Abstract
Although sociologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the processes and patterns associated with work (both paid and unpaid), it is crucial to bridge that with the extensive research that documents how work is constructed through racial, gendered, and classed practices. Sociological thinkers have offered important empirical contributions that highlight how intersections of race, gender, and class shape how work is defined, who has access to it, and what rewards (if any) derive from it. However, it is also necessary to consider how work is changing for a technologically driven, global economy and to explore how these intersections of race, gender, and class matter in that context. Research that pursues this direction will make important and timely contributions to both areas.
Keywords
Introduction
The study of work has a long history in sociology, covered by early social thinkers ranging from W.E.B. DuBois to Max Weber to Harriet Martineau. Sociologists have long noted that work is not just a matter of economic activity but a social arrangement that conveys legitimacy, power, and even citizenship to various segments of the population. These insights have particular resonance today, as contemporary sociologists now study work arrangements that are frequently more precarious and uncertain even as the pool of available workers has become increasingly more racially diverse. These changes open up a space for vibrant, innovative sociological research that focuses on work while considering how it is structured by intersections of race, gender, and class.
In this feature review, I consider how the sociology of work has benefited from research by intersectional scholars who emphasize how race, gender, and class inform various aspects of professional work. Although “mainstream” sociology of work has not necessarily always incorporated racial or gendered critiques, researchers drawing from intersectional paradigms have been able to document the nuanced inequalities that work perpetuates and reflects. I also discuss how this research can offer important contributions for assessing the current economic landscape and the implications these intersections have for work in an era of declining unionization, growing income inequality, and an increasingly thin social safety net.
Race, Gender, and Class in Various Professions
Many sociologists who study race have conducted research that explores the varied experiences that workers of color have in different occupational settings. These studies provide important insights into how work creates varied outcomes depending on the workers in question. Traditional theories of work suggest that it can provide economic stability, personal fulfillment, and upward mobility for employees. Indeed, none other than Karl Marx (1959) argued that humans were intrinsically motivated by a desire to reshape and influence their environments through work (though he contended that this desire was perverted by capitalist forces that abused workers and extracted their labor through exploitative processes).
However, mainstream theories have not always attended to the ways that the processes, outcomes, and results of work are fundamentally shaped by race, gender, and class. Insights from intersectionality theory provide a theoretical framework for assessing how race, gender, class, and other identities can shape the ways some groups experience work. In her pivotal book Black Feminist Thought, Collins (2000) was critical of second-wave feminist arguments that women can find a pathway to gender equity by engaging in paid work, considering that an intersectional analysis indicates that Black women have historically engaged in paid work for centuries without the accompanying dignity, equity, or independence such work arguably should provide. In fact, for many Black women, work has been a way of maintaining their economic precarity, as rampant racial and gender discrimination meant that they were shunted into low-wage jobs doing domestic work or sharecropping. Collins’s (2000) arguments show how these overlapping identities both create unequal work opportunities for Black women and perpetuate their economic disadvantage.
Since the publication of Collins’s (2000) book, other researchers have followed her lead to consider work from an intersectional perspective. Many of these studies examined how intersections of race, gender, and class affect workers in specific professions, among them attorneys, domestic workers, teachers, and others (Flores 2017; Garcia-Lopez 2008; Romero 1992). Overall, these studies give a broader, more comprehensive understanding of how various groups bring different insights, skills, and assets to their jobs. However, they also indicate that certain work can marginalize workers of color in various ways.
For instance, research on women of color in the legal profession highlights the ways assumptions embedded into this field about the perception of an “ideal lawyer” can undermine and disadvantage them. In a study of Chicana attorneys, Garcia-Lopez (2008) found that they were less likely than their white colleagues to be assigned lucrative cases that carried greater economic and occupational rewards. She also documented that these lawyers faced stereotypes in that they were frequently assumed to be clients or lower level court workers (e.g., stenographers, court reporters) than attorneys. As a consequence, many of these attorneys responded by channeling their energies into legal action on behalf of underserved minority communities. In some cases, they even left the firms that underused their skills, choosing instead to launch their own firms in order to become forceful advocates for communities of color and to escape the marginalization they experience.
