Chapter 1:
The Employment Relationship & Gender Inequality
For years scholars have documented the growth of nonstandard contingent employment and its role in exacerbating already rising wage inequality (e.g., Bidwell et al., 2013; Cobb, 2016). Women are overrepresented in low-paying contingent work, resulting in a widening gender wage between standard and nonstandard workers. While much of the research in this area has focused on inequality between these groups, the variation in gender wage disparities across different nonstandard employment relationships remains largely unexplored.
Nonstandard work is often treated as a monolith in terms of gendered wage outcomes, despite evidence that contingent work arrangements vary significantly in their configurations (Cappelli & Keller, 2013; Benassi & Kornelakis, 2021; Osterman, 2023). In response, I develop a typology of employment relationships to better understand how changes in the configuration of employment relationships either amplify or ameliorate the gender wage gap. Through this work I contribute to the growing body of literature on inequality, the gender wage gap, and contingent work by shifting the focus toward demand-side explanations within nonstandard employment.
Using data from the 2017 Contingent Work Supplement of the Current Population Survey, I empirically test this typology, offering new evidence of how employment relationship configurations shape demand-side gender wage inequality within contingent work.
Chapter 2:
Gaming the Lottery: A Study of Legal Avoidance and Gendered Migration
Much like individuals, organizations are subject to laws instituted and enforced by governments. Unlike individuals, organizations are large actors, meaning they have greater resources to shape these laws and/or manoeuvre around them (Holst, 2014). This ‘maneuvering’ is called legal avoidance in organization studies (Alexander, 2016) and institutional toying in employment relations (Benassi & Kornelakis, 2021).
Regarding workplace rules, organizations are typically understood to toy at employees’ expense (e.g., wage theft). Crucially, their tactics do not affect all workers equally. For example, employers are more likely to engage in overtime violations for female staff than for their male peers (Petrescu-Prahova & Spiller 2016). Toying thus serves as a means of stratifying individuals within organizations.
There are, nevertheless, instances when organization and worker interests align such that toying may be mutually beneficial. In this chapter, I examine such a case, the employer prioritization of certain job candidates when toying the immigration lottery. When organizations manipulate the lottery, they increase their probability of accessing top talent. But there are also benefits for the workers receiving this improved mobility. So, which workers benefit? I draw on human capital and gender discrimination literatures to theorize who gets prioritized via toying and the mechanisms behind these decisions. I test these mechanisms using employer H-1B visa applications for high-skilled temporary workers.
Chapter 3:
Employment Relationship Configurations & Temporary Worker Career Outcomes
Decades of research have found that temporary/contingent jobs may act as steppingstones for workers into full-time permanent roles or as traps leading to continuous employment precarity. Unfortunately, the steppingstone/trap debate has largely treated contingent work as a monolith, rarely examining variation within temporary work. As a result, it remains unclear under what contexts contingent jobs will lead to permanent positions.
Building on previous classifications of temporary jobs and a cost/control model of contingent work I develop a cost-based integration theory of temporary work. Using data on H-1B visa workers from the Department of Labor, I examine permanency outcomes across multiple employment relationship configurations (ERCs) for temporary workers.
I find that temporary jobs in firms under majority co-employment and externally mediated ERCs are associated with significantly lower permanent visa sponsorship ratios compared to those under direct ERCs. Externally mediated ERCs are also found to have significantly lower ratios of permanent visa sponsorship than co-employment ERCs.