chris (@) cornell

I'm leaving tomorrow for a Spring Break trip to the sunny beaches of Ithaca, New York. These days I'm spending most of my time on college budgets, department administration and Contexts editing, so it is especially lovely to think and talk about research. I could really use some feedback on a couple lines of research, so I'll be doing half the talk on a crim project and half the talk on a soc of law project.

My talk is co-sponsored by Cornell's Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology programs. Tuesday, March 16th, 3 PM, The Rushmore Room, MVR 114. Please stop on by if you're in the neighborhood.

Sex and Stigma: Experiments and Observations on Discrimination and Harassment

Chris will present ongoing work from two lines of research on crime and the employment relation:

(1) An Experimental Audit on Low-Level Criminal Records and Hiring

A prison record clearly reduces employment outcomes for entry-level job applicants. Yet many employers now have access to applicants’ arrest records, even for misdemeanor cases that never resulted in formal charges. We present experimental evidence from a new audit study testing the extent to which employers consider low-level arrest records in making hiring decisions. Our team sent matched pairs of African American and White men to apply for jobs, experimentally manipulating whether they reported or did not report a low-level criminal record during the application process. We find a modest effect of arrest records on employability, with callback rates about 4 percent lower for the experimental group than for the matched control group.

(2) Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power

This article uses longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study (YDS) to predict change in the likelihood of experiencing sexual harassment and in its frequency and severity. Expressions of gender and workplace authority emerge as consistent predictors. In particular, women supervisors are more, rather than less, likely to report sexually harassing behaviors and to define their experiences as sexual harassment than non-supervisors. Intensive interviews with a subset of survey respondents suggest that male coworkers, clients, and supervisors use harassment as an "equalizer" against women in power, consistent with research showing that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination.