Gendering the Job: Networks and Recruitment at a Call Center

Fernández, Roberto; Sosa, M. Lourdes

doi:10.1086/497257

Cited by 224 publications

(173 citation statements)

References 60 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

161

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…There were no significant correlations between women's networks' gender homophily and either women's preference for working in a male-dominated occupation or the general gender composition (by job title) of their job offers. An alternative explanation was offered by a pair of scholars documenting apparent heterophilous recruitment (Fernandez & Sosa 2005). Their explanation relied upon the interaction of network recruitment with existing supply-side biasing mechanisms.…”

Section: Revising Network Recruitment Theory Through Formal Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Firms influence the composition of applicants through advertisements (e.g., Gorman 2005) and location (Fernandez & Su 2004) among other mechanisms. The composition of non-referral external applicants represents an upper bound for the net effects of supply-side biases (Fernandez & Sosa 2005). 5 To explain this formula, consider a population with 2 groups: Ps and Qs, with P and Q representing the counts of their members.…”

Section: Interactions With Supply-side Effects: Biases In Who Appliesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to showing how network recruitment can segregate both male-typed and female-typed jobs, the interactions with supply-side effects can help explain the empirical findings where male referrers generate majority female referral applicants (e.g., Fernandez & Sosa 2005). Analysis of our model shows that whenever m/(1-m)<s, where m is men's same-sex referring rate, and s is the scaling factor for the net effect of supply-side mechanisms, male referrers will generate majority female referral applicants.…”

Section: 03) the Third Scenario Is The Linear Relation Between M Amentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first empirical case (Fernandez and Sosa 2005) is drawn from a call-center located in the midwestern United States serving a large bank. The dominant job title at this call center, and the job to which the case study data pertains, is that of Customer Service Representative (CSR).…”

Section: Empirical Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Decades after Granovetter's (1973) watershed study of the role of networks in job-changers' job searches, the network recruitment literature has continued to privilege the job-seeker's perspective (Rubineau & Fernandez 2015). As a result, the segregating effects of network recruitment commonly have been viewed as a primarily supply-side mechanism (e.g., Calvo-Armengol & Ioannides 2008;Fernandez & Sosa 2005;Kmec 2005). But network recruitment has both supply-side and demand-side components (Lin et al 2009;Reskin & Roos 1990;Rubineau & Fernandez 2015).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Tipping Points: The Gender Segregating and Desegregating Effects of Network Recruitment

Rubineau

Fernández²

2015

Organization Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Current scholarship commonly posits that network recruitment contributes to job sex segregation, and that the segregated nature of personal contact networks explains this effect. A variety of empirical findings inconsistent with this explanation demonstrate its inadequacy. Building upon Kanter's observation that recruitment processes often resemble "homosocial reproduction," we develop a population dynamics model of network recruitment. The resulting formal model builds a parsimonious theory regarding the segregating effects of network recruitment resolving the puzzles and inconsistencies revealed by recent empirical findings.This revised theory also challenges conventional understandings of how network recruitment segregates: in isolation, network recruitment -even with segregated networks -is more likely to desegregate rather than segregate. Network recruitment segregates primarily through its interactions with other supply-side (e.g., gendered self-sorting) or demand-side (e.g., gendered referring rates) biasing mechanisms. Our model reveals whether and to what extent network recruitment segregates or desegregates, and reveals opportunities for organizational intervention. There is an easily-calculable tipping point where demand-side factors such as gender differences in referring can counteract and neutralize other segregating effects from referring.Independent of other personnel practices, organizational policies affecting employees' referring behaviors can tip the balance to determine whether network recruitment serves as a segregating or desegregating force. We ground our model empirically using 3 organizational cases.

show abstract

Section: Revising Network Recruitment Theory Through Formal Modelingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Interactions With Supply-side Effects: Biases In Who Appliesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: 03) the Third Scenario Is The Linear Relation Between M Amentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Empirical Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Tipping Points: The Gender Segregating and Desegregating Effects of Network Recruitment

Rubineau

Fernández²

2015

Organization Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

How Do Labor Market Networks Work?

Rubineau

Fernández

2015

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The informal seeking and sharing of job opportunity information via contacts are the dominant mechanisms for both the supply and demand sides of the labor market. Despite many decades of scholarly scrutiny, we have established little certainty about the mechanisms through which labor market networks operate. Much of this uncertainty results from single‐perspective investigations of a fundamentally triadic process. Network‐mediated job search is not merely a version of the classic two‐way matching problem with some additional network factors but is rather a three‐way matching problem with three distinct agentic decision makers: the job seeker, the job screener, and the social contact acting as a connector. This essay summarizes what is currently known about the operation and consequences of labor market networks, their mechanisms, and their contextual dependencies. We show how the perspective of a triad of actors presents new opportunities for resolving current contradictory empirical findings and areas of ongoing debate. Progress on this topic requires both careful causal research isolating mechanisms affecting a particular actor and integrative research on how these mechanisms interact among the triad of actors.

show abstract

Occupational Segregation

Yl¹,

Weeden²

2015

The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Occupational segregation refers to the uneven distribution of social groups (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity) across occupations in a national, regional, or local labor market. The level of occupational segregation indicates the extent to which groups are distributed unevenly across occupations. Perfect segregation occurs if no occupations are populated by workers from different groups; perfect integration occurs if every occupation contains the same proportion of workers from each social group. Levels of occupational segregation are typically measured with the Duncan index (D), which measures the percentage of members of a social group who would have to change occupations in order to achieve perfect integration, or the log‐linear index (A), which indicates the multiplicative factor by which members of a social group are overrepresented in the average occupation. The pattern of segregation refers to the configuration of representation in particular occupations. Patterns of gender segregation, for example, are described by the percentage of men (or women) in each occupation or by the odds ratios in a table of counts of men and women in each occupation (e.g., Charles and Grusky, 2004).

show abstract

Gendering the Job: Networks and Recruitment at a Call Center

Cited by 224 publications

References 60 publications

Tipping Points: The Gender Segregating and Desegregating Effects of Network Recruitment

Tipping Points: The Gender Segregating and Desegregating Effects of Network Recruitment

How Do Labor Market Networks Work?

Occupational Segregation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About