My name is Koji Chavez and I’m an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University. My research focuses on gender and racial inequality in labor markets and in the workplace. I also teach courses on race and ethnicity, work, and research design.
Upcoming Presentations/Conferences
- Sometime August 9-13. ASA Annual Meeting, Montreal. “Diversity Disillusion: Support for Diversity Practices as a Consequence of a Processual Segregation Of Diversity Labor.”
- Sometime August 9-13. ASA Annual Meeting, Montreal. “The Great Recession and Its Aftermath: Rising Inequality in the Sociology Academic Job Market”.
Diversity Commodification in Software Engineering Hiring
I’m working with Dr. Kate Weisshaar and Tania Hutt on a number of projects. We are currently working on a paper that explores patterns of gender and racial discrimination in software engineering hiring. We argue that to understand patterns of gender and racial discrimination, we must incorporate the concept of diversity value—that is, that women and some racial minorities are valued for their contribution to organizational diversity. We theorize a process, which we call diversity commodification, by which decision-makers assign applicants diversity value and incorporate that value into their screening decisions. This study combines a large-scale audit study comparing discrimination across types of job transitions and in-depth interviews with hiring decision-makers. Katie Johnson, Anne Kavalerchik, Katie Furl, and Alyssa Browne were instrumental in keeping this project moving forward. So too have our undergraduate research assistants, including Maria Martinez, Erin Arikan, Olivia DeCrane, Olivia Christensen, Natalia Fuentes-Rohwer, Erika Ross, Maddy Ruprecht, Kemal Perdana, Lexi Hucko, and Kayla Cook. This is forthcoming at American Sociological Review, so keep an eye out for this work soon.
The Perpetuation of Diversity Practices
In-depth interviews give valuable insight into how people make hiring screening decisions and how they incorporate gender and race into those decisions. We are also finding interesting patterns in people’s reactions to diversity policies or practices depend on their position in the hiring process and in the organization as a whole. A second, purely qualitative paper focuses on the segregation of diversity labor and the consequences for the perpetuation of diversity practices. This paper draws on analysis of qualitative data from interviews with recruiters, hiring managers, and anyone else who is involved in hiring software engineers or financial analysts.
To the right is a real picture of me doing an interview. I have an excellent graduate student, Alyssa Browne, heavily involved in this project, without whom I’m not sure I could get these interviews off the ground.
Did discrimination change during the early COVID-19 pandemic? Yes, yes it did.
This figure is from a paper recently published in Work and Occupations. Kate Weisshaar, Tania Cabello-Hutt, and I find that discrimination patterns changed dramatically in the beginning of the pandemic. Our hunch is that the change in discrimination patterns corresponds to the fact that women and mothers disproportionately left the labor market compared to men and fathers. As women and mothers left, demand for women and mothers increased. We suspect that discrimination levels have returned to pre-pandemic levels given that employment rates for women and mothers have rebounded since the early pandemic time period that we study.
IU Sociology: Not the most elite, but gosh darn it we are consistent. (and our grad students get jobs!)
I’ve been cleaning Sociology department rankings over time. The National Research Council funded a project to evaluate departments in 1982 and 1993. Starting in 1995, the US News and World Report began ranking sociology departments and published new rankings in 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013, and 2017. I put together a fun visualization of the top 25 sociology departments over this time period. These rankings are probably very dumb, but the visualization is cool. And Indiana seems to have a pretty uneventful history of being in the middle of the pack for the last 40 years! Click this link to see the rankings visualized.
IU sociology is a great place to be with wonderful colleagues and graduate students. If you don’t already know!
