Julie Kmec - WSU Sociology Faculty

Current Research Interests: Current Research Interests: I am currently working on four projects, each involving some aspect of race and sex stratification at work.

Project 1: Organizational Practices
Using data I collected from hospital human resource administrators, I am examining how hiring practices contribute to variation in men’s presence in hospital nursing positions as a way to gain insight into the process of sex segregation. I am also exploring the environmental and organizational features that lead to the implementation of equal opportunity and affirmative action policies in hospitals, and the effects of human resource structures on hospitals’ receipt of formal discrimination claims.

Project 2: Social Networks and Job Turnover
I am analyzing the extent to which social network use in the job attainment process affects job turnover. Specifically, I an interested in what happens when a contact and applicant share a race and when they do not and when the contact is from inside versus outside of the company.

Project 3: The Glass Ceiling and Organizational Mobility
My colleague, Elizabeth Gorman (University of Virginia), and I are collaborating on a project in which we develop a new conceptualization of the glass ceiling and measure it using data from a sample of U.S. law firms.

Project 4: Gender Differences in Work Effort and Organizational Citizenship
With Elizabeth Gorman, I am also working on a second project that investigates the gender gap in self-assessment of required work and organizational citizenship behavior. We test whether the gap in both stems from gender differences in the objective demands of jobs, from gender differences in individual ability, family and household obligations, or from beliefs about employers’ performance standards.