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To understand the persistence of racial disparities across multiple domains (e.g., residential location, schooling, employment, health, housing, credit, and justice) and to develop effective remedies, we must recognize that these domains are reciprocally related and comprise an integrated system. The limited long-run success of government social policies to advance racial justice is due in part to the ad hoc nature of policy responses to various forms of racial discrimination. Drawing on a systems perspective, I show that race discrimination is a system whose emergent properties reinforce the effects of their components. The emergent property of a system of race-linked disparities is über discrimination—a meta-level phenomenon that shapes our culture, cognitions, and institutions, thereby distorting whether and how we perceive and make sense of racial disparities. Viewing within-domain disparities as part of a discrimination system requires better-specified analytic models. While the existence of an emergent system of über discrimination increases the difficulty of eliminating racial disparities, a systems perspective points to strategies to attack that system. These include identifying and intervening at leverage points, implementing interventions to operate simultaneously across subsystems, isolating subsystems from the larger discrimination system, and directly challenging the processes through which emergent discrimination strengthens within-subsystem disparities.

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This chapter reviews research on the determinants and consequences of race and sex composition of organizations. Determinants include the composition of the qualified labor supply; employers' preferences, including the qualifications they require; the response of majority groups; and an establishment's attractiveness, size, and recruiting methods. The race and sex composition of an establishment affects workers' cross-group contact; stress, satisfaction, and turnover; cohesion; stereotyping; and evaluation. Composition also affects organizations themselves, including their performance, hiring and promotion practices, levels of job segregation, and wages and benefits. Theorydriven research is needed (a) on the causal mechanisms that underlie the relationships between organizational composition and its determinants and consequences and (b) on the form of the relationships between organizational composition and workers outcomes (e.g., cross-group contact, cohesion, turnover, etc). Research is needed on race and ethnic composition, with a special focus on the joint effects of race and sex.

We examine the effects of organizations' employment practices on sex-based ascription in managerial jobs. Given men's initial preponderance in management, we argue that inertia, sex labels, and power dynamics predispose organizations to use sex-based ascription when staffing managerial jobs, but that personnel practices can invite or curtail ascription. Our results-based on data from a national probability sample of 516 work organizations-show that specific personnel practices affect the sexual division of managerial labor. Net of controls for the composition of the labor supply, open recruitment methods are associated with women holding a greater share of management jobs, while recruitment through informal networks increases men's share. Formalizing personnel practices reduces men's share of management jobs, especially in large establishments, presumably because formalization checks ascription in job assignments, evaluation, and factors that affect attrition. Thus, through their personnel practices, establishments license or limit ascription. B ARON and Bielby (1980) encouraged researchers interested in labor market inequality to "bring the firm back in" because firms "link the 'macro' and 'micro' dimensions of work organization and inequality" (p. 738). Researchers who have taken up the call have demonstrated the importance of organizational structures, such as their nonprofit or government status or their size, for sustaining or eroding sex-based ascription (Baron 1991; Baron and Newman 1990; Nelson and Bridges 1999; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993). Relatively little is known, however, about the effects of establishments' personnel practices, and it is these practices that are the proximate causes of establishment-based gender inequality (Bielby 2000; Reskin 2000). We examine the effects of organizations' employment practices on sexbased ascription in managerial jobs for a national probability sample of establishments. Ascription exists when a status, position, or opportunity is allocated at least in part on the basis of an ascribed characteristic (Kemper 1974; Mayhew 1968; Parsons 1964). Baron (1991:143), for example, has contended that employers practice ascription when employees' ascribed characteristics directly influence their jobs or rewards. Thus, ascription involves differential treatment based on sex, race, ethnicity, and the like. Sex-based ascription does not necessarily involve invidious intent; it can occur when custom shapes employers' personnel practices, when sex stereotypes or jobs' sex labels affect allocation decisions, when decision-makers have the discretion to act on their biases, or when they use sex as a proxy for productivity or employment costs. Impulses toward ascription may originate in or-Direct all correspondence to Barbara Reskin

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This article takes a look["looks at" is more efficient and direct] at how society tells us that we can be anything we want to be when we grow up. However, through deeper evaluation we can see how society contradicts itself with the concept of "doing gender". "Doing gender" sets barriers for the sexes causing institutional segregation in the workplace. [You need to include here how you're going to examine gender and its effects on the workplace. You also need to mention what your findings are-what discoveries or trends do you make in this article? Your readers need to know these things to determine if your article is going to prove useful to their research-or not. Grade: B Jane] Sex Segregation in the Workplace The concept that males and females dominate different occupations may not be surprising to many. Women are typically found to dominate occupations that require degrees in "education, English, fine arts, foreign languages, home economics, library and archival sciences, social work" and nursing. Men are found to dominate occupations that require degrees in "agriculture, computer science, dentistry, economics, engineering, law, medicine, and the physical sciences"(Morales, 21). Our educators, parents, and society base the reasoning for this segregation among genders in different occupations on the way we are taught. This assignment to male and female roles begin [since the subject is "assignment," the verb needs to be singular] from the moment are born. Our parents dress us in blue if we are a boy, and pink if we are a girl. [since "we" is plural, the nouns should also be plural: " we are boys…we are girls."] This process continues to be reinforced when parents tell their children, "No, that's for boys" or "No, that's for girls". We define this as "doing gender". This article will discuss why and how we "do gender." By "doing gender" we segregate ourselves, men and women, in the workplace. We continuously "do gender" and by doing so many occupations will begin [the future tense here is puzzling, since society appears to have been using this form of segregation, if anything, more rigorously in the past than in the present] to suffer from this concept. The occupations that are and will suffer from the concept of "doing gender" are ones that are mostly dominated by females such as nursing and teaching. "Doing gender" can be illustrated in the three levels: individual, interactional, and institutional. This article will take a look at how "doing gender" affects work on the institutional level [.][good use of anticipatory point The way that interact with one another and we want to represent ourselves to our coworkers and employers are examples of "doing gender". "Gender segregation exists in nearly every organization and every occupation, with men occupying the best paying and most prestigious jobs, and the highest positions of organizational power" (Williams, 10).

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