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Welcome to Berkeley Sociology

Berkeley’s Sociology Department is known around the world for its excellence in research and teaching. Our faculty advance cutting edge research and teach in most sociological specialities. Our PhDs are leaders in universities and research centers across the US and in many other countries. And our BAs populate the ranks of innumerable professions, bringing with them the skills and special perspective of Berkeley sociology. 

We are proud to make these contributions from the world’s leading public university. At Berkeley, we combine intellectual rigor with a commitment to public service through our research, teaching, and service on campus and beyond. 

For the past six decades, Berkeley’s Sociology Department has consistently been ranked among the world’s top sociology departments. Our graduate program is ranked #1 in the latest U.S. News and World Report, and our undergrad degree is currently the best in the US according to College Factual and features on Grad Reports’ Best College List 2020.

Faculty Spotlight
Irene Bloemraad
Class of 1951 Professor
Immigration, political sociology, race & ethnicity, social movements, nationalism, research methods, Canada
Armando Lara-Millan
Associate Professor
Economy & Society, Law & Society, Medicine, Historical Sociology, and Urban Ethnography.
Heather A. Haveman
Professor
Organizational theory, economic sociology, historical sociology, entrepreneurship, organizational demography, gender, careers and social mobility
In Memoriam
Albert Einstein (1941)
Albert Einstein (1941)
EMERITUS PROFESSOR

Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…

Faculty Publishing
[homepage] colloquium

Departmental Colloquium Series

Heather Haveman, "Shades of Gender in Employee Discourse"

Monday, March 18th, 2024 at 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building & Via Zoom

Abstract:

In many organizations, ideal workers are conceived of as male, which disadvantages female employees. To investigate this phenomenon, we integrate cultural theory, structural linguistics, and natural-language processing to capture shades of gender in cultural conceptions of workers and organizations. We analyze large-scale data on employee discourse about organizations and use word embeddings to extract a gender axis in semantic space. We study tech firms, which have highly masculine cultures, and analyze associations in tech-worker discourse between the gender axis and cultural constructs related to gender. We find that discourse about tech firms is sometimes “degendered”: the stereotypically male traits independence and leadership competence appear gender-neutral, while instrumental competence appears female-shaded. Although discourse about tech firms is generally male-shaded, there is considerable variation across employees and firms. Male employees, less-satisfied employees, and those in privately held and smaller firms use more male-shaded language; language-use differences between men and women are wider among less-satisfied employees and those in publicly traded and larger firms. Our approach to quantifying shades of gender in organizational cultures moves us closer to determining how those cultures promote or reduce inequality and exclusion. It also points the way to quantifying other dimensions of organizational culture content at scale.