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The post California Labor Commissioner Assistant Chief Daniel Yu appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California workers’ rights are bolstered by some of the country’s strongest labor legislation, mandating higher minimum wages in many sectors, increased sick days, and other protections. But around the state, “you see quite a bit of suffering” among low-wage workers, Zócalo California columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews noted Wednesday night.

Mathews was moderating an event on the Capitol steps in Sacramento for the statewide Zócalo Public Square series supported by The James Irvine Foundation, “What Is a Good Job Now?” Many seemingly well-protected workers, he said, deal with wage theft, unpaid overtime, dangerous working conditions, discrimination, and rising employer retaliation.

What has to happen for laws to work on the ground, and why do they fail? The problems are complex, but the solution is usually communication and collaboration, said a panel of three speakers who focus on fairness in the workplace.

Mathews opened the discussion by asking, “What’s the gap between our legislation—our intentions, the policies we put in place—and the realities on the ground?”

Sara Fee, a founding member of Inland Empire Amazon Workers United and a warehouse worker at the Amazon air hub at the San Bernardino International Airport, said, “The gap is enforcement.” Worker power and organizing can help close that gap, and laws give organizers a place to start—but laws are difficult for workers themselves to enforce. For one thing, it’s not clear where complaints should go; human resources, she noted, works to limit company liability. Fee was lucky enough, she said, to have the help of the nonprofit Warehouse Worker Resource Center when she took action against Amazon.

California Labor Commissioner assistant chief Daniel Yu said that there are not enough investigators to cover every single violation in California, so his office focuses on making “each enforcement action more than the specific action itself.” For example, recovering wages for one group of workers gets them the money they are owed while simultaneously putting the employer—and other employers in the same sector—on notice, and offering worker education and outreach.

Mathews asked California State Senator Maria Elena Durazo if the state government is having conversations about the need to allocate more funds to enforcement.

Illustration by Soobin Kim.

Durazo said that unfortunately, budget conversations are typically one-sided: Lawmakers discuss how much something is going to cost, but “we don’t talk about how it’s going to save us from having to provide food or rental vouchers or all those other things” that the government pays for.

Bringing the discussion back to the ground level, Mathews asked where workers who feel they are being treated unfairly can start—what kind of complaint do you file, where do you go, and how do you get educated?

Yu, who acknowledged his answer might seem self-serving, recommended the California Labor Commissioner’s Office. The first step does involve filling out a very long form, he said, but added that he and his colleagues can also help by phone and redirect workers as needed to other government agencies.

Fee said that if she’d seen the form alone, she would probably have said, “Forget it.” But she had the help of a worker center, which does education and outreach at workplaces—including finding out if violations are taking place—and connects workers and enforcement agencies. Ultimately, the center helped build a bridge between workers and government, and helped her learn about her rights and stand up for them.

“Organizing is always the answer. Worker power is always the answer,” said Fee. “When you have people who have your back in your workplace, you can change things, and I know that you can because we’ve done it.”

Durazo added that it’s not a complicated form that keeps people from standing up for their rights but rather the fear of retaliation, job loss, or worse. “Entire industries rely on violations of workplace rights” to operate, she said. And employees in those industries “know that when they assert their rights they’re going to be fired and/or risk deportation, and/or risk other things.”

Mathews asked what more can be done to prevent these violations—could agencies utilize technology, like surveillance or algorithms that predict problems, rather than waiting for the problems to come to them.

“I won’t reveal all of our trade secrets in this conversation,” said Yu. But “we don’t abide by a strict complaint-based model. We are increasingly trying to be proactive.”

Durazo added that the state budget has included funding—which began during rampant COVID lockdown-era labor violations—for worker centers and on-the-ground organizations to do more outreach to help workers connect and build collective strength.

Fee said that putting these many pieces together is changing lives and making workplaces safer. “It’s a little bit slower than a worker on the ground would like it to be,” she said, and wages still aren’t high enough—but she is seeing effective cooperation among government agencies, workers, and organizations.

