Neha Gondal, Institute Junior Fellow, Gives April 6, 2016 Meet Our Fellows Talk

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM on Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Refreshments to follow
Hariri Institute for Computing
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180

Who does Academic Inequality Hurt more? An Examination of Academic Hiring Networks by Professorial Rank, Gender, and Discipline

Neha Gondal
Junior Faculty Fellow, Hariri Institute for Computing
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, College of Arts & Sciences

With an introduction given by Alya Guseva, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, College of Arts & Sciences

Abstract: Academia is a durable system of inequality where faculty members’ career prospects are deeply circumscribed by the status of the department where they received their doctoral degree. Research demonstrates that students of highly ranked departments tend to monopolize the job market whereas upward mobility for graduates of lower ranked schools is scarce. Despite what we know about the hierarchical nature of academia, it is unclear if prestige-based inequality hurts some groups of scholars more than others. Using a network analytic approach, I examine if the effect of academic prestige hierarchies varies by professorial rank and gender across four disciplines: Business, Computer Science, History, and Sociology. On the basis of rigorous statistical models, I find that (1) Reputation-based US News rankings are a far superior predictor of hiring networks than objective NRC rankings, (2) Social sciences are more status conscious than other disciplines, (3) As compared to men, doctoral prestige has a considerably stronger effect on the job prospects of women, especially in Computer Science and Business, (4) Women are also more likely than men to be judged on the basis of their alma mater’s performance on objective criteria like citation and publication records and; (5) Male full professors are least vulnerable to the prestige of their doctoral degree. By comparison, female full professors’ jobs are closely connected to the reputation of their degree-granting department.

Bio: Neha Gondal was selected as an Institute Junior Faculty Fellow in fall 2015. She is an assistant professor in the sociology department. Prior to joining Boston University, Professor Gondal served as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and School of Communication at The Ohio State University for two years. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Rutgers University in 2013 and her M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics in 2005. She uses quantitative and mathematical techniques to study culture and stratification through the lens of social networks. She is particularly interested in investigating how micro-level cultural and structural processes concatenate to generate macro-level network structures.