 to 2015 Internal Revenue Service, Social Security, and Census records, the authors calculate national average gender pay gaps for various population definitions and then decompose trends in the contribution of firm, occupation, and job segregation to these pay gaps, as well as the size of the average residual “within-job” pay gap. In general, observed segregation tends to explain about half of age, education, and hours of work adjust…
Manager's gender, supervisory style, and employee's perception of the demanding work climate
Prior research on the link between managers' gender and workplace gender equity primarily focuses on career outcomes. The present study explores overly demanding work climates, which we see as a realization of the ideal worker norm, bad for all workers, but a particular barrier to women's careers. We examine whether female managers are 'agents of change' toward better work climates, while also exploring the impact of gendered supervisory styles o…
Immigrant-Biased Technological Change
This study examines how workplace technological innovation is associated with individual-level employment turnover. We advance the literature by studying how the impact of technology differs for Dutch native workers and workers with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. Furthermore, we examine the disparate impacts of organizational context, as indexed by the proportion of workers with non-Western immigrant backgrounds and workplace job volatility, …
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Gender inequality in relational position-taking
A Tale of Force
We develop an explicitly organizational and relational approach to examine the problem of police violence, focusing empirically on prominent policy recommendations to increase officer demographic diversity, raise educational requirements for new officers, and implement community policing strategies. We first review prior research on these proposals, which is surprisingly thin and non-supportive of the proposals. To examine the baseline plausibili…
Employment Discrimination Charge Rates
The authors document variation in charge rates by demographic basis, observe basis and spatial variation in charge rates, and examine potential sources of this variation. The authors find that discrimination charge rates are much higher for the disabled and African Americans than for women, people older than 40 years, Hispanics, Asians, immigrants, and men, and there is dramatic state-level variation in charge rates. Possible explanations for thi…
Categorical Distinctions and Claims-Making
In this article, we examine wage negotiations as a specific instance of claims-making, predicting that the capacity to make a claim is first a function of the position, rather than the person, and that lower-status actors-women, migrants, fixed-term, part-time, and unskilled workers-are all more likely to be in positions where negotiation is not possible. At the same time, subordinate-status actors may be less likely to make claims even where neg…
Chapter 11. Driving While Black
This chapter examines the impact of race on the likelihood of being stopped by both the North Carolina Highway Patrol and local police in the state. It utilizes citizen survey data that captures variables that are often missing in traffic stop studies, including measures of self-reported driving behavior. The chapter reveals that race is a significant predictor of traffic stops in the data involving local police, but not in the Highway Patrol dat…
Rising between-workplace inequalities in high-income countries
Significance Understanding the causes of rising inequality is of concern in many countries. Using administrative data, we find that the share of inequality that is between workplaces is growing in 12 of 14 countries examined, and in no country has it fallen. Countries with declining employment protections see growth in both between- and within-workplace inequalities, but this impact is stronger for between-workplace inequalities. These results su…
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare Vol. 47 No. 1
Welfare participation has been a longstanding issue of public debate for 50 years but remains largely understudied in welfare literature.The purpose of this research is to challenge the flawed assumptions of welfare participation by examining the varying spatial inequalities that influence U.S. welfare participation rates among eligible poor.This comparative analysis uses spatial inequality theory to examine welfareto-work participation rates in …
Inside Affirmative Action
On September 24, 1965, President Johnson signed executive order 11246 mandating that federal contractors could not discriminate and must take affirmative action in the employment of minorities. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) in the Department of Labor (DOL) is the regulatory home of this mandate, which has endured multiple attacks from opponents both within government and without. This volume is a history of the effort…
Relational Inequalities
Relational Inequalities focuses on the organizational production of categorical inequalities, in the context of the intersectional complexity and institutional fluidity that characterize social life. Three generic inequality-generating mechanisms—exploitation, social closure, and claims-making—distribute organizational resources, rewards, and respect. The actual levels and contours of the inequalities produced by these three mechanisms are, howev…
Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States
Organizations as the building blocks of social inequalities
Most contemporary inequalities emerge in and are constituted through organizations. In this article, we review research at the intersection of organizations and inequalities, bringing the organizational literature and social stratification literature into conversation with one another. In doing so, we outline an emerging theoretical perspective, Relational Inequality Theory (RIT), that helps to make sense of how inequalities emerge within and bet…
Occupations, workplaces or jobs