Yu offered one example of a “highly effective” partnership that led to a significant enforcement action. A janitorial subcontractor that supplied workers for various Cheesecake Factory locations was paying workers below minimum wage, making them work unpaid overtime, and not giving them enough breaks. Yu’s office typically would have gone after the subcontractor, but that business couldn’t afford the backpay, so the office also found the Cheesecake Factory liable. Such actions have a ripple effect. Subcontractors around the state began letting clients know they were following the law“This was impactful not only for the workers, but for the industry as well,” said Yu, adding that some employers have thanked the Labor Commissioner’s Office, “which is rare.”

Before turning to audience questions, Mathews asked the panelists for actionable advice—what are red flags to look for in a new employer, and what do you do when things start to go south?

Yu said getting paid late or not having an accurate pay stub are big red flags, and advised workers to start documenting patterns of violations or abuses.

Fee said to beware, after your honeymoon phase at any new job, if early promises—about future opportunities or a higher salary—seem false. And as soon as possible, organize.

The question-and-answer session came from the livestream audience, who dove into specifics of the panelists’ experiences.

The first question was for Yu: Is there a sector of the California economy that sees the most workplace complaints?

Yu said there are several industries, and named just a few: restaurants, agriculture, warehouse, garment, janitorial, residential care facilities, and construction.

Next up was Fee. What has been the hardest part of your organizing experience?

The retaliation, she said, including getting put “in unfavorable positions.” Retaliation “affects your mental health when you’re not allowed to express yourself or speak to other people in your workplace.” Ultimately, however, standing up is worth it, she emphasized.

The post All’s Not Yet Fair in California Workplaces appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in university admissions early this summer thanks in large part to the charge that Harvard’s practice of race-conscious admissions discriminates against Asian Americans. Whether or not the decision changes the college application process for Asian Americans, it certainly obscures the more insidious and widespread forms of bias that many Asian Americans face. It also opened up pathways to dismantling race-conscious policies elsewhere—particularly in the workplace, where assumptions about what makes a good leader are couched in ideas of race.

Asian Americans are not underrepresented in university classrooms, including at Harvard. They account for 7.2% of the U.S. population, yet 29.9% of Harvard’s incoming class. Where they are underrepresented is in the boardroom and the C-suite. Among the Fortune 500, only 2.4% of CEOs are Asian, two-thirds of whom are South Asian (with roots in the Indian subcontinent, and mainly from India). Many Asian Americans—and especially East Asians (with origins in China, Korea, and Japan)—find themselves hitting a “bamboo ceiling” akin to the glass ceiling that women face. It’s here, in the workplace, where affirmative action has an important role to play in the lives and livelihoods of Asian Americans—one that the Court has put in jeopardy.

Asian Americans lag behind all racial, ethnic, and gender groups in promotion to managerial and executive ranks in spite of their education, work experience, and job performance. Even in fields in which Asians are overrepresented, such as technology, medicine, the natural sciences, engineering, and law, they are rare in leadership.

In top technology firms in Silicon Valley, white men and women are twice as likely as Asian men and women to advance into the executive ranks. Between 1997 and 2008, Asian Americans made up 20% of medical school faculty—yet there were no Asian American deans. And while Black and Latino physicians are underrepresented in the field, Asian Americans are the only racial group that accounts for a much smaller share of medical school department chairs than their percentage of the faculty in medical schools.

A similar pattern emerges in law: Asians comprise 10% of graduates of top-30 law schools, but only 6.5% of all federal judicial law clerks. And while Asians are the largest non-white group in major law firms, they have the highest attrition rates and the lowest ratio of associates to partners of all groups at four-to-one, compared to two-to-one for Blacks and Latinos, and parity for whites. Even in academia, where Asian Americans are overrepresented as students in top universities, they are nearly absent in leadership ranks, comprising only 1.5% of college presidents.

So what forms the branches of the bamboo ceiling?

