First-generation college students-that is, those for whom neither parent holds a bachelor's degree-face important challenges that tend to undercut their completion of a 4-year degree, yet they also often engage in proactive behaviors aimed at stabilizing their college experiences. In this article, we interrogate specifically the gendered character of such processes by focusing on (1) potential differences in the vulnerabilities that first-generation women and men report; and (2) whether and/or how the timing, extent, and type of help-seeking they engage in differs when such challenges arise. Our analyses draw on unique and rich semistructured interviews with 61 first-generation college students across 4 years. Our findings, beyond pointing to general academic, social, and financial obstacles, highlight unique gender patterns when it comes to self-reported mental health challenges and family tensions, as well as gender gaps in help-seeking-that is, help-seeking that tends to boost the likelihood of college completion. We elaborate on our most central gender findings in these regards and discuss ways in which these rich over time accounts inform sociological literatures on mobility, inequality, gender, intersectionality, and higher education.

Abstract Inequality scholarship has emphasized the tangible consequences of workplace position and status, focusing less attention on how experiences at work may influence individuals’ views about what is and ought to be. In this article, we explore the possibility that experiences with workplace injustice will shape beliefs about inequality. Our modeling builds on classic theory regarding organizational socialization experiences, recent conceptions concerning relational power dynamics, and research that touches on the spillover from work to other domains of social life. Drawing from five waves of the General Social Survey, our analyses highlight how perceived experiences of injustice in workplace organizations – incompetent management, unfair promotional practices and unjust pay – erode beliefs about meritocracy and encourage progressive orientations toward inequality, including whether or not the government should intervene. Notably, these relationships hold even when accounting for intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of work, demographic attributes, and other potentially relevant controls. Additional analyses demonstrate that these patterns are consistent across race, gender, and socioeconomic status, and are robust to alternative modeling strategies. We conclude by highlighting our most central findings in these regards and how they expand the sociological conception of experiences with inequality, implications for beliefs, and their foundations within organizational contexts.

Workplace stratification research has been clear regarding ongoing earnings inequalities by gender and how both family dynamics and long-term employment may be playing a role. Gender gaps in both earnings and labor force integration, however, may also be partially shaped by divergences in post-secondary educational backgrounds. In this article, we draw on NLSY97 data and interrogate gender wage inequalities among college educated individuals in the U.S., how they may be tied to distinct fields of study, and the implications especially for labor force attachment and detachment over time. Results show clear divergences and significant contemporary baccalaureate underrepresentation of women in STEM fields—i.e., fields where eventual labor force attachment and wages tend to be highest. Although well-represented among non-STEM degree holders, women’s wage returns to these degrees are depressed relative to their male counterparts; a pattern partly tied to women’s concentration in “applied” fields of study that tend to lead to care-centered forms of employment. Further analyses show how observable earnings gaps across majors are partly a consequence of differences in labor force attachment across time; and that earnings benefits associated with labor force attachment are nearly double for men than for women. We conclude by discussing the stratified gender pipeline in educational pathways, its implications for employment integration and, consequently, ongoing earnings gaps.

First-generation college students face systemic barriers to persistence, including lower campus engagement, delayed graduation, and higher departure rates compared to their continuing-generation peers. While these disadvantages are well documented, less is known about how first-generation students adapt to institutional contexts laden with inequality. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative interviews with 55 first-generation students at a large public university-conducted at the start of their first and second years-we examine how they navigate their first year, a critical period marked by heightened attrition. Our findings show: (1) that first-generation students enter college with cultural, social, and economic resources that higher education institutions often devalue and (2) many first-generation students demonstrate resilience through two key forms of adaptation: capital conversion, or transforming one form of capital into another, and strategic repositioning, or shifting across majors or programs where their existing capital is more valued. These strategies unfold through peer networks, trial-and-error learning, and selective access to institutional support. By analyzing how first-generation students adapt over time, our results contribute to literatures on educational inequality, social mobility, and first-generation college students by highlighting how structural barriers shape both the obstacles that students encounter and the adaptive strategies at their disposal.