In a more recent study of Black women attorneys, Melaku (2019) found some similarities between their experiences and those of the Chicana lawyers Garcia-Lopez (2008) studied. As is the case for their Chicana counterparts, Black women also do not fit the assumed image of the prototypical attorney. Consequently, they too were not often assigned to the most lucrative, prestigious cases, were frequently isolated from colleagues and partners, and faced serious difficulties forming relationships with potential mentors. Although Melaku did not report patterns of respondents’ launching their own firms, she did find that the exclusion and marginalization Black women encountered in this profession could make ascension and mobility very difficult.
Other studies that examined how intersections of race, gender, and class influence work outcomes focused on small business workers and entrepreneurs. In a particularly innovative study, Kang (2003) considered how these overlapping categories differentially affect Korean American women working in nail salons. Building on Hochschild’s (1988) concept of emotional labor, Kang contended that these women workers do “body labor,” whereby “workers attend to the physical comfort and appearance of the customers, through direct contact with the body . . . and by attending to the feelings involved with these practices” (p. 20). Yet Kang also showed that intersections matter here, with workers doing a more expressive labor for upper class white women clients that allowed them to feel pampered and cared for. In contrast, Korean American workers offered Black working-class women courteous, brisk service that aimed to offset potential interracial tensions and long-term frictions.
Studies that use intersectional framing to assess the work done in small businesses find that entrepreneurship is also shaped by these factors. Valdez’s (2011) book on Latinx business owners shows that basic components of entrepreneurship—market, social, and government capital—are formed by these intersections in ways that differentiate these entrepreneurs’ experiences from those commonly covered in the existing literature. Using this intersectional approach, Valdez showed that intersections of race and gender (as well as embeddedness in an ethnic community) can give rise to certain types of social capital that assist entrepreneurs.
Overall, these studies further develop Collins’s (2000) early claim that race, gender, and class create divergent occupational experiences. This research indicates that these intersections leave Chicana and Black female attorneys subject to additional struggles that stymie advancement in the legal field (Garcia-Lopez 2008; Melaku 2019). Small businesses present their own complications, with workers differentially structuring their labor as well as their access to various kinds of capital (Kang 2008; Valdez 2011). Across the board, however, these studies illuminate why and how we see women of color underrepresented in high-status jobs and how even entrepreneurship presents constraints.
Intersecting Factors across Occupations
An additional line of research eschews the focus on specific occupations in order to give a broader overview of how intersecting factors inform workers across multiple fields. In an early review of the existing literature on this topic, Browne and Misra (2003) examined whether the research in the sociology of work supports intersectional theories. Their assessment of this research yielded several provocative findings. In reviewing the existing studies on wage inequality, stereotyping and discrimination, and immigration and domestic labor, Browne and Misra (2003) documented that the premises put forth by intersectional theorists have merit. Groups that are multiply disadvantaged by virtue of their race and gender (e.g., women of color) experience wage gaps and earn less than their white counterparts. Employers also show a preference for immigrant women of color for domestic work, which is frequently low paid and comes with few benefits.
Importantly, though Browne and Misra (2003) considered the available literature up to that point, it is noteworthy that many of the patterns they identified still persist. Current data indicate that although the gender wage gap between white women and white men means that white women earn 79 cents for every dollar earned by white men, Black women earn 65 cents and Latinas only 54 cents (Hegewisch and Hartmann 2018). Furthermore, men of color experience a wage gap too. As of 2015, Black men earned 22 percent less than their white counterparts even after controlling for education, region, and work experience (Wilson and Rodgers 2016). These disparities are exacerbated by union decline, patterns of social closure, and outright employer discrimination (Roscigno 2007; Rosenfeld 2014; Royster 2003).
Employer preferences for women of color in domestic service jobs also persist today (Shierholz 2013). Immigrant women in particular remain disproportionately represented in this work, which still confers few benefits and low wages and is by design excluded from the protections established by many labor laws and federal regulations (Katznelson 2005). The low pay associated with this work (median wage of $10.21 per hour) contributes to the economic instability many employees experience, demonstrating the ways race, gender, class, and nationality are all interconnected.
Roscigno’s (2007) research also examines intersections of race and gender in a variety of occupations. In a study of claims brought before the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, he showed that in professional and managerial occupations, Black women face specific difficulties beyond what their white female and Black male peers encounter. In particular, office rules are applied more harshly to Black women than to other groups, making it harder to remain in these jobs. When it comes to Black men, Mong and Roscigno (2009) showed that rules are also selectively applied in ways that make it easier to deny them promotions or terminate them from jobs. This work echoes a study by Moss and Tilly (1996), showing that one way employers discriminate against Black men involves denying employment opportunities on the basis of their perception that these workers lack the “soft skills” (congeniality, amiability, approachability) that are essential for success and advancement.