Some argue that racial and gender stereotypes—technically strong but socially weak, mathematically and scientifically inclined rather than verbally gifted—hinder Asians’ advancement in the workplace. Employers may recognize Asian Americans for their hard work, dedication, and effort without seeing them as innately brilliant, visionary, or skilled to lead.

Asian American women are doubly disadvantaged in this regard: They are the least likely group to be promoted to leadership positions, and to be perceived as fit for leadership roles regardless of their education, experience, and behavior.

Where do these stereotypes come from, and what can be done to combat them? A new strand of research points to differences in culture, and, more specifically, differences in verbal assertiveness between East Asian and white Americans. Western corporate culture prizes individual assertiveness and achievement, whereas East Asian culture promotes harmony and the stability of interpersonal relationships.

To buttress this point, researchers find that South Asians are more verbally assertive than East Asians, and, despite still not being as represented as white men in top positions, South Asian men are now even more likely than white men to attain leadership positions—pointing to a unique pattern of “South Asian exceptionalism.” A similar pattern emerges in law and business schools, where South Asians outperform East Asians in leadership, strategy, and marketing—courses in which verbal assertiveness is prized and class participation accounts for a larger percentage of the final grade. The branches of the bamboo ceiling begin to grow in the classroom.

South Asian exceptionalism may also be explained by Americans’ understanding of who counts as Asian. In the U.S., “Asian” is often shorthand for East Asian, and most Americans—including most Asian Americans—exclude South Asians from the fold. If the stereotypical perception of Asian men (i.e., East Asian men) is that they are diffident, passive, and distant, South Asian men (who are not perceived as Asian) may not be hampered by a social identity that presumes these qualities. The absence of the stereotype may change both their behavior and the way others interpret that behavior.

But a larger question underlying this debate is why we assume that leaders must be bold, brash, and assertive to be effective. Some of the country’s top CEOs have been described as listeners first, and team players who are empathetic, thoughtful, steady, and measured. Columbia University’s new president, Minouche Shafik, is the first woman to lead the university in its 269-year history. When asked about her leadership style, she quoted the 6th-century B.C. Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu: “A leader is best when people barely know they exist … When the leader’s work is done, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’”

Thinking more expansively about the qualities that make a good leader while recognizing that different leadership models may be just as effective (if not more so) than traditional Western ones will broaden leadership opportunities for not only East Asians, but also women, and for many of us who do not fit the prototype of what an American leader looks or acts like. It would also benefit the members of such leaders’ organizations, who may work more effectively with more diverse managers and styles. Leadership comes in many forms, and recognizing and rewarding this will better prepare us to lead and serve the diverse country that we are.

It is the recognition of race, ethnicity, and gender that enables us to identify biases in our understanding of who makes a suitable CEO, president, chair, dean, or manager. Affirmative action policies in the workplace give us the tools to address these biases and remove the barriers they create. Now, even these policies are coming under attack, led by no less than the same conservative advocate who engineered the lawsuit against Harvard.

The fight to dismantle affirmative action in university admissions was never about protecting Asian Americans, yet profiling them abetted the demise of the policy. It also veiled the more rampant forms of bias that Asian Americans face that impede their career mobility. Affirmative action in the workplace paved the way for white women to shatter and break through the glass ceiling. It can help non-white professionals—including Asian Americans—do the same.

The post Where Asian Americans Need Affirmative Action appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This pressure-cooker situation, with fellow scientists locked in a constant fight for their results to get funding and their names to garner respect, is common in university research settings around the world. In a recent piece published by Issues in Science and Technology titled “Time to Say Goodbye to Our Heroes?,” Elkins-Tanton called attention to this problem and explored the ways to change this toxic laboratory culture from within. She continued the conversation at yesterday’s Zócalo/Issues event titled “Is Cutthroat Science Hindering Discovery?”

“Many of us have a really heroic ideal of scientists, from movies, from the books that we read, just from our culture,” said Issues in Science and Technology editor in chief Lisa Margonelli, who was interviewing Elkins-Tanton. Margonelli noted that we don’t like to think of scientists as competitive, cutthroat, or worse. “You saw something wrong, and you called it the hero model. What did you see?” she asked.