Since the Civil Rights Act, state oversight has constrained racial discrimination in employment to some degree. Interpretational gaps among victims and perpetrators, loopholes in the law, and adjudication by judges, however, arguably allow such discrimination to persist. Building on prior work and drawing on rich qualitative detail from judicial decisions from two states, the authors analyze in this article (1) how employees versus employers discuss potentially discriminatory incidents and (2) the criteria judges draw from when making legal determinations about whether employer actions are, in fact, discrimination. Minority workers point to unequal treatment while their employers in such cases mostly highlight a meritocratic process or some problematic feature of the employee in question. Administrative judges, in trying to rectify otherwise contrasting narratives, mostly side with employers given several legal loopholes in discrimination law—i.e., loopholes that allow judges to infer employer fairness from compositional diversity or the fact that the employee in question was originally hired in the first place. Although racial/ethnic minority employees prevail periodically, this is relatively rare, usually requiring explicitly racist behavior by employers, a clean employee work history, and very strong comparative case evidence. The authors conclude by discussing these findings and their pertinence for racial inequality, legal justice, and sociology of work scholarship.

Randomized audits and correspondence studies are widely regarded as a “gold standard” for capturing discrimination and bias. However, gatekeepers (e.g., employers) are the analytic unit even though stated implications often center on group-level inequalities. Employing simple rules, we show that audits have the potential to uncover applicant-side inequalities and burdens beyond the gatekeeper biases standardly reported. Specifically, applicants from groups facing lower callback rates must submit more applications to ensure an eventual callback, have fewer opportunities to choose from, and face higher uncertainty regarding how many applications to submit. These results reflect several sequential and cumulative stratification processes “real-world” applicants face that warrant attention in conventional audit reporting. Our approach can be straightforwardly applied and, we show, is particularly pertinent for employment relative to other institutional domains (e.g., education, religion). We discuss the methodological and theoretical relevance of our suggested extensions and the implications for the study of inequality, discrimination, and social closure.

Research over the past two decades has noted significant racial/ethnic wealth inequalities—inequalities with important implications for life chances and institutional access. Home ownership is as a foundational element of such inequality with broad consequences for exposure to crime, quality of public safety services, and access to healthcare, education, and employment. Building on earlier scholarship that has tended to focus on specific forms of mortgages, we draw in this article on over 1.4 million diverse mortgage applications from the largest 100 U.S. metropolitan areas to interrogate racial/ethnic disparities for (1) all home types (mobile homes, condominiums, multi/single-family units), (2) all lien holders (private/government backed), (3) all purposes (vacation/rental/owner-occupied), and (4) all buyer loan sequences (purchase, refinance, home-equity/improvement). Our analyses, which make use of multilevel modeling, reveal durable inequalities for African Americans and Hispanics across time and advantages for Non-Hispanic White and Asian-American applicants. Such disadvantages are likewise observed for those seeking housing in highly concentrated minority locales, although such effects seem to vary by applicant race/ethnicity. Specifically, mortgage originations, while generally less likely in high minority concentrated areas, appear to be more likely for Black/Hispanic borrowers in areas that have been becoming increasingly minority concentrated. Mortgage lending, we conclude, remains a deeply problematic dimension of racial/ethnic inequality with important consequences for persistent segregation, wealth disparities, and the intergenerational transmission of advantage/disadvantage.

Social science researchers and higher-education personnel have begun to recognize the unique and unequal experiences of first-generation, low-income, and working-class students, but what of those from such backgrounds that manage to reach the professoriate? What can we learn from their mobility experiences? What obstacles do they and others perceive standing in their way? Using original data on faculty and graduate students collected between 2018 and 2022, we analyze how diverse faculty (including graduate students) reflect on the relevance of social class background for upward mobility and success in academia. Results point to a shared understanding of ways in which cultural, social, and economic resources and resource constraints are influential although we also find noteworthy interpretational divergences by social location and identity. We discuss our most central results in these regards as well as their implications for building greater equity in higher education.

Vincent J. Roscigno, Jasmine Whiteside, Erick Axxe, Anne McDaniel, and Oded Mcdossi on first-gen students’ vulnerabilities and resilience.

Sociological research has long been interested in inequalities generated by and within educational institutions. Although relatively rich as a literature, less analytic focus has centered on educational mobility and inequality experiences within graduate training specifically. In this article, we draw on a combination of survey and open-ended qualitative data from approximately 450 graduate students in the discipline of sociology to analyze graduate school pipeline divergences for first-generation and working-class students and the implications for inequalities in tangible resources, advising and support, and a sense of isolation. Our results point to an important connection between private undergraduate institutional enrollment and higher-status graduate program attendance—a pattern that undercuts social-class mobility in graduate training and creates notable precarities in debt, advising, and sense of belonging for first-generation and working-class graduate students. We conclude by discussing the unequal pathways revealed and their implications for merit and mobility, graduate training, and opportunity within our and other disciplines.

