Observing How Organizations Hire People: The Approaches Used and Their Significance to Inequality Research

Abstract

Based on the award-winning paper, this paper explains what significance observing corporate organizations has for inequality research and how to observe their employment behavior quantitatively. First, we summarized the awarded paper after describing our previous studies. Examining how the effects of WLB measures and the proportion of female managers on female hiring vary across business conditions shows that "gender-equal" firms do not necessarily exhibit equal hiring practices when their performance deteriorates. Observing how organizations behave as key players in determining an individual's status is thus a useful approach to analyzing the mechanisms that generate various social inequalities. Such mechanisms are more likely to be discovered when observing different aspects of an organization's employment behavior, as we discuss using the metaphor of drawing projections.