Elkins-Tanton said that to understand today’s hero model, you have to go back to 18th- and 19th-century Germany, where it was developed. It centers around one professor, who owns their sub-discipline at a university and controls a pyramid of resources, including personnel, budgets, and equipment, all dedicated to that field. That hero scientist had to do good work, but fame and charisma were also part of the job.

“Where is the hero model steering us wrong now?” asked Margonelli.

For one thing, the model discourages interdisciplinary cooperation, said Elkins-Tanton. Professors want to protect their resources, including graduate students, and keep them from spending time in other laboratories. For another, it can create a culture of harassment or bullying. “There is not a network of resources available for people in the pyramid, and their entire career is dependent on that senior person,” said Elkins-Tanton. The model also slows down research. New discoveries, she said, “tend to be in incremental slivers of real estate” in scientific sub-disciplines because that is what the model rewards.

How, Margonelli asked, can we create a culture of faster progress that is also designed to be more inclusive?

Rather than focusing on knowledge produced by a personality, said Elkins-Tanton, we should think about outcomes. “Everything we do can be more inclusive,” she said, whether it’s in an academic lab or a large government organization like NASA. “It doesn’t have to be about making individual people more famous,” she said. Instead, it’s about creating a workplace where more voices are heard.

In meetings for the Psyche mission, Elkins-Tanton saw the value of engineers, scientists, graphic designers, photographers, and others working together—and utilizing their specialized knowledge—toward a shared goal. That has inspired her to institute “the big questions process” at the ASU Interplanetary Initiative.

For the inaugural session in 2017, Elkins-Tanton invited a mix of around 50 people from within the university and the surrounding community for a brainstorm devoted to discovering the questions that needed to be answered to create a positive human space future. Together, they came up with a wide variety of questions on subjects as diverse as faster propulsion systems to preparing people on Earth to be interplanetary. Without much discussion, the group then voted on which questions would be worth answering. They ended up with a list of 10 “rather profound and important questions,” said Elkins-Tanton. Then, the group split up into interdisciplinary teams to address individual questions with a small amount of seed funding as well as professional project management.

The new model is based on “the fundamental belief I have that science and engineering is in service to all of humanity” and not just a small group of one’s scientific peers, said Elkins-Tanton. “Let’s involve everyone in thinking about what’s important and feeling like they’re a part of the conversation.”

Isn’t this approach a bit “squishy,” Margonelli asked, for science?

“This is not getting rid of the idea of the expert,” said Elkins-Tanton. “You need to have disciplinary expertise of the deepest variety.” But by bringing experts together across disciplines—alongside non-experts as well—we can find the directions that are important to all of humanity.

Turning the discussion over to audience questions, which came in via a live YouTube chat, Margonelli asked Elkins-Tanton about parallels between her model and corporate and industrial models, including X (formerly Google X)’s “moonshot” development and more profit-driven endeavors.

“We are working in parallel with some other forward-looking organizational models,” said Elkins-Tanton. But these ideas are unusual in a university research setting, which is precisely why they’re valuable—they can help guide individual researchers in academia to faster, more rewarding, and better outcomes. But she was quick to add that research should not be entirely profit-driven. “We absolutely cannot have all our research be just use-inspired. We need fundamental, curiosity-driven research also,” she said. “Just learning about our place in the universe is something humans need to do more of.”

Another audience member asked if some of the problems with the current research model are scarcity-driven. Is there not enough funding for basic research? Are there too many PhDs?

Research is expensive, said Elkins-Tanton, and scientists do have to compete for grants. It’s also true that there are far more graduate students than tenured faculty positions. “That’s a red herring,” she said. Getting a PhD teaches a variety of problem-solving skills. “All of us are very good about complaining about what’s wrong with our lives. Fewer of us are good at posing that complaint into a well-constructed problem. And then even fewer can solve it. That’s a super power” you acquire when you work toward a PhD, she said. People with those skills can “go into every job, not just into faculty appointments.”