Studies that examine intersecting factors across occupations offer further insights into how these issues matter on a macro level. The studies that address how race, gender, and class shape workers’ experiences in various professions are useful for documenting how certain groups are less likely to encounter opportunities, mentorship, and social support in the workplace. The research that builds on these studies to consider these issues at a broad level offers insights into how these challenges have measurable documented consequences. Browne and Misra’s (2003) review of the literature in this area shows how these intersections create economic disparities and leave women of color with fewer financial resources and lower wages. Other studies add to these findings by showing that not only do these intersections adversely affect women of color, but they also reproduce economic disadvantages for racial minority men in the workplace (Wilson and Rodgers 2016). Overall, the studies that examine these intersections represent an important strand of the sociological research on work. They provide a nuanced assessment of how work creates varied outcomes for different groups.
Directions for Future Research
Given that there has been a relatively long tradition of intersectional research that focuses on paid employment as well as entrepreneurship, it might seem that this subfield of sociology has exhaustively considered how race, gender, and class shape work. But there are additional areas sociologists can consider to flesh out more fully how work, as currently organized, both reflects and is shaped by these overlapping intersections. In particular, future researchers should consider the way organizations that structure work are themselves informed by racial, gendered, and classed processes. Additionally, there is room to assess how these organizations create occupational outcomes that differ for various groups and how those variations may be explained more precisely by attending to these intersecting criteria.
Inequality Regimes
Joan Acker (2006) offered a theoretical approach for thinking about the ways organizations themselves are grounded in intersectional processes. Building on her influential theory of gendered organizations (Acker 1990), in the theory of inequality regimes Acker (2006) contended that organizations are fundamentally shaped by racial, gendered, and classed processes. In an extensive review of existing literature, Acker (2006) argued that several basic organizational functions are intrinsically informed by processes that maintain various types of inequality. When these processes become embedded in organizational structures, the organizations themselves become inequality regimes wherein workers are hierarchically slotted into different positions and roles.
By way of example, most organizations follow certain processes by which they hire employees. But in the modern economy, hiring outcomes are increasingly driven by social networks and relationships (Gershon 2016). In high-status occupations, candidates who apply for positions without inside connections to hiring managers are often immediately disregarded (Rivera 2013). These processes occur in lower status jobs as well, as Royster (2003) also showed that Black men seeking skilled work are also often overlooked when their connections privilege white referrals. Thus, Acker (2006) wrote that “hiring through social networks is one of the ways in which gender and racial inequalities are maintained in organizations” (p. 450).
Other organizational processes function to maintain additional inequalities. Wage setting allows employers to decide the value of certain work, ensuring that some occupations will yield greater salaries and wages than others. This easily serves to reinforce class disparities, as work that employers consider more valuable will be more highly compensated and rewarded. However, Acker (2006) also noted that this process lends itself easily to perpetuating gender disparities as well. The work that women do has long been regarded as less valuable, important, and necessary than work predominantly performed by men (Reskin and Roos 1990). Consequently, when organizations engage in wage setting, they are engaging in inequality regimes that maintain gendered and class inequalities.
Although Acker (2006) did not discuss it in her article, it is not hard to consider how wage setting could reproduce racial inequalities as well. As Browne and Misra (2003) noted, employers tend to prefer immigrant women (often those of color) for domestic and home health care work. These jobs are at the lower end of the health care hierarchy, and workers are paid significantly less than doctors, nurses, and technicians. Although it is certainly true that home health care workers, nurses’ aides, and jobs of this ilk require less training, credentialing, and education than other positions in the medical field, it is also the case that employers’ preference for immigrant women of color for these jobs helps maintain racial inequalities along with class-based and gendered ones.
Finally, the framework of inequality regimes is useful for thinking through the ways organizations legitimize and justify routine acts of racial bias, hostility, and mistreatment. Acker (2006) argued that everyday organizational practices can also be sites of racial inequality. In a recent study of Black workers in the health care industry, I found that informal interactions with colleagues were often a source of racial harassment for Black nurses (Wingfield 2019). Coworkers would frequently make explicitly or implicitly racist remarks to Black nurses, ranging from open defenses of the Confederacy (and its regime of racial terror) to likening colleagues to cleaning staff members. Although these exchanges were not formally or officially structured by the facilities where respondents worked, these routine conversations and interactions became an inequality regime wherein racial differences were solidified, as Black workers in the nursing profession were regularly reminded that many of their colleagues did not view them as equals.