Occupations have long been held by sociologists, from the older status attainment tradition to the more recent micro-class tradition, to be at the center of stratification writ large. Occupations are specifically argued to be central to shaping wages. Indeed, this has been understood as the comparative advantage of sociology relative to economics in understanding wage setting. However, an undercurrent has for decades existed in sociology that sug…
Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies
This study advances understanding of gender pay gaps by examining organizational variation. The gender pay gap literature supplies mechanisms but does not attend to organizational variation; the gender and science literature provides insights on the role of masculinist culture in disciplines but misses pay gap mechanisms. A data set of federal workers allows comparison of men and women in the same jobs and workplaces. Agencies associated with tra…
Racial and gender trends and trajectories in access to managerial jobs
A Relational Inequality Approach to First- and Second-Generation Immigrant Earnings in German Workplaces
We conceptualize immigrant incorporation as a categorically driven process and contrast the bright distinctions between first-generation immigrants and natives, with more blurry second-generation contrasts. We analyze linked employer-employee data of a sample of 5,097 employees in 97 large German organizations and focus on first- and second-generation immigrants. We explore how generational status in the labor market and workplace contexts expand…
Documenting Desegregation
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made employment discrimination and segregation on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex illegal in the United States. Previous research based on analyses of aggregate national trends in occupational segregation suggests that sex and race/ethnic employment segregation has declined in the United States since the 1960s. We add to the existing knowledge base by documenting for the first time male-female, black-wh…
Organizational Approaches to Inequality
This article reviews recent theoretical and empirical research addressing organizations and workplace stratification, with an emphasis on the generic organizational mechanisms responsible for producing both stability and change in workplace inequality. We propose that an organizational approach to the study of stratification should examine status- and class-based inequalities at the intersection of (a) the inertial tendencies of organizational st…
Race and the Accumulation of Human Capital across the Career
The authors develop an explicitly sociological variant on human capital theory, emphasizing that most human capital acquisition is a social product, not an individual investment decision. The authors apply this model to racial earnings inequality, focusing on how exposure to discrimination influences both human capital acquisition and earnings inequalities as they develop across the career. The authors estimate models of career earnings trajector…
Driving While Black
We estimate the degree of racial disparity in police vehicular stops separately for local and state police in North Carolina in the year 2000. We introduce four mechanisms that might produce racial disparities in police stops—racial profiling, race sensitive police deployment, cognitive bias and stereotyping, and prejudice. We then model the relative odds of police vehicle stops as a function of race, driving behavior, and other demographic statu…
Education and the Inequalities of Place
Students living in inner city and rural areas of the United States exhibit lower educational achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of high school than do their suburban counterparts. Educational research and policy has tended to neglect these inequalities or, at best, focus on one type but not the other. In this article, we integrate literatures on spatial stratification and educational outcomes, and offer a framework in which resou…
The Relational Generation of Workplace Inequalities
In this article, I outline a dynamic, relational theory of workplace inequalities. I begin with the basic model offered by Charles Tilly in Durable Inequality that categorical distinctions, such as gender or education, are mapped, exaggerated, and naturalized within organizational divisions of labor. This argument is attractive in the generality and simplicity of its causal account, yet fairly weak in specifying (1) core organizational processes,…
An Establishment-Level Test of the Statistical Discrimination Hypothesis
This article explores the basic assumption of statistical discrimination theory, which holds that women and minorities earn lower wages because they, on average, have lower productivity. Employer exploitation of women and minorities and social closure by advantaged employees are advanced as alternative explanations for the lower wages of women and minorities. The authors first demonstrate that there are substantial gender and racial wage penaltie…
Financialization and U.S. Income Inequality, 1970–2008
Focusing on U.S. nonfinance industries, we examine the connectionbetween financialization and rising income inequality. We argue thatthe increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channelsdecoupled the generation of surplus from production, strengtheningownersâ and elite workersâ negotiating power relative to other workers.The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce fromrevenue-generating and compensation-sett…
Intersections of Power and Privilege
This article examines post-Civil Rights Act trends in private sector managerial representation for white men, white women, black men, and black women. We examine how three factors affect changing access to managerial positions: (1) industrial restructuring, (2) the process of bottom-up ascription, and (3) organizational characteristics. Accounting for compositional shifts in the labor supply, we find that white male managerial overrepresentation …
Racial Economic Subordination and White Gain in the U.S. South
