Gendered Parenthood Gaps in Employer-Provided Training: The Role of Immediate Supervisors

Eileen Peters, Lynn Prince Cooke, Silvia Maja Melzer

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Abstract

Powerful male actors are argued to secure workplace resources for themselves and other in-group members, contributing to workplace inequalities. We contend that, like gender, parenthood similarity in supervisor-supervisee dyads also provokes group processes, and that parenthood is superordinate to childlessness. Critically, we hypothesize how shared supervisor-supervisee parental status at its intersection with gender might intensify or offset (dis)advantage in access to workplace training. Hypotheses are tested with unique linked German employer-employee data and estimating gender-parental training differences using workplace fixed-effects regressions. Results show that while on average women train less than men and parents train more than childless workers, these effects can alter at the intersection with supervisors’ group memberships. Dyad “double jeopardy” is evident in that childless women face the greatest training disadvantages when reporting to childless female supervisors. Yet whether sharing one superordinate status offsets disadvantage of a subordinate group membership occurs only for shared parenthood. Childless men gain no advantage when reporting to a male supervisor, whereas sharing parenthood with immediate supervisors countervails disadvantage of being female for mother supervisees. We conclude that only by considering social relations at the intersection of supervisor-supervisees’ multiple categorical memberships might we better understand the relational processes sustaining or reducing workplace inequalities.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)890-903
Number of pages14
JournalEuropean Sociological Review
Volume39
Issue number6
Early online date4 Jan 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Dec 2023

Bibliographical note

Opinions expressed here reflect only the authors’ views; the Agencies are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. We are extremely grateful for the valuable feedback of Alexandra Kalev, Anja Abendroth, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Dustin Avent-Holt, Laura Lükemann, and Vincent Roscigno and other participants of the 2020 workshop “What work for better or worse? Mechanisms creating and compensating organizational inequalities” where we presented an earlier version of this study. The paper also benefited from feedback from participants at the 2020 ECSR meeting. Any errors remain our own.

Data Availability Statement

The data analyzed in this study is subject to the following licenses/restrictions: The datasets analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to data restrictions by the Federal Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung (IAB). Data are only available on request for analyses to be conducted locally at Bielefeld University in cooperation with project members.

Funding

The research was supported in part by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 680958, L. P. Cooke, PI) and with funding from the German research Foundation as part of the project “Organizational Inequalities and Interdependencies between Capabilities in Work and Personal Life: A Study of Employees in Different Work Organizations” (grant No 373090005).

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