Before closing the discussion, Margonelli turned to the hero question once more. “You are in the hero position,” she said to Elkins-Tanton. “What is it like to stand in front of a bunch of people and ask them for their ideas? Is it nice not to be the hero?”

“It makes me so happy,” said Elkins-Tanton. “It gives me a chance to invite more voices to be heard and to see people experience their jobs and their hobbies with more joy.” It also allows her to share the risks and rewards of the work. “It’s so much better for the outcome and for every individual,” she said, “if we do it together as a team with nobody standing up and saying, ‘It’s all about me.’”

The post Scientists Don’t Have to Be Heroes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

More than four decades later, a groundbreaking new study suggests just how much poorer science and technology has become because of this discrimination. The research, conducted by sociologists Erin Cech of the University of Michigan and Tom Waidzunas of Temple University, is the first comprehensive national look at the experience of LGBTQ scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in STEM workplaces. With a sample size of more than 25,000, the study offers new insight into the bias that LGBTQ professionals must contend with at work. Among its findings: LGBTQ professionals experience 30 percent more harassment and social exclusion than their non-LGBTQ peers, and 20 percent greater incidence of professional devaluation, including lack of proper credit for their expertise.

Cech and Waidzunas’s work joins a long tradition of research that reveals practices and inequities that punish marginalized groups—and make a case for change. An early, visually striking use of data for advocacy is the collection of graphs titled “The American Negro,” which W.E.B. DuBois and his students prepared for an exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1921. In bold colors and often unusual shapes, the graphs documented the cultural, economic, educational, and intellectual achievements of American Negroes, supporting DuBois’s assertion that they were “a small nation of people who were studying, examining and thinking of their own progress and prospects.”

Data needn’t be complex to make a point. More than half a century after DuBois, investigative reporter Randy Shilts published And the Band Played On, which presented data in its simplest form to expose how the national press’s failure to document AIDS helped the disease spread unchecked. In October 1982, when seven people died from Tylenol laced with cyanide, he reported, the New York Times published 34 stories about the murders and the federal investigation that followed. The same month, 634 people were diagnosed with AIDS, and 260 died. In all of 1981, the Times published three stories about AIDS, and in 1982, it published another three.

Shilts, one of the first openly gay journalists to write for a major newspaper, was part of the nascent modern gay rights movement that grew around the 1969 Stonewall uprising. The scholarly Journal of Homosexuality was founded soon after, in 1974, with the goal of publishing research that provided alternatives to the prevailing model of homosexuality as pathology. Through the ’70s and ’80s, sociological, historical, and literary studies of gay culture burgeoned in its pages, and to a lesser extent in other journals. Yet the experience of LGBTQ people in the workplace was little studied—in part because the same social climate that kept LGBTQ professionals closeted created barriers to conventional scholarly work and powerful disincentives for research.

Rochelle Diamond, a founding member of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Science and Technical Professionals (NOGLSTP), has been a practicing scientist and fully out since the early ’80s. She recalled scholars receiving no encouragement to ask questions about LGBTQ people’s work experience, few individuals willing to identify openly as LGBTQ, no funds to support research, and few journals that would consider such work.

Donna Riley, head of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, has long advocated for an equitable playing field for all minorities in STEM education and employment. She recalls searching the literature for workplace studies in the early 2000s, and finding very little quantitative work. “[The research] was thin. I would say formal research on the LGBTQ STEM community is absolutely a recent phenomenon,” she explained.

In the ’80s and ’90s NOGLSTP stepped into this vacuum by publishing a series of pamphlets about the realities of doing science while gay, including “Who are the Gay and Lesbian Scientists?” about queer scientists of historical note, “Measuring the Gay and Lesbian Population,” and “Sexual Orientation and Computer Privacy.” The pamphlets were influential and widely (albeit quietly) circulated within the queer scientific community.

