| Abstrakt: |
This article proposes a multilevel examination of the relationship between gender, PhD social capital, and employment prestige among academic professionals in the discipline of sociology. While the association between doctoral social capital and employment prestige has been documented in prior research, previous analyses have typically focused on the institutional level, and have not considered potential gender inequality in academic job attainment. Expanding on recent research, this study conceptualizes PhD social capital as deriving from a department's position in PhD exchange networks, and as granting differential access to prestigious employment opportunities. The data were manually collected from department websites and individual curricula vitae, and include 1,398 tenured and tenure-track sociology faculty housed within 60 top-ranked sociology departments. We construct a PhD exchange network between departments, based on interdepartmental hiring and placement of PhD graduates. This network is used to measure the social capital of doctoral departments where individual faculty members earned their PhD as eigenvector centrality of their doctoral department in the exchange network. Hierarchical Linear Models are estimated to examine the extent to which faculty's employment prestige is predicted by doctoral social capital and gender, and whether gender inequalities exist both in employment prestige and in its association with doctoral social capital. We find a steep hierarchy and significant gender inequality in employment prestige among sociology faculty. Female sociologists attain systematically lower employment prestige than men, even when controlling for the effect of doctoral social capital and other individual and contextual variables. The disadvantage of women in terms of academic occupational attainment remains unaltered across different departments, levels of PhD social capital, and degrees of employment prestige. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
