Fainter Praise: Online Professional Recommendations and Immigrant Job Promotions

• In Event: 30814 - Gender Dynamics of Immigration

Abstract

This paper explores letters of recommendation as a new mechanism contributing to constrained job mobility for immigrant workers in the U.S. technology sector. Recommendations are a key factor influencing promotions to leadership, yet this paper shows that not all recommendations carry the same weight.

Analysis of 7,177 LinkedIn profiles of Indian migrants finds disparities in the presence, content and influence of recommendations on promotion outcomes. Results indicate that the likelihood of promotion to management is higher for candidates with recommendation letters, and letters that emphasize leadership traits have the strongest influence. Yet women candidates receive fewer recommendations than men and receive faint praise on key leadership traits associated with promotion, even from peers of the same race and gender. Further, the status of recommender matters for women candidates, yet recommendations written by in-group members carry less influence.

The paper is among the first to analyze immigrant professional recommendations, and updates prior work on letters of recommendation to reflect the emergence of online professional networking websites. It takes up calls for a more explicit gender framework in skilled migration research and reveals new insights into a mechanism constraining immigrant job mobility that goes beyond previously documented barriers of legal status and foreign education. The implications of these findings for inequality in migrant job mobility and recommendations for corporate equity are discussed in the conclusion.

Author

• Elizabeth Jacobs, University of Connecticut