The literature on LGBTQ people in STEM work was still thin in 2008, when Erin Cech, then a second-year graduate student in sociology, ran a literature search for studies of LGBTQ students’ experience of bias in undergraduate engineering programs. Her search didn’t turn up a single paper. Cech, who is lesbian, studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate. She knew about bias. “I didn’t know how I’d do it,” Cech told me. “I didn’t know what I’d find. I just knew I needed to research this.”

Even the notion that LGBTQ people’s experience warranted study challenged the prevailing culture in many STEM settings. Cech remembers that to recruit students for their first research effort, she and fellow student Tom Waidzunas would visit the empty lecture halls in UC San Diego’s engineering building at night. They’d walk down the rows of seats to the front of the room, and write on the chalk board, Are you a lesbian, gay, bisexual engineering student? Please email us. “Just walking down those steep stairs and doing that felt so subversive, but also so important,” said Cech. “We felt how countercultural it was to be in this engineering building and writing that on a chalkboard in 2008.”

Cech and Waidzunas’s resulting paper, published in 2011, stated that “the experiences of people who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) are all but absent in literature about math and science-based professions in general and have never been documented in research related to the engineering profession.” Other researchers have told Cech that this paper encouraged them: It confirmed that workplace research could be done and that it could get published. Over the next decade, as gay people became more visible in American popular culture, Cech, Waidzunas, and others found it incrementally easier to study larger populations. Every succeeding publication confirmed that LGBTQ people constituted a significant minority within the STEM workforce, and that they faced a variety of biases and discriminatory treatment. Yet there was no study of national scope, the kind that carries weight with policy makers.

This lack of national data persists even though there is a federal agency, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCES), specifically tasked by Congress to survey and report on the status of minorities in the STEM workforce. Part of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCSES publishes reports, including a biennial report on women and minorities, that do everything from help Congress draft legislation to undergird university and foundation programs. But NCES does not classify LGBTQ people as underrepresented, keeping them from many opportunities and funding avenues within NSF and other federal agencies.

NCSES’s spokesperson has said that the center is conducting internal research and waiting for federal recommendations for standardizing data collection across agencies. But Nancy Bates, formerly the Census Bureau’s senior methodologist, points out that other federal entities, including the Departments of Education and Justice, have moved more quickly on this issue. The Department of Education has successfully included questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in its surveys since 2016. She called NCSES’s leisurely pace “a head scratcher.”

This year NCSES will, for the first time, pilot a question related to gender identity in its 2021 survey of college graduates. Yet an NSF spokesperson could not say when its surveys will deploy fully tested questions that would enable it to determine the percentage of sexual minorities in the STEM workforce.

Cech and Waidzunas are among those waiting for NCSES to act. In 2015, NSF’s Division of Human Resources Development funded their proposal for a national survey of multiple underrepresented minorities—women, Latinx, Asians, African Americans, people with disabilities—in STEM workplaces. More than 25,000 scientists, engineers, and mathematicians—including more than 1,000 who self-identified as LGBTQ—replied. Their paper on bias against LGBTQ professionals is the first of many that will come from this survey.

Their findings, which make clear that biases against LGBTQ professionals undermine their ability to do their best work, may increase the pressure on NCSES to include sexual minorities in their surveys. Still, because their survey isn’t an NCSES-sponsored study, its influence with policy makers will not be as broad as it could be.

Bias against sexual minorities not only hurts individuals; it also undermines the American research enterprise. This year, Gallup reported that its 2020 survey showed that 15.9 percent—one in six—members of Generation Z identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This is the talent pool that will produce the next generation of American scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

We know that no single group holds a monopoly on talent. Intelligence and imagination, creativity and tenacity, and other capacities required to do excellent science, engineering, and mathematics, are distributed randomly through the population. A growing body of research has shown that the most innovative ideas and solutions come from diverse groups. Diversity is necessary but not sufficient: For their creativity and innovation to flourish, all the members of a work group must feel that they and their contributions are valued.

