Gender Sorting and the Glass Ceiling in High-Tech Firms

With few exceptions, studies have conceived of the glass ceiling as reflecting internal promotion biases. In this article, the authors argue that glass ceiling patterns can also be the result of external recruitment and hiring processes. Using data on people applying by means of the Internet for jobs at 441 small- and medium-sized high-tech firms, they find evidence that the glass ceiling is produced by both internal and external hiring processes. On the supply side, females are sorted into lower-level job queues than males. On the demand side, screening biases against women also are evident, but a series of “what if” simulations suggest that demand-side screening processes play a comparatively minor role in producing the glass ceiling pattern. These results suggest that bias remediation policies designed to equalize gender differences in hiring chances are likely to be less effective than recruitment and outreach policies designed to improve gender disparities in candidate pools.

Research on Job Shop Scheduling Technique in Small-Scale Machine Production

According to the characteristics of the small-scale machine production, a job shop scheduling technique was given in this paper. In the technique, two classes of queues were built. The job queue expresses the procedures of a job. The machine queue expresses the actual processing sequence of the jobs on a machine. At first, all job queues could be built and the sequence of the operations in them should not be changed forever; all machine queues are null. The completion rate of each operation is defined. The core task of the technique are prioritizing the operation which the completion rate is the smallest of the job queues inserting into a machine queue, and minimize the finish time of the last operation in all machine. The technique could always achieve good job shop schedules. The feasibility and availability of the technique is verified through an example.