This article examines experiences of workplace precarity and employment vulnerability among resettled refugees in the United States. Our study, which draws on eight months of participant observation at a refugee resettlement agency and in-depth interviews with refugees, provides important insights into the ways that refugees navigate (un)employment after initial resettlement and the precarities they encounter while on the job. Our findings suggest that the confluence of specific workplace experiences, familial expectations, and resettlement case processing creates distinct vulnerabilities for refugee men and women. Moreover, we find gender to be especially crucial to both work-family pressures and negative workplace encounters, limiting men's employment opportunities and undercutting women's labor market potential. We discuss associated vulnerabilities and gendered pressures and conclude by highlighting avenues for future work.

Popular attention to the multi‐million‐dollar enterprise of collegiate sports often centers on the extent to which student athletes are academically engaged. In this article, we draw on a national sample of approximately 5,000 college‐goers, employ key comparisons (i.e., high‐visibility student athletes, nonrevenue student athletes, and nonathletes), and consider background disadvantages and collegiate division levels relative to achievement (i.e., grade point average) and bachelor's degree completion. Analyses show that once background attributes and division levels are accounted for, there is little difference in achievement and attainment between high‐visibility student athletes and their nonathlete peers. There is, however, a dual advantage in 4‐year degree completion for those playing other collegiate sports—an advantage tied to their more privileged family and educational backgrounds and their participation in intercollegiate athletics itself. Our results in these regards are robust to several restrictive and analytically rigorous modeling strategies. We conclude by highlighting the implications for higher education research and its attention to inequality, educational representation, institutional processes, and student success.

Social science research has long recognized the relevance of socioeconomic background for mobility and inequality. In this article we interrogate how and why working-class and first-generation backgrounds are especially meaningful and take as our case in point the professoriate and the discipline of sociology, – i.e., a field that intellectually prioritizes attention to group inequality and that arguably offers a conservative empirical test compared to other academic fields. Our analyses, which draw on unique survey items and open-ended qualitative materials from nearly 1,000 academic sociologists, reveal significant background divergences in academic job attainment, tied partly to educational background. Moreover, and especially unique and important, findings demonstrate significant consequences across several dimensions of inequality including compensation and economic precarity, professional visibility, and isolation at departmental, college or university, and professional levels. We conclude by highlighting how our discussion and results contribute in important ways to broader sociological concerns surrounding mobility, group disadvantage, and social closure.

Emerging literatures have highlighted the social- and resource-related inequalities among first-generation college students. Less attention has been devoted to the curricular pathways (i.e., college majors) these students follow and their potentially gendered character. We build on educational inequality and gender literatures in this article, and arguments surrounding habitus and class-based dispositions to address this gap. Our analyses draw on several waves of the Education Longitudinal Survey (ELS-2002) merged with national data on sex composition of fields of study. Our results suggest unique pathways in college for first-generation compared to continuing-generation students. Specifically, first-generation students are more likely to choose occupationally specific "applied" majors than their continuing-generation counterparts. Modeling by gender reveals little to moderate variation between first- and continuing-generation students' representation in female-dominated majors. These patterns generally hold for 2- and 4-year college going samples. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these findings for educational inequality, eventual job returns, and occupational mobility.

Abstract Public-sector reforms over the last three decades have fundamentally changed working conditions in almost all OECD countries. This chapter compares the consequences for public-sector workers in the US, where reforms took hold in the 1980s, and Germany, where reforms began unfolding in the 1990s and early 2000s. After a short description of the pre-reform and post-reform structure of the public-sector work in these two poignant cases, we investigate the consequences for public-sector job security and pressure across countries and over time. Our analyses of part-time work, contractual protections, and overtime hours draw on data of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Results show a remarkable and nearly parallel shift from full to part-time work in both countries in the last 30 years, albeit time-delayed in the case of Germany. Contractual insecurity measured by at-will (US) and fixed-term (Germany) contracts increased in both countries, with somewhat steeper increases in the US. The share of public-sector workers working overtime hours has increased, again in nearly parallel fashion, in the US and Germany since the mid-1990s owing to public-sector reforms. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of such changes and future trajectories.