Relational Inequality Theory
Building on Acker’s (2006) work, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt (2019) also called for a more thorough investigation of the ways organizations matter in shaping occupational outcomes. They too contended that it is necessary for researchers to assess ways organizations themselves are foundational in shaping and perpetuating inequality, and they noted that this is an area from which the sociology of work would particularly benefit. However, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt developed these ideas more fully with the concept of relational inequality theory (RIT), which emphasizes not just the importance of centralizing organizational processes but considering how variation among organizations will lead to variations in outcomes, even within the same field.
Pulling from a wide range of studies in the sociology of work tradition, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt (2019) offered many persuasive examples of why it matters both to consider organizations as central figures in perpetuating inequality and to be mindful of how organizational variations lead to divergent outcomes. By way of one example, they cited Katherine Kellogg’s (2011) study of three different teaching hospitals. Kellogg found that although these organizations were all situated in the health care industry, different responses to regulatory compliance yielded different gendered reactions. As Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt showed, these findings suggest that broad statements about wage disparities, occupational segregation, and other processes that disadvantage certain workers may be less useful than studies that compare how organizations can mediate and/or facilitate different outcomes among groups.
A key finding that emerges from this approach is Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt’s (2019) argument that focusing on organizations can also yield insights into how various inequalities are manifested not just within firms, but among firms. They noted, for instance, that many major organizations are able to maintain profitability and generate significant economic rewards by trimming costs they otherwise would need to pay. In practical terms, this occurs when organizations cut labor costs and hire part-time or contingent workers, allowing firms to reduce costs associated with health care, retirement, or other worker protections afforded to full-time employees rather than contractors. However, because organizations still need workers to carry out these functions, they rely on smaller firms to carry out these services. Thus, a company such as Amazon or Facebook would not hire full-time workers to perform janitorial services (thereby relieving themselves of the costs associated with this expense). But they could easily develop and maintain a contract with a cleaning firm, thus outsourcing this labor to another, smaller company. Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt (2019) noted that sociologists would do well to consider these relationships between organizations and the ways they facilitate unequal power relationships at the firm level.
Similarly to Acker (2006), Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt (2019) argued that RIT has important implications for better understanding how racial, gender, and class-based inequalities persist in work and occupations. By focusing on these processes at the organizational level, RIT is a useful theoretical tool for identifying how firms perpetuate these issues. Kellogg’s (2011) example of the differences among hospitals yields some important insights into how organizations can take a central role in shaping (or potentially reducing) gender-based inequalities. The relationships among firms can highlight how class-based disparities are perpetuated. Additionally, as race researchers have shown, focusing at the organizational level highlights how these structures can also be racialized in ways that explain differences in resources, opportunities, and rewards (Ray 2019; Wooten and Couloute 2017).
The theoretical advancements posed by Acker’s (2006) contribution of inequality regimes and Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt’s (2019) RIT offer important directions for how the sociology of work can incorporate new ideas that build on Collins’s (2000) original contributions of thinking intersectionally about various social institutions and structures. Specifically, these theoretical paradigms call for centering the role that organizations play in shaping occupational outcomes and establishing norms and practices that maintain not just racial inequalities but gendered and classed ones as well. This is an important new direction in this research because it calls attention to the meso-level structures that play an important role in shaping occupational outcomes. These organizations can act at a mediating level to allocate resources, maintain hierarchies, and establish culture and norms. Thus, sociologists who attend to how organizational practices are developed and maintained can highlight some of the key processes that perpetuate and reproduce racial, gendered, and classed inequalities.
Contemporary Changes: Work in the Neoliberal Economy
The preceding sections discuss how researchers can build on new theoretical developments to consider how race, gender, and class are affecting work and professions. The focus on organizations as not just racialized entities but spaces that are also gendered and classed offers important directions for understanding how these intersections are present in various professions and occupations (Acker 2006; Ray 2019; Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019). However, there are also reasons to think about structural changes that are occurring at the systematic level in ways that have an impact on both organizations and the workers within them.
