Beyond Treatment and Impact

Abstract

Discrimination remains integral to understanding both how inequality is produced and how it can be remedied in employment settings. Yet like many sociological concepts, the notion of discrimination involves an uneasy mapping of theory to practice. Traditional conceptualizations of discrimination as differential treatment are ill-fitted to the structural and relational nature of much discrimination in the contemporary era. The disparate impact doctrine, which recognizes policies or practices that systematically disadvantage protected groups, picks up some of the theoretical slack, but offers little in the way of conceptualizing individuals' complex and entangled experiences with inequality at work. In this article, I provide a conceptual reorganization of theories of discrimination, underscoring recent calls to move beyond the confines of the current disparate treatment and disparate impact binary by recognizing the structurally and culturally embedded nature of bias and discrimination. Drawing on recent sociological research as well as my own analysis of legal records and interviews with plaintiffs involved in high-profile sex and race lawsuits settled in the past decade, I illustrate how differential treatment emerges in the context of and enabled by systems of vulnerability and privilege, workplace culture, and compositional asymmetries. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this framework for antidiscrimination enforcement efforts.

The Wage Effect of Workplace Sexual Harassment: Evidence for Women in Europe

“…The vulnerable-victims hypothesis reflects in fact the typical scenario of workplace sexual harassment but as explained by Brodsky (1976), sexual harassment can be not only top-down, from supervisor to subordinate, but also horizontal, from peer to peer, and even bottom-up, from subordinate to manager, because competition for privilege occurs in all these directions. In fact, the new frontier of contemporary relations at work begs sociology scholars to examine more complex forms of discrimination (among them sexual harassment) that include the dynamics of workplace power relations (Roscigno, 2019;Hirsh, 2014;McLaughlin et al, 2012;Stainback et al, 2011). Considering workplace power, the so-called power threat model (McLaughlin et al, 2012) suggests that women who threaten men's dominance are more frequently targeted, because they challenge traditional gender norms.…”