Les AA. montrent que les inegalites economiques entre blancs et afro-americains tendent a croitre aux Etats-Unis. Ils soulignent toutefois que leur intensite varie en fonction des regions. Ils estiment que les differences liees au capital humain refletent avec une plus grande acuite ces inegalites et que celles-ci sont determinees par la competition economique et politique. Ils s'interessent plus particulierement a la situation des populations no…
Discrimination and Desegregation
Numerous commentators have concluded that the Civil Rights Act was effective in promoting increased access to quality jobs for racial minorities. Many have worried as well that the pace of change has been too slow or stalled, particularly after 1980. Few have directly discussed under what conditions we might expect equal employment opportunity (EEO) to flourish. Explanations of status inequalities in the workplace have primarily relied on theorie…
The categorical generation of organizational inequality
The Relational Basis of Inequality
In this article, a relational model of inequality is applied to understand organizational wage inequality patterns. The authors begin by laying out a relational model arguing that wage distributions emerge from actors within workplaces negotiating and contesting who should receive greater or lesser rewards for their work. These claims typically involve constructing categorical distinctions between people and jobs, attaching meaning to those categ…
Patriarchal Pressures
The focus of this article is on the organizational contexts in which gender-based earnings inequalities are exacerbated or eroded. By conceptualizing patriarchy in workplaces as a process of dynamic struggles over organizational practices and rewards, we assume that the degree of gender inequality in workplaces should vary as a function of organizational structure, resources, and practices. We examine five organizational characteristics hypothesi…
Categorical Distinctions and Claims-Making
In this article, we examine wage negotiations as a specific instance of claims-making, predicting that the capacity to make a claim is first a function of the position, rather than the person, and that lower-status actors-women, migrants, fixed-term, part-time, and unskilled workers-are all more likely to be in positions where negotiation is not possible. At the same time, subordinate-status actors may be less likely to make claims even where neg…
A Relational Theory of Earnings Inequality
Most research on earnings adopts economist's human capital model. In doing so, social scientists, explicitly or implicitly, cede primacy to the labor supply and demand mechanisms of neoclassical economics. In contrast we develop a model that treats actors' claims as the central mechanism generating inequalities. In this model earnings are most proximately a result of negotiation between actors embedded in a set of social relations within organiza…
Studying Race or Ethnic and Sex Segregation at the Establishment Level
Scholars of employment segregation now recognize that gender, race, and class processes are mutually constitutive. Coupled with new data-collection strategies, understanding of the organization of work and distribution of inequality will improve. The authors explore the strengths and weaknesses of longitudinal establishment data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), comparing these to other data used to study workplace …
The Gender and Race Composition of Jobs and the Male/Female, White/Black Pay Gaps
Journal Article The Gender and Race Composition of Jobs and the Male/Female, White/Black Pay Gaps Get access Donald Tomaskovic-Devey Donald Tomaskovic-Devey North Carolina State University Direct correspondence to Donald Tomaskovic-Devey at the Department of Sociology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8107, (919) 737-3291 or [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar S…
Race and Workplace Integration
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 stands as one of the greatest achievements in U.S. history. Although the law made discrimination illegal, its effectiveness, especially Title VII covering the employment domain, remains highly contested. The authors argue that legal shifts produce workplace racial integration only to the extent that there are additional political pressures on firms to desegregate. They examine fluctuating national political pressure t…
Women at Work
Using a unique sample of 5,022 workers in 94 large German workplaces, the authors explore whether and how women's access to higher level positions, firms' human resources practices, and workers' qualification levels are associated with gender differences in earnings. First, they find that having more women in management reduces the gender earnings gap for jobs with low qualifications, but not those with high qualifications. Second, they find that…
Do Female Top Managers Help Women to Advance? A Panel Study Using EEO-1 Records
The goal of this study is to examine whether women in the highest levels of firms' management ranks help to reduce barriers to women's advancement in the workplace. Using a panel of more than twenty thousand firms during 1990 to 2003 from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the authors explore the influence of women in top management on subsequent female representation in lower-level managerial positions in U.S. firms. Key findings …
Contingent Autonomy
The authors argue that autonomy in the labor process results from the contingent interaction of worker power and organizational practices. Focusing on the 'core jobs' (i.e., most central to the production process) in 618 randomly sampled workplaces in Australia, the authors find that the influences of technology and bureaucratization on autonomy are conditioned by the relative power (skill and unionization) of employees. As the relative power of …
Relational Inequality
We examine the relational model of inequality using samples of employer-employee matched data from manufacturing plants in the United States and Japan. We argue that gender is a salient status characteristic in both the United States and Japan, but because of differences in gender politics, wage inequality will vary more across U.S. workplaces than Japanese workplaces. We find this claim to be supported, and then we model this variation as a func…
