The Wager: Race, Gender, and Value in Elite Firms

• In Event: 4537 - Gendered and Racialized Organizations

Abstract

Feminist and anti-racist scholars have long established that gender and race, as systems of inequality, influence whose labor is valued and devalued. The focus has largely been on the devaluation of work gender-typed as women’s work and how this varies according to the racial-typing of the work. In contrast, I examine how and why the work of elites in finance and technology—work dominated by white men—has become highly valued, even relative to that of other top earners. I conducted in-depth interviews and field observations of hedge fund, venture capital, and technology startup firms, which all feature striking social disparities in terms of who wields the investment power to dole out financial funding and who gets funding. I identify how the organizational structures, specifically those that delineate wages and equity, designate the work of these elites as of high worth and how this is central to the prevailing gender and racial hierarchies in the labor market. I find that the social interactions that set wages, bonuses, and equity reflect speculative, financial cultural logics that are distinct in each of these three fields, shaping how inequality is embedded within each type of firm. The processes through which earnings and capital are distributed in these fields are intrinsically racialized and gendered, as they are based on racialized and gendered assumptions about risk, value, and worth. I call the process of speculating on earnings and equity the “wager” and explain how it helps to account for widening economic inequalities, how these trends are gendered and racialized, and how elites in finance and tech view their earnings as consistent with the logic of accumulation of financial markets.

Author

• Megan Tobias Neely, Copenhagen Business School