Nancy Hopkins, who successfully challenged MIT to end discrimination against women, said, “If you don’t have women, you’ve lost half the best people.” In the new century, the message from American demographics to STEM employers is that if they don’t welcome and support LGBTQ professionals, they’ll lose a significant fraction of the best people.

Shirley Malcom’s words from 40 years ago are prescient: Science and technology is poorer for the loss of any talent because of personal attributes that are irrelevant to ability as scientists and engineers. The workplaces that welcome LGBTQ professionals as full citizens will draw from a richer pool of talent, and bring a wider range of problem-solving skills to their work. Those that do not will increasingly find themselves on the sidelines of innovation.

The post What Science Loses to LGBTQ Bias appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Of course, if you ask most people, they are likely to say they deplore gossip, but as a social scientist who studies how organizations work, it’s clear to me that it plays a more positive role in the workplace than we might expect.

Research suggests that gossip provides groups with important benefits. For example, recent social psychological studies consistently have found that gossip can be motivated by the desire to protect one’s group against those who violate norms. People begin gossiping when they observe someone behaving in ways that are not in line with group mores. A norm violator who, say, doesn’t contribute to group goals while benefitting from group resources is engaging in behavior that economists call “free riding.” Observing a group member behaving like a free rider motivates people to gossip about the norm violator, in an attempt to protect other group members as well as the group’s resources as a whole.

Studies also show that gossiping is an effective way to deter group members from behaving selfishly. The mere threat that other group members might gossip about uncooperative actions makes members more cooperative. For example, in 2011, I worked with Gerben Van Kleef on an experiment that asked participants to choose between keeping valuable lottery tickets for themselves or donating them to the group they belonged to. If a ticket that was donated to the group won, the whole group would share the prize.

We found that participants gave more lottery tickets to the group when they believed that their group members would learn about their decision and when they believed group members had a high tendency to gossip. This finding was driven by reputational concern; when the threat of gossip is high, group members worry that their reputation may be damaged when they behave uncooperatively. The likelihood that others might gossip about them motivates people to behave according to group norms.

From this angle, gossip seems remarkably effective at deterring group members from engaging in selfish behaviors in the first place, and punishing them when they do. Of course, one could argue that directly informing norm violators that their behavior is unacceptable would also serve the goal of sanctioning or preventing norm violations. But most people don’t like direct confrontation, and research from the 1970s suggests that people refrain from overt sanctions because of the risk of retaliation. Indeed, gossiping about norm violators is obviously much less risky, as it enables people to indirectly punish norm violators, build coalitions, and warn their group members against uncooperative slackers—all without exposing themselves to possible adverse reactions by the norm violator. Recent research backs up this strategy, finding that gossip is at least as, or even more, effective in establishing cooperation than directly punishing norm violators.

As I and other colleagues have done research that essentially sings the praises of gossip, enthusiastically discussing its benefits for group functioning, I’ve come to wonder why the idea that gossip is bad is so widespread. Many people claim to hate gossip. Religions around the world view it as asocial, objectionable behavior (the Quran, for instance, compares gossiping to eating the flesh of one’s dead brother). How can we understand the virtually universal condemnation of gossip in light of the functions that gossip has for groups?

Currently there is no research that directly answers this question, so we can only speculate on why everyone claims to hate gossip so much. Possibly people gossip for many reasons, of which the positive ones, like warning groups about norm violators and protecting group cooperation, are the most benign. In fact, there are several lines of research that point to other motives for gossip. Gossip has, for example, been described as a form of indirect aggression, driven by self-interested motivation to destroy the reputation of potential social rivals.

Moreover, gossip may also have negative effects on groups. It has been shown to coincide with specific types of social network structures called coalition networks, in which some individuals have positive connections with each other but jointly share negative ties with someone else. Coalition networks are plagued by destructive power struggles.

Despite the alleged benefits of gossip to groups, studies in organizations also have found correlations with decreased cooperation and decreased psychological safety—the feeling that the social environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.

