There is a new and excellent paper by Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez on this topic:
Unlike gender or race, class has rarely been the focus of research or DEI efforts in US elite jobs. Should it be so? In this paper, we document a large phase gap in career progression in one labor market: US tenure-track academia. We use parents’ education to proxy for socioeconomic background, comparing the career outcomes of people who earned their PhDs at the same institution and field (excluding those with PhD parents). First-generation college students are 13% more likely to end up with an R1, and on average are hired at institutions ranked 9% lower, than their PhD classmates with a (non-PhD) parent. We examine three sets of methods: (1) research productivity, (2) networks, and (3) preferences. Research productivity can explain less than a third of the gap, and preferences explain nothing. Our analysis of coauthor characteristics suggests that networks may play a role. Finally, when we examine PhDs working in industry we find a class gap in salary and management roles that extends across the workforce. This means that the class gap in career advancement exists in other US occupations beyond education.
Here’s Stansbury’s first tweet storm in the paper. By Aidan Finley.
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