Social Stratification, Welfare, and Social Policy Seminar, at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

Dragana Stojmenovska from New York University presents "Relational Inequality and Organizational Variation in the Gender Authority Gap"

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Abstract

This study examines organizational variation in the gender gap in workplace authority and its relationship to organizational actors’ relative power to claim authority at the workplace. Building on the “relational inequalities” literature, I argue that inequality in authority is produced locally through processes of claims-making by groups of individuals in the form of (explicit or implicit) statements about why they are more deserving of having authority than categorically distinct others. Based on employer-employee matched linked survey and administrative data of more than 100,000 individuals from 500 work organizations in the Netherlands, and mixed effects multilevel logistic analyses, I find considerable organizational variation in the gender authority gap. The size of the gap across organizations seems to be related to women’s and men’s relative power to claim authority as an organizational resource. Specifically, I find that the gender authority gap is larger in organizations with larger shares of men and organizations where men tend to have higher status relative to women in terms of other culturally or organizationally recognized status distinctions, for example in organizations where men tend to have permanent employment status and women tend to have temporary employment status.

Dragana Stojmenovska

Dragana Stojmenovska is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at the New York University. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam (2022). Her current research focuses on gender inequality in the workplace. Stojmenovska is the recipient of an NWO (Dutch Scientific Council) Rubicon grant for research on the stalled narrowing of the gender pay gap (2022-2024), and an NWO Research Talent grant for her PhD project on women’s underrepresentation in workplace authority (2019-2021). Her work has been published in general sociology journals as well as in journals specializing in the study of gender and work (incl. European Sociological Review, Gender, Work & Organization, Social Forces and others).