The workplace today is a prime site for studying how race, gender, and class create divergent outcomes among various groups. As policy makers have noted, we now live in an era when economic inequality is rampant and the gap between the wealthiest and most Americans is significant and growing. Many workers today switch jobs multiple times, and the “career ladder” present in hierarchically structured organizations of the middle twentieth century has been replaced with a “jungle gym” in which workers often move laterally as a way of accessing better opportunities. All too frequently, however, jobs that offer the promise of upward mobility remain out of reach for many, as growing numbers of workers remain trapped in the “bad jobs” that offer meager wages, low status, few benefits, and infrequent opportunities for autonomy (Kalleberg 2003).
One way this has occurred is through the transition from a labor market that contained a relatively sizable number of full-time work options with benefits, high wages, and autonomy to a preponderance of jobs that are part-time with lower salaries, few benefits, and infrequent or nonexistent worker protections. In some cases, these jobs may allow workers significant autonomy and control over their time; and indeed, in a neoliberal economy this independence and emphasis on workers’ ability to direct their own schedules and labor is prized as advantageous. For instance, many jobs in the gig economy allow workers to dictate their own schedules and to work whenever best suits their schedules and preferences (Ravenelle 2019). However, the flip side of the rise of these jobs is that more workers are employed in positions that do not offer the economic stability necessary in an environment in which workers are increasingly responsible for retirement, health care, and other “externality costs” once assumed by corporations (Acker 2006).
We know that changing economic policies have hollowed out the middle class, worsened economic inequality, and created more instability for many U.S. citizens. However, it is also useful to consider how these shifting policies have an impact on work and the way it is organized and constructed in modern society. For instance, many workers experience heightened stress and emotional distress as a result of the uncertainty associated with work, financing retirement, and other costs that were once borne or offset by employers (Chen 2013). Cooper (2003) found that across socioeconomic levels, families report heightened levels of anxiety, uncertainty, and concern as they attempt to adapt to the pressures of a changing economy. Additionally, Silva (2013) found that among millennials, who inhabit an increasingly bleak occupational landscape, economic uncertainty leads to self-blame.
These economic inequalities exist across the board, but they also have racialized and gendered consequences. For instance, research shows conclusively that Black families hold significantly less wealth than their white counterparts (Shapiro 2005). Current estimates indicate that as of 2016, the median wealth Black families held was $17,600, compared with white families’ $171,000 (Kochhar and Cilluffo 2017). This leaves Black families less able to weather economic downturns, provide a buffer in the case of unexpected expenses, or build significant savings. Importantly, the widening gulf between “good jobs” and “bad jobs” seems unlikely to offset this racial divide. Consequently, as economic policies continue to favor private industry and public policies that make concentrate wealth in the hands of the top 1 percent of households, Black households are unlikely to be able to close the wealth gap.
Some indications of this are present when it comes to recent government policy concerning unions. Over the past several decades, much federal government policy has limited workers’ ability to organize, even though organizations are legally prohibited from curtailing employees’ efforts to do this. This antiunion activity can have outsize consequences for Black Americans, however. Rosenfeld (2014) showed that the decline in unionization is directly linked to growing wage inequality between Black and white workers, specifically among Black men. Thus, as union membership falls to all-time lows (currently at 11 percent, down from 20 percent in 1983), this component of the modern economy creates both economic and racial consequences that are worth addressing. It is not just that the decline of unions has lowered wages for workers across the board (though this is in fact the case) but that this particular feature of the neoliberal economy is simultaneously worsening racial disparities as well (Western and Rosenfeld 2011).
Other components of the modern economy and current-day work reproduce gendered and racial differences. With sociologists, economists, and journalists calling important attention to the fact that many companies do not offer paid leave for new parents, some companies have slowly begun to recognize that this is an important and necessary benefit that can aid tremendously in retaining workers. Corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Reddit now offer their workers paid parental leave in addition to assistance with adoption and infertility treatment. In a move that echoes some of the policies of states with more liberal social welfare benefits, Netflix provides new parents with a year of paid leave, while Airbnb provides birth parents with 22 weeks of paid leave (Molla 2018). Given that technology companies face a gender gap in their workforce, policies such as these are intended to create a more equitable environment for parents (especially women) and to offset some of the barriers that can disadvantage women in the “greedy professions” that demand exorbitant amounts of labor and time.
