Class Advantage, Commitment Penalty:

The Gendered Effect of Social Class Signals in an Elite Labor Market

Lauren Rivera (Kellogg) | András Tilcsik (Toronto)

Class Matters

‣  Social class background affects attainment

‣  Mechanism: educational inequality

‣  Employment discrimination as a mechanism?

•  Employers are gatekeepers to income brackets
•  Qualitative research (Rivera 2015) suggests that applicant
social class matters in hiring for professional jobs
•  Yet to systematically examine patterns of social class
discrimination in hiring (net of education) in U.S.

2
A First Step

‣  Randomized résumé audit

•  Associate positions at large law firms
•  Applying from selective but non-elite law schools

‣  High stakes
•  3-6 times higher salaries than other legal employment
•  Starting salary à top 10% of household incomes

‣  Documented social class inequalities

•  But unclear whether due to discrimination

3
Study Details

‣  2 × 2 (social class background × gender)

•  Conflicting predictions re: gender-class interaction

‣  Summer associate jobs

•  Most common point of entry
•  92% receive full-time job offers

‣  Apply directly through NALP Directory

•  Common for applicants from selective law schools
•  316 offices (147 firms), 1 résumé per office

4
Signaling Class and Gender

‣  Gender
•  First name

‣  Class: multiple signals

•  Combination of economic/cultural markers (Weber 1958)
•  Interviews and extensive pre-tests

‣  Class markers
•  Last name (Broad 1996)
•  Parental education (Stephens et al. 2012)
•  Parental income (Reardon 2011)
•  Extracurricular activities (Bourdieu 1984, Rivera 2015)
5
 Upper-class signals Lower-class signals

Last name Cabot Clark

Undergraduate athletic award University Athletic Award University Award for Outstanding
Athletes on Financial Aid

Undergraduate extracurricular Peer mentor for first-year Peer mentor for first-generation
activity (from 2008 to 2011) students college students

Undergraduate extracurricular Sailing team Track & field (relay team)

activity (from 2007 to 2011)

Personal interests Sailing, polo, Track & field, pick-up-soccer,

classical music country music

* Identical educational/professional experiences

* Pre-tests: Clear consensus on class differences and no
differences in perceived race and parental status, and no
within-gender difference in masculinity/femininity
6
Upper-Class Male Advantage

20

16.25
15
Callback Rate (%)

10

5 3.83

0
Upper-Class Male All Other Applicants
Applicant
Upper-Class Advantage: A Gendered Effect

20
16.25
15
Callback Rate (%)

10
6.33
5 3.8
1.28
0
UC man UC woman LC man LC woman
Applicant
Why Do Only Men Benefit?

9
Why Do Only Men Benefit?
‣  Survey Experiment
•  200 practicing attorneys screened by a professional
survey company
•  Asked to evaluate one of the resumes from the audit;
rated the applicant on several dimensions:
-  Competence
-  Warmth
-  Fit with culture/clientele of law firms
-  Commitment
-  Masculinity/femininity

‣  Interviews
•  20 in-depth interviews with attorneys involved in hiring at
NALP-listed firms
10
Results
‣  Upper-class signals (for both men and women) à
greater fit with culture and clients

‣  But: commitment penalty for upper-class women

•  Less significantly committed to work, long-term career,
long hours than upper-class men and lower-class women

‣  Upper-class women
•  less devoted to career; viewed through negative
stereotypes of intensive motherhood (“future helicopter
parent”); seen as an attrition risk

‣  Lower-class women
•  “motivated,” “in need of the paycheck,” “debt to pay”
11
“[With] a female associate from a privileged background, there
is an unspoken concern—which is not good—that they may go
off track. And leave the firm. Or pursue other interests. Or
perhaps a family focus or what have you…With unhealthy 100-
hour weeks, you can see why that concern is prevalent. Those
types of expectations, people assume that women will bow out
of them…If you come from a more privileged background, that
optionality is of a greater concern…I don’t think it’s active. It’s
unspoken, but I think it’s very prevalent. Let’s say you’re
building a team at a law firm, and you’re not supposed to be
thinking along those lines, but I think there is an ever-present
thought at the associate level that you’re concerned, “Are
they’re going to be sticking around?”
–Adam, attorney

12
Implications
‣  Class still plays a meaningful role in explaining who
gets hired into top law jobs (Smigel 1963)
‣  Class differences are not due to solely differences
in education or professional experience (Farkas
1996) or self-selection; employers actively
discriminate based on applicants’ social class
signals
‣  But the effect of class is intimately intertwined with
gender; being upper-class significantly helped men,
but did not help women
‣  Higher-class women face a pre-motherhood,
commitment penalty