Working Papers
Moving Up by Moving Around? The Impact of Career Distinctiveness on Organizational Advancement and Inequality
with Ming D. Leung, Tingting Nian, and Richard Lu
In the age of restructuring and flattening, many private-sector managerial organizations have started to dismantle formal job ladders. Yet scholarly theories of careers in organizations have not kept up with this shift. We advance a new perspective that can better account for the more varied career trajectories that emerge in contemporary organizations. We argue that careers along “roads less traveled” in organizations, penalized in other contexts, are rewarded here. More specifically, employees reap benefits from careers composed of moves between jobs that are rarely spanned by other firm employees—what we term career distinctiveness—because these moves grant access to career-enhancing opportunities that cut across an organization’s bureaucratic and social structures. Given that access to these career-enhancing opportunities tends to be more limited for women and racial minorities, we also expect career distinctiveness is particularly beneficial for them. We test these arguments using over three million employee-month observations for over 53,000 employees at a high-tech Fortune 500 firm from 2008 through 2015. Our results support our arguments. This study updates the literature on organizational careers, delineates a context in which spanning professional boundaries can be advantageous, and has practical implications for organizations seeking to reduce gender and racial pay gaps.
The Collaboration-Association Tradeoff: How the Gender Composition of Networks and Genres Influences the Novelty of Creative Products
with Noah Askin, Michael Mauskapf, and Brian Uzzi
While creative production is widely recognized as a collective endeavor, scholarship on gender and creativity has primarily focused on individual-level differences in creative ability and output. In this paper, we explore how the gender composition of artists’ occupational context—the collaborators with whom they interact, and the other artists with whom they are associated through shared category membership—influences the novelty of the work they produce. Using an exhaustive and original dataset comprising nearly 250,000 commercially recorded songs written and released worldwide by 15,000 unique artists between 1955 and 2000, we construct a quantitative measure of musical distinctiveness to test how the gender composition of artists’ networks and genres shape the relative novelty of their creative products. We show how the production of novelty can be both enabled (through network diversity) and constrained (through perceived status threat) by the gender composition of the occupational context in which artists work. The results suggest a collaboration-association tradeoff, shedding new light on the role and consequences of gender composition for the creative careers of both women and men.
Early-Stage Projects
Examining the ‘Class Ceiling’ in Big Tech
with Melissa Mazmanian and Phoebe Chua
National Science Foundation, Building Capacity in STEM Education Research Grant #1920529.
In order to better understand how social class background influences the careers of STEM professionals, this study examines the application and hiring process for elite internships. Internships in Big Tech (e.g., firms like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) are a direct path to economic prosperity. Not only are research interns paid well while they are interning, they are regularly asked to come back as full-time employees with average starting salaries in the top 10 percent of U.S. household incomes. Thus, elite internships are an understudied gateway that propel some people into the upper echelons of STEM jobs. Although the role of class background in hiring for these STEM jobs is assumed to be minimal due to the emphasis on “objective” technical skills, our research suggests the opposite: that hiring decisions for these internships are influenced by tacit markers of class background like “fit” and “communication style.” By simultaneously studying the hiring process at Big Tech firms from both sides—the demand-side evaluations of job applicants by employers and supply-side choices and preparation of job applicants—this research illuminates the hidden factors that shape who is offered elite internships.