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In this article, we ask whether macro-level changes during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to changes in the levels of discrimination against women and Black job-seekers at the point of hire. We develop three main hypotheses: that discrimination against women and Black job-seekers increases due to a reduction in labor demand; that discrimination against women decreases due to the reduced supply of women employees and applicants; and that discrimination against Black job-seekers decreases due to increased attention toward racial inequities associated with the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020. We test these hypotheses using a correspondence audit study collected over two periods, before and during the early COVID-19 pandemic, for one professional occupation: accountants. We find that White women experience a positive change in callbacks during the pandemic, being preferred over White men, and this change is concentrated in geographic areas that experienced relatively larger decreases in women's labor supply. Black women experience discrimination pre-pandemic but receive similar callbacks to White men during the pandemic. In contrast to both White and Black women, discrimination against Black men is persistent before and during the pandemic. Our findings are consistent with the prediction of gender-specific changes in labor supply being associated with gender-specific changes in hiring discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. More broadly, our study shows how hiring decision-making is related to macro-level labor market processes.
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Emotional Labor in Everyday Resilience: Class-based Experiences of Navigating Unemployment Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S.
During the COVID-19 global health crisis, institutions, policymakers, and academics alike have called for practicing resilience to overcome its ongoing disruptions. This paper contributes a comparative study of the job search experiences of working-class and upper-middle-class job seekers, particularly in relation to their resilience practices during the pandemic. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 working-class and 11 upper-middle-class job seekers in the U.S., we unpack challenges resulting from both the pandemic and unemployment and job seekers’ novel practices of navigating these challenges in their everyday disrupted life. Job seekers’ ongoing negotiation with their resources, situations, and surroundings gives practical meanings to building everyday resilience, which we conceptualize as an ongoing process of becoming resilient. While job seekers across classes experienced similar challenges, working-class job seekers took on additional emotional labor in their everyday resilience due to their limited experience in the digital job search space, competition with higher-degree holding job seekers applying for the same jobs, limited social support networks, and at times, isolation. By foregrounding the uneven distribution of emotional labor in realizing the promise of resilience along class lines, this work cautions against the romanticization of resilience and calls for a more critical understanding of resilience in CSCW.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717186
- PAR ID:
- 10359490
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Computer supported cooperative work CSCW
- ISSN:
- 1573-7551
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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