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Over the last decade, consumer-driven health care elevated customer satisfaction to be the central mission of hospital care. Satisfaction surveys and hotel-style amenities rose hand-in-hand to become central features of U.S. hospitals. This trend has done more harm than good. It focuses everyone’s attention on front-stage aspects of health care over what matters most to patients: excellent medical treatment.

As I discovered in a recent study published in Social Forces with my colleague Xinxiang Chen, satisfaction scores are driven by room and board hospitality, rather than medical quality or patient survival rates. Moreover, when hospitals face greater competition from other facilities, there is higher patient satisfaction, but lower medical quality.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the resulting Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, many in the United States have become increasingly concerned not only with police brutality, but with the impact of systemic racism in the United States.

One important aspect of systemic racism comes in the form of job quality. There are significant gaps between white and Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino/Latina, and other racial/ethnic minority workers in the United States in this regard. White workers, for instance, tend to receive better pay, more fringe benefits, and have an easier time getting hired than workers of color.

As many as 1 in 3 Americans have some type of criminal record. Many of them face multiple barriers to employment.

In 2018, 95 percent of employers conducted background checks during the hiring process, which was up from 70 percent of the employers surveyed in 2012. In addition, many state occupational licensing laws prohibit people with criminal records from joining licensed professions. These barriers, coupled with the persistent social stigma surrounding past arrest and conviction records, mean that employment prospects are grim for a substantial segment of the U.S. population.

Within this social context, the United States military happens to be one of the largest employers to regularly hire people with a criminal record. However, we know little about their lives, other than that people with a criminal record perform equally well or better than their counterparts without a criminal record.

Since the 1970s, there has been a global resurgence of sweatshop working conditions in numerous industries, from apparel to high-tech electronics to agriculture. In their attempts to improve their working conditions, however, these workers are often not struggling alone, but have a range of allies, from local labor rights and human rights organizations to social justice groups in the US and Europe.

One of the groups in the US that has been particularly successful in supporting sweatshop workers is United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), a national network of students at colleges and universities. They have helped workers in factories around the world unionize and improve their working conditions.

What may be most surprising about USAS’ strategy to many observers is that USAS does not normally use what might think is the most obvious strategy against apparel companies using sweatshop labor—the boycott. Why? Because the workers they seek to help oppose such boycotts.

On average, Muslim women work for pay less than other women around the world, but until recently, we did not know if this was also true in the United States. A study I published recently answers this question and digs into which Muslim women might be less engaged in paid work outside the home and why. I find that only visibly Muslim women, those who wear the hijab, have significantly lower employment than non-Muslim women.

Why should we care about Muslim women’s employment?

Demographers, sociologists, and economists track women’s employment, because participation in the labor force has been linked to women’s empowerment both individually and across societies. Paid work may have many downsides—especially when juggled with a disproportionate amount of care work—but in capitalist economies, it is a key component of financial independence, which has been shown to impact wellbeing. As a result, we often think of women’s employment as an indicator not just of women’s individual outcomes, but also of overall gender inequality in a society. For example, Paula England argues that the plateau in women’s entry into the labor force in the United States in the 1990s and 2010s is evidence that the gender revolution has stalled.

Since the late-twentieth century, there has been an explosion of precarious work in the U.S labor market. The precariat comprises of a diverse set of workers, including but not limited to part-time, temporary, contingent workers, and independent contractors – or freelancers.

Freelancers make up a significant part of the precarious workforce. A survey reported that out of 57 million Americans who engaged in some types of nonstandard work in 2019, around 16 million considered themselves full-time freelancers. Despite its size and importance, freelancers remain understudied relative to other segments of the precarious workforce. Additionally, while we know a great deal about how workers transition out of traditional jobs to become freelancers, movements in the opposite direction received much less attention. My recent research explores how a history of freelancing affects workers’ subsequent career prospects.

Most executives today understand that if their companies are to thrive in an increasingly competitive and dynamic marketplace, they must hire and retain the most talented employees. This has created imperatives to recruit job candidates solely on the basis of merit, and reward and promote employees based on their work performance.

Adding to these increasingly competitive pressures, companies are now at the center of intensely charged debates about racial and gender inequality. Facing a greater need than ever to demonstrate a commitment to diversity, inclusion, and racial justice, corporate executives, even those with openly progressive ethos, have struggled to rectify demographic imbalances in their organizations. For example, Google’s US workforce is just 32.0 percent female and only 3.7 percent Black, per the Google Diversity Annual Report 2020. To improve the recruitment and retention of underrepresented employees — and, importantly, to show that their decisions about whom to hire, reward, and promote are based on objective, fair, unbiased criteria — some companies have become eager to dismantle any role that bias might play in employment decisions and outcomes.

Does gender diversity make an organization more productive?

Some say yes, suggesting that gender diversity could lead to more innovative thinking and signal to stakeholders that an organization is well run. Others say no, pointing to group research showing that demographic diversity could lead to conflict and reduce team solidarity.

But while past research has been conflicting, most have looked at this question only within a single country or industry. This oversight got me thinking: could social context play a role? Social norms and regulatory context could affect people’s approaches to and attitudes toward diversity, which might, in turn, influence diversity’s organizational impact overall. 

Since the mid-twentieth century, women have entered the labor market in droves and now make up over half of the paid workforce. Still, women do a disproportionate amount of housework and childcare, despite their increasing hours spent in the labor force. Both academic research and public sentiment suggest that most people support gender equality and we just need workplace policies to catch up. But what if workplace policies are not the only barrier to progress?

Our new study in Sociological Science finds that fewer young people desire gender egalitarian arrangements—equal earning and caring roles for men and women—than conventional wisdom presumes. We analyzed almost 40 years of Monitoring the Future data to examine trends in young peoples’ division of labor preferences, an indicator of beliefs about appropriate roles for men and women in both work and family contexts.

Our study differs from prior research by evaluating perceptions of both women and men’s behavior in work and family contexts. Each year, high school seniors were instructed to imagine they were married and have one or more pre-school children. They then evaluated six distinct division of labor arrangements as not at all acceptable, somewhat acceptable, acceptable, or desirable for their future selves. This data enabled us to evaluate whose employment was prioritized, not just tolerated.