Donald Tomaskovic-Devey
Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of Center for Employment Equity | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA, UNITED STATES
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is an expert in understanding the processes that generate workplace inequality.
Expertise (7)
Employment Equity
Labor Markets
Income Distributions
Economic Sociology
Organizations and Inequality
Sex, Race and Class Processes
Workplace Equality
Biography
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is an expert in understanding the processes that generate workplace inequality.
His research encompasses the impact of financialization on U.S. income distribution, workplace desegregation and equal opportunity, network models of labor market structure, and relational inequality as a theoretical and empirical project.
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Education (2)
Boston University: Ph.D., Sociology
Fordham University: B.A., Sociology
Links (3)
Select Recent Media Coverage (5)
White-sounding names have edge in hiring, bias study says
TechTarget online
2024-04-12
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, professor of sociology, and executive director of the Center for Employment Equity, comments on a study exploring racial bias in hiring practices, showing that white-sounding names are often preferred, with a notable overall discrimination rate of 10%.
Study: Tech industry often denies job interviews to women
TechTarget online
2023-06-21
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is quoted in an article examining hiring bias in the tech industry against women and people of color. “African Americans have to apply for more jobs to find one,” Tomaskovic-Devey says. “For gender, the pattern is different. There is consistent evidence of bias against women for traditionally male jobs and against men for typically female ones.”
No longer a trade secret: Diversity data at country's mega contractors
USA Today online
2023-04-19
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, who runs the Center for Employment Equity, said making the data public allows people to compare companies and hold them accountable for their hiring practices. He said diversity, equity and inclusion officers also could use the data to benchmark their companies’ performance against competitors.
Exclusive: Women still don't get the top jobs or pay even in industries they dominate
USA Today
2023-03-14
Long-term change will require changing how we run businesses, not just confronting personal biases, said Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a sociology professor who runs the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "Culture matters," he said. "To reduce male preferences in high wage and leadership positions requires fundamentally changing organizational routines.”
Big Tech Layoffs May Further Disrupt Equity and Diversity Efforts
U.S. News & World Report
2023-01-05
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who studied U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity data for 2008-2016, found that about 7% of tech firms are actively trying to diversify their workforce. Tomaskovic-Devey said if the same pattern holds, the current round of layoffs will lead to fewer women and non-Asian minorities in tech firms and further entrench the dominance of white and Asian males in the industry.
Select Publications (4)
The tech industry talks about boosting diversity, but research shows little improvement
The ConversationDonald T. Tomaskovic-Devey and JooHee Han
2022-03-01
"It looks to us as though the recipe for increasing diversity in the tech sector is at least in part to increase diversity at the managerial level. It also looks like increased diversity is good for business, although it is also possible that well-run firms hire more diverse labor forces. Unfortunately, this combination is not widespread. Dramatic improvements in employment diversity are confined to only 10% of firms."
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Nature Human Behaviour2023 Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of countries. Here, using recent linked employer–employee data from 15 countries, we show that the processes sorting people into different jobs account for substantially less of the gender pay differences than was previously believed and that within-job pay differences remain consequential.
Immigrant-biased technological change: the effect of new technology implementation on native and non-Western immigrant employment in the Netherlands
Social Forces2022 This study examines how workplace technological innovation is associated with individual-level employment turnover. We advance the literature by studying how the impact of technology differs for Dutch native workers and workers with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. Furthermore, we examine the disparate impacts of organizational context, as indexed by the proportion of workers with non-Western immigrant backgrounds and workplace job volatility, as well as industry-level unionization.
Gender inequality in relational position-taking: an analysis of intra-organizational job mobility networks
Social Science Research2022 We conceptualize within-organization job mobility as a position-taking process, arguing that the structure and outcome of claims over positions are characteristics of organizational inequality regimes. Drawing on data from 10 distribution centers from a large U.S. firm, we examine gendered job mobility as the observed network of workers moving among jobs. Results from network analysis and meta-regression reveal that in the firm examined, workers tend to move between jobs with similar gender compositions, that mobility lattices tend to be more ladder-like for male-concentrated jobs but more circuitous for female-concentrated jobs, and that there is less upward mobility overall in organizations with higher levels of wage inequality.
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