First-Generation Students, College Majors, and Gendered Pathways.

Emerging literatures have highlighted the social- and resource-related inequalities among first-generation college students. Less attention has been devoted to the curricular pathways (i.e., college majors) these students follow and their potentially gendered character. We build on educational inequality and gender literatures in this article, and arguments surrounding habitus and class-based dispositions to address this gap. Our analyses draw on several waves of the Education Longitudinal Survey (ELS-2002) merged with national data on sex composition of fields of study. Our results suggest unique pathways in college for first-generation compared to continuing-generation students. Specifically, first-generation students are more likely to choose occupationally specific "applied" majors than their continuing-generation counterparts. Modeling by gender reveals little to moderate variation between first- and continuing-generation students' representation in female-dominated majors. These patterns generally hold for 2- and 4-year college going samples. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these findings for educational inequality, eventual job returns, and occupational mobility.

First-generation inequality and college integration.

Institutional integration has long been an important focus in literatures on inequality, education and mobility. Building on this work and drawing from multi-wave survey and records data from a large public university, the analyses we offer in this article provide unique and systematic comparative tests of first- versus continuing-generation inequalities in integration, disaggregated by academic versus social types, and with attention to other potentially influential status attributes. Our findings reveal: (1) clear overall inequalities in campus integration for first-generation students that cut across gender and race/ethnic lines; (2) a higher likelihood of employment among first-generation students-employment that tends to detract from integration opportunities; and (3) especially pronounced inequalities when it comes to forms of academic and social integration that entail bureaucratic- and resource-related barriers. We discuss the implications for understanding inequality and the first-generation experience in higher education and for more general sociological conceptions of institutional integration and mobility.

Workplace financial transparency and Job distress.

Social scientists have long been interested in questions of organizational culpability, workers' rights, and workplace equity. This study focuses on a particularly important aspect of managerial practice-financial transparency-and its implications for job-related distress. Drawing on 2011 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey data, we interrogate the transparency-distress relationship and whether it is mediated or moderated by other organizational dynamics, such as managerial relations. Our hierarchical analyses of nearly 20,000 workers across over 2,000 workplace establishments reveal that managerial communication and trust surrounding organizational financial transparency reduces job distress-an ameliorating effect that is both markedly robust and stronger in firms with limited collective bargaining coverage. Positive supervisory appraisals serve as a major mechanism underlying this relationship, with job security and organizational commitment playing a more moderate role. We conclude by highlighting our core findings in these regards and especially the centrality of social-interactional factors above and beyond monetary considerations.

Race, ageism and the slide from privileged occupations.

The sociological literature on workplace inequality has been relatively clear regarding racial disparities and ongoing vulnerabilities to contemporary structural and employer biases. We still know little, however, about the consequences of age and ageism for minority workers and susceptibilities to downward mobility. Coupling insights regarding race with recent work on employment-based age discrimination, we interrogate in this article African Americans and Whites, aged 55 and older, and the extent to which they experience job loss across time. Our analyses, beyond controlling for key background attributes, distinguish and disaggregate patterns for higher and lower level status managers and professionals and for men and women. Results, derived from data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, reveal unique and significant inequalities. Relative to their White and gender specific counterparts, older African American men and women experience notably higher rates of downward mobility-downward mobility that is not explained by conventional explanations (i.e., human capital credentials, job/labor market characteristics, etc.). Such inequalities are especially pronounced among men and for those initially occupying higher status white-collar managerial and professional jobs compared to technical/skilled professional and blue-collar "first line" supervisors. We tie our results to contemporary concerns regarding ageism in the workplace as well as minority vulnerability. We also suggest an ageism-centered corrective to existing race and labor market scholarship.

End of an era? Managerial losses of African American and Latinos in the public sector.

In this article, we examine whether "new governance" reforms in public sector work over the last two decades have generated managerial wage losses for African Americans and Latinos. Findings from Integrated Public Use Micro-Series data across three time points indicate that the new "business logic" encompassing, most notably, increased employer discretion has progressively disadvantaged African American and Latino men and women relative to their White and gender counterparts. Indeed, for both African Americans and Latinos in the managerial ranks, relative parity in wages that were witnessed in the public sector progressively eroded between 2000 and 2010. Qualifications to these findings indicate that levels of inequality become pronounced for African Americans, and more so among men than women. We discuss the historical niche status of public sector work for racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. and the importance of conducting further analyses of the public sector because of its fluid nature as a locus of racial stratification.