Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made employment discrimination and segregation on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex illegal in the United States. Previous research based on analyses of aggregate national trends in occupational segregation suggests that sex and race/ethnic employment segregation has declined in the United States since the 1960s. We add to the existing knowledge base by documenting for the first time male-female, black-white, and Hispanic-white segregation trends using private sector workplace data. The general pattern is that segregation declined for all three categorical comparisons between 1966 and 1980, but after 1980 only sex segregation continued to decline markedly. We estimate regression-based decompositions in the time trends for workplace desegregation to determine whether the observed changes represent change in segregation behavior at the level of workplaces or merely changes in the sectoral and regional distribution of workplaces with stable industrial or local labor market practices. These decompositions suggest that, in addition to desegregation caused by changes in the composition of the population of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission monitored private sector firms, there has been real workplace-level desegregation since 1964.

This article reviews recent theoretical and empirical research addressing organizations and workplace stratification, with an emphasis on the generic organizational mechanisms responsible for producing both stability and change in workplace inequality. We propose that an organizational approach to the study of stratification should examine status- and class-based inequalities at the intersection of (a) the inertial tendencies of organizational structure, logic, and practice; (b) the relative power of actors within workplaces; and (c) organizations' institutional and competitive environments. The interplay of these generic forces either reproduces static practices and structures or leads to dynamic processes of change. We conclude with theoretical and methodological implications for analyzing social stratification through an organizational lens.

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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has upended nearly every aspect of social life in the United States and abroad. People turn to news to provide public health updates about the virus, such as reports of new cases and deaths, but also to understand how COVID-19 is affecting jobs and the economy. The news, irrespective of its format, serves as a central conduit of information during the pandemic. Prior research examining public traumas, such as terrorist attacks, suggests that greater media intake may also amplify perceived threats about the virus and therefore have a negative effect on mental health. We argue that in the absence of a solution to the virus, such as a vaccine, greater COVID-19 media viewing is likely to heighten uncertainty and anxiousness about the future threat the virus poses to health and well-being, which should in turn increase psychological distress. Drawing on a unique data set of U.S. residents in mid- to late March 2020, the authors examine the relationships among COVID-19 news consumption, perceptions of COVID-19 threats to health and economic well-being, and psychological distress. The findings suggest that greater COVID-19 media consumption is associated with greater psychological distress and that approximately two thirds of this effect operates indirectly through increased perceptions of COVID-19 threats.

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