******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, Nov. 9, 2018
Devah Pager, Who Documented Race Bias in Job Market, Dies at 46
By Katharine Q. Seelye
Devah Pager, a Harvard sociologist best known for rigorously measuring
and documenting racial discrimination in the labor market and in the
criminal justice system, died on Nov. 2 at her home in Cambridge, Mass.
She was 46.
Michael Shohl, her husband, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
In her seminal work, Dr. Pager, who was the Peter and Isabel Malkin
professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard and a professor of sociology at the university, documented what
she called the “powerful effects of race” on hiring decisions, which she
said contributed to persistent inequality. Employers, she found, were
more likely to hire a white man, even if he had a felony conviction,
than a black man with no criminal record.
“This suggests that being black in America today is essentially like
having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding
employment,” Dr. Pager said in a video interview with the Stanford
Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Her finding, which appeared first in her doctoral dissertation in 2003
at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, surprised many.
“I am a scholar of race relations,” William Julius Wilson, the Harvard
sociologist and author of “The Declining Significance of Race,” said in
an email, “and prior to Devah’s research, I would not have predicted
this finding.”
Her research quickly found its way into the 2004 presidential campaign.
Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and at one time the leading
contender for the Democratic nomination, often cited it, saying he was
determined to combat the “institutional racism” it revealed.
With the subject in the air, and the recognition that ex-convicts were
less likely to commit more crimes if they had a job, President George W.
Bush created a program to help newly released prisoners re-enter the job
market. White House aides said at the time that Dr. Pager’s study had
helped shape the plan.
Her research was remarkable enough for having such an immediate effect
on public policy. It was all the more unusual for having originated as a
dissertation; graduate students are not often able to undertake field
experiments on such a scale. But she cobbled together funding from five
sources, including the National Science Foundation, to support her work.
Her dissertation became a book, “Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work
in an Era of Mass Incarceration” (2007).
“By her mid-30s, she had established herself as a historic figure in the
scientific study of racial discrimination,” Mitchell Duneier, chairman
of the sociology department at Princeton, said in a telephone interview.
Her work was so well regarded that she had been on track to be elected
to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences — a rare achievement in
any case but even rarer for someone in sociology, for a woman and for
one so young. Upon her death, her name was removed from the ballot
because membership cannot be given posthumously.
“Had she not died, she was a sure bet to be elected,” Robert M. Hauser,
who was one of Dr. Pager’s advisers on her dissertation at Wisconsin,
said in a telephone interview.
Devah Iwalani Pager was born on March 1, 1972, in Honolulu. Her father,
David Pager, is professor emeritus of computer sciences at the
University of Hawaii. Her mother, Sylvia (Topor) Pager, who died in
2015, was a pediatrician.
In addition to her husband and her father, she is survived by her son,
Atticus, who is 5, and two brothers, Chet and Sean. She and Mr. Shohl
were married in 2016, after Dr. Pager’s diagnosis.
She grew up in Hawaii, where she attended the private Punahou School.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of
California, Los Angeles, in 1993; a master’s in sociology from the
University of Cape Town in 1996; a second master’s from Stanford in
1997; and a doctorate in sociology from Wisconsin in 2002, before
becoming a Fulbright scholar in Paris.
Dr. Pager became attuned to racial issues when she left Hawaii, which
has a high rate of interracial marriage, for Los Angeles, which she
found more segregated. “When you grow up with that being normal,” she
told The New York Times in 2004, “everything else seems strange — and
wrong.”
That gave her the idea to try to isolate the effect of a felony
conviction on job applicants. She recruited two teams of young,
well-groomed, well-spoken college men of the same height — one team
black, the other white — and gave them identical résumés as they applied
for 350 entry-level jobs in Milwaukee. The applicants took turns saying
they had served an 18-month sentence for cocaine possession.
Dr. Pager said that even she had been surprised by the results: A
follow-up telephone survey showed that blacks who said they had a
criminal record had a callback rate of 5 percent, and blacks who said
they did not had a rate of 14 percent. For whites, the rates were 17
percent for those who said they had a criminal record and 34 percent for
those who said they did not.
Before Dr. Pager’s research, there was no way to know for sure why
ex-convicts had such trouble getting jobs, said Prof. David B. Grusky of
Stanford, who worked with Dr. Pager.
“What Devah showed, contrary to this view, is that employers do indeed
discriminate,” he said in an email. “And not just a little bit on the
margins.”
She went on to replicate these findings in 2004 in a similar study in
New York City. At the time, she was teaching at Princeton and worked
with Bruce Western, another Princeton sociologist. This time, the teams
applied for 3,500 jobs.
Their findings gave momentum to the so-called ban-the-box movement,
which urged employers to eliminate the box on job applications asking
whether the applicant had a felony record. Several major employers,
including Walmart, Home Depot and Koch Industries, have now removed the
question from their job applications.
“Ultimately, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a
guidance saying that a criminal record by itself shouldn’t disqualify
people,” said Dr. Western, who now teaches at Columbia and had been in
the midst of another project with Dr. Pager when she died. “There was a
direct line from Devah’s work to that guidance.”
Dr. Pager was a mentor to scores of students and continued to teach
until three weeks before her death.
Her husband said she loved to ride bikes, sing and dance and frequently
organized karaoke nights. Her signature song was the anthem popularized
by Gloria Gaynor: “I Will Survive.”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com