An Organizational Approach to Understanding Sex and Race Segregation in U.S. Workplaces
This article examines the influence of resource dependence and institutional processes on post-Civil Rights Act changes in private sector workplace segregation. We use data collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1966 through 2000 to examine organizations embedded within their firm, industry, local labor market and federal regulatory environments. Sex segregation declines precipitously from 1966 through 2000, but we see…
Occupations, workplaces or jobs
Occupations have long been held by sociologists, from the older status attainment tradition to the more recent micro-class tradition, to be at the center of stratification writ large. Occupations are specifically argued to be central to shaping wages. Indeed, this has been understood as the comparative advantage of sociology relative to economics in understanding wage setting. However, an undercurrent has for decades existed in sociology that sug…
The Determinants of Jencks Who Gets Ahead? The Determinants of Economic Success in America . Christopher Jencks
A Methodological Comment on 'Economic Segmentation, Worker Power, and Income Inequality
Recapitalizing America
Revitalizing Western Economies
Sociology of Poverty in the United States
Why Some Peoples are More Unemployed than Others
Discrimination, Jobs, and Politics
Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States
The Social Structural Determinants of Ethnic Group Behavior
We criticize traditional ethnicity research for treating indicators of observed ethnic behavior as reflections of cultural values. Other researchers who argue that behavior is the result of structural opportunity suggest an alternative approach to ethnicity but may underestimate the potential importance of culture. We propose a general parsimonious model of ethnic behavior that describes group behavior as constrained by three aspects of social st…
The gender gap and nuclear power
Research in Rural Sociology and Development
Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States
Uneven Development in North Carolina? Job Quality Differences Between Local and Nonlocal Firms1
Do outside firms come to North Carolina or, more generally, to the rural South to take advantage of the low-wage unorganized local relations of production? Do they disrupt local labor market arrangements? We use data from a survey of North Carolina employees to examine labor market and job quality differences between local and outside firms and also the organization of regional labor markets. Results, based on multiple regression models, suggest …
Life Chances and Support for Equality and Equity as Normative and Counternormative Distribution Rules
Rosemary L. Ritzman, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Life Chances and Support for Equality and Equity as Normative and Counternormative Distribution Rules, Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Mar., 1992), pp. 745-763
Gender and Racial Inequality at Work
(1994). Gender & Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation. Economic Geography: Vol. 70, No. 3, pp. 319-322.
The Gender and Race Composition of Jobs and the Male/Female, White/Black Pay Gaps
Journal Article The Gender and Race Composition of Jobs and the Male/Female, White/Black Pay Gaps Get access Donald Tomaskovic-Devey Donald Tomaskovic-Devey North Carolina State University Direct correspondence to Donald Tomaskovic-Devey at the Department of Sociology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8107, (919) 737-3291 or [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar S…
Organizational Survey Nonresponse
This paper has benefitted from the generous comments of Howard Aldrich, Ron Czaja, Arne Kalleberg, Kevin Leicht, Sarah Mavrinak, Charles Perrow, Catherine Zimmer, and ASQ reviewers. This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-902318). Direct correspondence to Tomaskovic-Devey, Department of Sociology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8107 or DonTomaskovic-Devey@NCSU. EDU . This paper advances…
Gender & Racial Inequality at Work
Racial Politics in the Contemporary South
While explanations of contemporary racial disparity in political participation and representation emphasize stratification differences between dominant and subordinate group members and mobilization-countermobilization patterns, they tend to neglect the often interrelated nature of race and class based processes. Drawing from socio-historical accounts of racial disadvantage in the U.S. South that deal explicitly with the interrelation of race and…
Jones's Minimal
Item Nonresponse in Organizational Surveys
Nonrandom missing data can distort estimates of substantive relationships. In elaborating this principle for organizational research, we first develop a theoretical expectation that missing data in organizational surveys will normally be nonrandom relative to important organizational characteristics. We summarize empirical findings from a previous paper that demonstrate that unit nonresponse is a predictable outcome of organizational processes. N…
Gender and Racial Inequality at Work - The Sources and Consequences of Employment Segregation
Gender & Racial Inequality at Work
Gender and Racial Inequality at Work
Patriarchal Pressures
The focus of this article is on the organizational contexts in which gender-based earnings inequalities are exacerbated or eroded. By conceptualizing patriarchy in workplaces as a process of dynamic struggles over organizational practices and rewards, we assume that the degree of gender inequality in workplaces should vary as a function of organizational structure, resources, and practices. We examine five organizational characteristics hypothesi…
Economics (60 works) · Sociology (60 works) · Political science (48 works) · Inequality (38 works) · Demographic economics (34 works) · Labour economics (33 works) · Gender Diversity and Inequality (30 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (27 works) · Law (27 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (24 works)