Co-authorships and gender bias in academia

This article examines gender bias in the Italian academia, and whether this bias depends on one’s collaborative work and its related conventions across academic disciplines. We carry out the research by relying on status characteristics theory, which is tested via a factorial survey experiment of 2,098 associate and full-time professors employed in Italian public universities in 2019. This is one of the few experiments of the hiring process in academia conducted on a nationally representative population of university professors. Our article focuses specifically on three academic disciplines: humanities, economics, and social sciences. The results indicate that female academics in Italy are penalized for co-authoring. They receive less favorable evaluations of their competence, but only when the evaluator is a male. This gender bias is most pronounced in economics, a discipline where conventions of co-authorship allow for more uncertainty on individual contributions to a joint publication. Overall, the results partially confirm our postulates based on status characteristics theory.

The Impact of Concentrated Affluence and Disadvantage on the Pre-Adjudication Detention Decision: A Status Characteristics Approach

Studies of racial disparities in juvenile justice are primarily organized around four theoretical frameworks: focal concerns, racial threat, symbolic threat, and attribution theory. Moreover, juvenile justice research sometimes neglects to pay close attention to the front-end outcome of pre-adjudication detention. Therefore, the present study contends that status characteristics theory may broaden our understanding of how and why disparities in pre-adjudication detention arise. Moreover, the present study seeks to find how juvenile justice disparities in pre-adjudication detention emerge across races, among other social, legal, and community factors. Therefore, the present study focuses on the pre-adjudication detention decisions of judges and probation officers, utilizing quantitative data from the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice and merged with American Community Survey data.

Homophily Exclusion or Homophily Preference? The Influence of the Executive Identity of Nonexecutive Directors on the Focal Firm Executive Pay and Ordinary Employee Pay

The occupational identity of nonexecutive directors exerts a considerable influence on their way of designing and distributing executive pay as well as ordinary employee pay in the focal firm. Integrating the status characteristics theory into the corporate governance literature, I theorize that status contest effect comes into play in the process of setting executive pay in the focal firm, specifically when its nonexecutive directors serve as executives on stakeholders. More often than not, such executive identity triggers the status competition with focal firm executives, which motivates nonexecutive directors to reduce the focal firm executive pay so as to secure and aggrandize their own status within the focal firm. However, since ordinary employees pose no threat to nonexecutive directors in the focal firm, they tend to increase ordinary employee pay. Basing upon the empirical test which adopts the data of China’s Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed firms, I find that the greater the focal firm’s nonexecutive director ratio, the less will be the top executives’ pay in the focal firm; the greater the focal firm’s nonexecutive director ratio, the greater will be ordinary employees’ pay in the focal firm; the greater the focal firm’s nonexecutive director ratio, the smaller will be the pay gap between top executives and ordinary employees in the focal firm. In addition, I also find that ownership power and gender can moderate the relationship between nonexecutive director ratio and executive pay: top executive ownership can alleviate the negative relationship between focal firm’s nonexecutive directors and top executives’ pay; female nonexecutive directors are more likely to increase focal firm’s ordinary employee pay than their male counterparts.

Cracking the Black Box: Capturing the Role of Expectation States in Status Processes

A fundamental task for sociology is to uncover the mechanisms that produce and reproduce social inequalities. While status characteristics theory is the favored account of how social status contributes independently to the maintenance of inequality, it hinges on an unobserved construct, expectation states, in the middle of the causal chain between status and behavior. Efforts to test the mediation mechanism have been complicated by the implicit, often unconscious, nature of status expectations. To solve this “black box” problem, we offer a new conceptualization and research approach that capitalizes on the accuracy and precision of neurological measurement to shed new light on the biasing role of expectations in the status–behavior relationship. Results from an experimental study provide a unique illustration of ways in which social status is inscribed in the brain and how, in turn, these inscriptions are related to behavioral inequalities that emerge during interaction.

Workplace Gender Pay Gaps: Does Gender Matter Less the Longer Employees Stay?

Research indicates men often receive greater merit rewards than women for the same performance. It is unclear, however, whether gender differences in merit rewards narrow with increasing firm tenure or whether gender differences in merit-rewards stay constant across employees' firm-internal career. Using longitudinal personnel records of a private U.S. employer (2005–2014), the author finds no evidence for declining gender effects on pay when employees stay longer, not even among nonprofessionals where performance is easier to assess. Results contradict information-based theories and speak to status characteristics theory. Moreover, gender disparities are significant only when supervisors have discretion over merit increases.

Lay and Professional Judges in Europe’s Labour Courts: Does the Professional Judge Dominate?

Several European countries have a first instance ‘mixed’ labour court, that is a judicial panel comprising a professional judge and two or more lay judges, the latter with experience as employees or employers/managers. The lay judges’ main contribution is their workplace knowledge, but they act in a juridical setting where legal norms prevail, so does the professional judge, despite being in a minority, dominate? This article seeks to address this question by focussing on first instance labour courts in Great Britain, Germany and France. Theories of differential power, particularly status characteristics theory, and previous empirical research indicate that professional judges dominate, but our findings are more nuanced. Based on 177 interviews in three countries, we find that professional judge dominance varies according to the country’s institutional context and the salience of lay judges’ workplace knowledge. These institutional differences, however, are mediated by the attitudes of the judicial actors. Many interviewees noted that some lay judges were more prepared to challenge the professional judge than others, whereas others observed that some professional judges were more inclusive than others.

Social Structures in Transition: Applications of Two Theories to Chiefdoms

Status characteristics theory and elementary theory are applied to explain developments through three structural forms that chiefdoms are known to take. Theoretic models find that downward mobility inherent in the first form, the status-lineage structure, destabilizes its system of privilege. As a consequence, high-status actors are motivated to find mechanisms to preserve and enhance privilege. By engaging in hostile relations with other chiefdoms, high-status actors offer protection to low-status others from real or imagined threats. Through that protection, they gain tribute and support. The result is structural change from influence based on status to power exercised through indirect coercion, the second structural form. In settled societies, accumulation through war and selective redistribution contribute to separation of warrior and commoner rankings. That separation leads to the third structural form, direct coercive chiefdom.

Jurors' Subjective Experiences of Deliberations in Criminal Cases

Research on jury deliberations has largely focused on the implications of deliberations for criminal defendants' outcomes. In contrast, this article considers jurors' outcomes by integrating subjective experience into the study of deliberations. We examine whether jurors' feelings that they had enough time to express themselves vary by jurors' gender, race, or education. Drawing on status characteristics theory and a survey of more than 3,000 real-world jurors, we find that the majority of jurors feel that they had enough time to express themselves. However, blacks and Hispanics, and especially blacks and Hispanics with less education, are less likely to feel so. Jurors' verdict preferences do not account for these findings. Our findings have implications for status characteristics theory and for legal cynicism among members of lower-status social groups.

Status, Networks, and Opinion Change: An Experimental Investigation

This study evaluates two prominent sociological theories of interpersonal influence: status characteristics theory and social influence network theory. In application to status settings, we test social influence network theory and its established measurement model as well as a recent “modular integration” that operationalizes social influence network theory’s central constructs by incorporating assumptions from status characteristics theory. The two formulations are systematically examined within an open interaction experiment where groups of two, three, and four participants discussed their initial opinions and formed final opinions on two separate issues. Participants were randomly assigned to status positions, which status characteristics theory emphasizes as normative foundations of influence in small task-oriented groups. Analyses of group-level and individual-level opinion change support social influence network theory as it has been used in the past and suggest that status characteristics theory shows promise in modeling the influence networks that drive opinion change at the individual level.