Congratulations to Professor Sharla Alegria who recently received the Outstanding Article Award in her co-authored scholarly article titled "Gender Pay Gaps in US Federal Science Agencies: An Organizational Approach" in the American Journal of Sociology. This award honours scholarly articles with excellence of writing and discussion in a sociological topic. Professor Alegria, alongside co-authors Laurel Smith-Doerr, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Kaye Husbands Fealing, and Debra Fitzpatrick received the award in the section of Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Professor Alegria is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, with teaching responsibilities on the St. George campus. Professor Alegria's research focuses on work, race, class, gender, science, and technology.
We have posted the abstract and the citation of the article below. The article can be accessed through U of T Libraries:
Laurel Smith-Doerr, Sharla Alegria, Kaye Husbands Fealing, Debra Fitzpatrick, and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, "Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies: An Organizational Approach," American Journal of Sociology 125, no. 2 (September 2019): 534-576.
This study advances understanding of gender pay gaps by examining organizational variation. The gender pay gap literature supplies mechanisms but does not attend to organizational variation; the gender and science literature provides insights on the role of masculinist culture in disciplines but misses pay gap mechanisms. A data set of federal workers allows comparison of men and women in the same jobs and workplaces. Agencies associated with traditionally masculine (engineering, physical sciences) and gender-neutral (biological, interdisciplinary sciences) fields differ. Pay-gap mechanisms vary: human capital differences explain a larger share in gender-neutral agencies, while at male-typed agencies men are frequently paid more than women within the same job. Although beyond the federal workers’ standardized pay scale, some interdisciplinary agencies more often pay men off grade, leading to higher earnings for men. Our theory of organizational variation helps explain local agency variation and how pay practices matter in specific organizational contexts.