Abstract:Classic theory has long been interested in mobility, but with limited attention to the implications of intergenerational movement for inequality-specific beliefs. In this article, we introduce a dynamic conception and modeling of the impact of intergenerational occupational mobility on inequality orientations generally and distributive and redistributive beliefs in particular. The diagonal models we employ using 2008–2010 General Social Survey samples—modeling that considers intergenerational occupational origin and destination, and that is replicated on a larger sample across three waves of the GSS—reveal strong conservatizing effects of mobility overall. Those who occupationally fall relative to their parents, although somewhat more progressive by virtue of the downward mobility experience, tend to cling more so to the conservative beliefs characteristic of their higher status origins. Those experiencing mobility gains, in contrast, usually adopt the more conservative orientations of those who they are now surrounded by and in ways that legitimize individual efforts. These patterns are notably pronounced compared to other aspects of one's job, political affiliation, and status-related attributes; are somewhat stronger among men than women; and differ significantly for Blacks. We elaborate and conclude by highlighting the need for a mobility-centered corrective to sociological understandings of inequality beliefs and how workplace-related experiences in particular shape ideological leanings.

The research literature on workplace inequality has given comparatively little attention to age discrimination and its social-psychological consequences. In this article, we highlight useful insights from critical gerontological, labor process, and mental health literatures and analyze the patterning of workplace age discrimination and its implications for sense of job insecurity, job-specific stress, and the overall mental health of full-time workers 40 years old and above, covered by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). Our analyses, which draw on two decades and five waves of the General Social Survey (2002–2018), reveal (1) the prevalence of self-reported workplace age discrimination and growing vulnerability particularly for those 60 years and above, (2) clear social-psychological costs when it comes to job insecurity, work-specific stress, and overall self-reported mental health, and (3) dimensions of status and workplace social relations that offer a protective buffer or exacerbate age discrimination’s corrosive effects. Future research on age as an important status vulnerability within the domain of employment and the implications of unjust treatment for well-being and mental health are clearly warranted.

Abstract A recurring theme in popular media accounts of office work has been the office of the future’, in which an unconventional decor and ‘fun’ working environment allegedly reflects and supports the creative and knowledge-based work of employees. In this chapter this vision, with its implication of a paradigm shift from the routine ‘9–5’ office work stereotype, is held up to scrutiny by first looking at the scale and variety of work done in offices and then examining key dimensions of job quality in office work and assessing the evidence from contemporary research. The chapter takes the historical trends in the nature of office work, observed for over a century, such as routinization of work, mechanization and the diffusion of office technology, intensification of work and enhanced managerial control and a lowering of status (the ‘proletarianization’ thesis) and examines, in the context of current economic pressures, the degree to which the contemporary ‘creative’ office offers a radical break from such trends or whether, for most office workers, the experience is a continuation and even an acceleration, of such processes.

Institutional integration has long been an important focus in literatures on inequality, education and mobility. Building on this work and drawing from multi-wave survey and records data from a large public university, the analyses we offer in this article provide unique and systematic comparative tests of first- versus continuing-generation inequalities in integration, disaggregated by academic versus social types, and with attention to other potentially influential status attributes. Our findings reveal: (1) clear overall inequalities in campus integration for first-generation students that cut across gender and race/ethnic lines; (2) a higher likelihood of employment among first-generation students—employment that tends to detract from integration opportunities; and (3) especially pronounced inequalities when it comes to forms of academic and social integration that entail bureaucratic- and resource-related barriers. We discuss the implications for understanding inequality and the first-generation experience in higher education and for more general sociological conceptions of institutional integration and mobility.

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer triggered U.S. and worldwide protests—protests that raised questions about police funding, use of force, and whether police officers are distinctly racist. In this article, the authors draw on nearly four decades of the General Social Survey to examine trends over time and specifically model whether those in law enforcement are more likely to hold racialized and arguably racist views, vested “blue” occupational interests, or both. Trends show declining public support for police expenditure and police use of force over time. The authors’ further modeling highlights stark differences between police and the general public, as well as between cops and those of similar occupational status. Specifically, police uniquely believe that they should receive more funding and have the right to use physical force against citizens; they are also more racist, a pattern especially apparent among white male officers. These findings, which largely support the arguments of current Black Lives Matter protesters, show how vested occupational interests and racialized orientations intersect in important ways, sometimes with perilous consequences.