Gender, Job Mobility Networks, and Organizational Hierarchy

• In Event: 2356 - Managers' Bias and Employees' Bias-reduction Strategies

Abstract

Gendered patterns of job mobility have long been implicated as crucial mechanisms driving inequality in job rewards, segregation, and promotions. Few researchers have attempted to directly examine how mobility pathways in organizations are linked to gendered features of jobs. Drawing on data from distribution centers from a large U.S. supermarket chain, we examine job mobility as a network of movements of workers among jobs. Results from network analysis and meta-regression reveal that workers tend to move between jobs with similar male/female ratios and that mobility ladders tend to be more direct for male concentrated jobs while more circuitous for female concentrated jobs. Mobility across wage level does not appear to be related to gender compositions of jobs, but the results offer evidence that the gendering of job mobility may be strongest in male dominated organizations.

Authors

• Annika M. Wilcox, North Carolina State University

• Steve McDonald, North Carolina State University

• Richard Benton, University of Illinois