However, the impact of policies such as these would benefit from an intersectional analysis as well. Sociologists have shown that although technology companies in particular are beginning to do a better job attracting women into entry-level positions, differences emerge in where women of different races are tracked within these companies. White women are more likely to be channeled into managerial roles than women of color (Alegria 2019), and racial differences emerge in how well women are perceived to “fit” potential teams in tech companies (Chavez 2016). Additionally, women of color are typically overrepresented in hourly wage jobs relative to salaried positions. This means that a company that offers extensive parental leave benefits to its professional workers could potentially still reproduce racial divisions among women workers, if those most likely to be offered and take advantage of these benefits are white women. An additional direction for sociology of work research, then, is to use an intersectional approach to consider how the push toward policies designed to create more gender equity may still reproduce racial hierarchies and inequalities.
Summary
To conclude, in this article I examined the history of intersectional research on work and occupations and considered future directions for this scholarship. There is a substantial history of race scholars’ considering how intersections of gender and class inform occupational experiences. Stemming from Collins’s (2000) original theorizing, these studies indicate that gender, race, and class influence the experiences workers have in specific occupations (including but not limited to attorneys, entrepreneurs, and educators) but also at the aggregate level, leading to wage discrimination, employer preferences, and the concentration of women of color in low-wage, low-status work. Although many studies emphasize how these intersections create particularly disadvantageous outcomes for women of color, research also indicates that race, gender, and class overlap to create distinct outcomes for men of color as well, including but not limited to discriminatory processes in hiring and promotion. Overall, this research documents that attention to race, gender, and class is necessary to gain a more complete picture of the challenges and opportunities present for various groups in the workplace.
Second, I consider future directions for sociology of work research in efforts to incorporate the insights from intersectional theory. One such direction is to consider the insights from Acker’s (2006) theory of inequality regimes. This theoretical approach centralizes organizations and their basic functions by considering how organizational procedures maintain various inequalities. Wage setting, everyday interactions, basic supervisory practices, and hiring decisions are all routine organizational procedures that also serve to perpetuate racial, gendered, and class-based inequities. Future studies might highlight an organizational setting (or several) to assess how their normative practices maintain these inequalities.
Similarly, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt’s (2019) RIT builds on Acker’s (2006) arguments to consider how organizational variation can create different outcomes. Like Acker (2006), Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt (2019) called for more attention to organizations. However, they also suggested that researchers identify the connections among organizations, the fields in which they are situated, and institutionalized practices that can engender varying outcomes that better highlight the social processes associated with work (and how these processes yield outcomes that can vary depending on the race, gender, and class of the workers in question). This might mean that sociology of work researchers compare how different organizations in the same field establish practices that lead to raced, gendered, and classed outcomes and whether and how these outcomes vary by organization.
Third and finally, an additional direction for future study of the sociology of work involves adopting a broader perspective to examine how macro-level systemic changes are restructuring the way work is done and to consider the implications of this from an intersectional perspective. Work now is increasingly more insecure, uncertain, and contingent than it has been in previous years. Much of this is linked to the decline in “good jobs” and the growing proliferation of “bad jobs” that provide far less economic stability. These systemic changes are facilitated by multiple factors, including but not limited to the shrinking of the public sector, declining unionization, and the massive transfer of social support benefits (such as health care and retirement accounts) from organizations to individuals. The result is record levels of inequality not seen since the gilded age.
Consequently, it would be useful for future scholars to consider how the issues created by the new economy, as well as the policy solutions set forth to solve them, would be better addressed by incorporating an intersectional approach. Racial wealth disparities, for instance, are not likely to be improved as long as economic inequality continues to worsen, thus indicating that economic problems that are exacerbated in the current economy are also racial ones as well. Furthermore, solutions such as paid parental leave, while designed to improve gender issues in the modern economy, can potentially create opportunities for white women while excluding women and nonbinary people of color.
Sociologists who study race have long brought attention to bear on the ways that gender and class co-constitute racial barriers in the workplace. These insights matter because they provide a more comprehensive understanding of just how various groups face unequal access and opportunities in the workplace and how work itself can have different meaning and significance depending on a worker’s social location. As work becomes more stratified and unequal in the new economy, and as organizations take on an increasingly central role in determining how, when, and under what conditions work is done, it will be all the more important for sociologists to consider these factors going forward.