These lines of research paint a much less rosy picture of gossip: Rather than a group-oriented mechanism that fosters social control and cooperation, they portray gossip as a self-interested behavior that is toxic for groups.

There is currently no overarching theory or empirical study that can pinpoint exactly what motivates gossip, and when it is useful or, in contrast, detrimental, to group functioning. However, if we accept the idea that gossip is a multifaceted phenomenon that is sometimes driven by genuine concern for the welfare of one’s social groups, but at other times driven by less noble motives, we may begin to speculate about where gossip gets its negative reputation from.

For starters, there is what psychologists call negativity bias, which means that negative impressions are stronger than positive ones. When people experience a combination of negative and positive things, they evaluate them more negatively than you’d predict. One single instance of nasty, mean gossip might spoil a whole barrel of group-protective, pro-social gossip episodes.

But that still leaves another question: Why do people claim to hate gossip but still participate in it? For that, we could look at another famous bias, the self-serving bias, which is the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. Because of this bias, we may see gossiping in general as objectionable, but our own gossip as acceptable.

Finally, it’s possible that simply saying we hate gossip makes gossip itself even more effective. Studies that have examined gossip as a mechanism that protects groups against norm violations consistently point out that gossip might be such a popular response because it is relatively risk-free. Gossip can be used to punish group members without requiring that the punishers have any confrontations with potential negative consequences.

It’s an effective strategy, in other words, but there’s an element of sneakiness about it. And it becomes an even better stealth weapon if one consistently portrays oneself as a non-gossiper. Claiming to hate gossip while at the same time using gossip when the need arises makes it very unlikely that norm violators will recognize who is attacking them. Perhaps this contributes to the popularity of gossip and its simultaneous universal condemnation.

Many things about gossip are poorly understood. But if someone tells you they hate gossip, you might want to question what exactly their intentions are.

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Considering the parallels and differences in the biases that women and racial minorities face is an important way to increase our understanding of workplace discrimination and equality. By reviewing some recent work by cross-disciplinary researchers from across the world, we attempted to shed light and theorize on some ways in which racial minorities might suffer from similar biases as those identified for women. For the sake of comprehension, we narrowed our scope to research on Asian Americans.

As our starting point, we took four patterns of workplace bias that women face as identified by a 2014 study by a research team based out of UC Hastings College of the Law’s Center for WorkLife Law. Joan C. Williams, Kathrine W. Phillips, and Erika V. Hall interviewed 60 women who work in the sciences and found that 100 percent reported experiencing one or more of four gender bias patterns.

Although these biases were identified as specific to women, by comparing them to findings from research on biases that Asian Americans face in the workplace, it becomes clear that they can also apply to racial minorities.

The first bias, “prove-it-again,” refers to when women have to provide more evidence of competence than men in order to be seen as equally competent. As the name suggests, women can find themselves in situations where they have to prove again and again that they are professional, competent, and/or intelligent. For example, a woman might have to exhibit competency at her job for a longer period before being considered for promotion than a man doing an equivalent job.

Similarly, Asians oftentimes have to provide more evidence of competence than non-Asians. A 2013 study by Lei Lai and Linda C. Babcock found evidence that Asian Americans are evaluated as less socially skilled than whites, and are therefore less likely to be hired for a job requiring social skills (like public relations) than technical skills (like information technology). A 2013 study on the leadership theories of Asian Americans and whites found that even when Asian managers are seen as equally competent as white managers in specific metrics, on the whole whites see Asian managers as less sociable, less transformational, and less authentic compared to white managers. Like women, Asian Americans must prove their competence to a greater extent than whites, particularly in areas where stereotypes and prejudices remain.

The second bias, “tightrope,” refers to when women often find themselves walking a tightrope between being seen as too feminine to be competent or too masculine to be likable. This is a difficult—not to mention unfair—balance for women to have to consider, and is often very hard to attain. Hillary Clinton is only the most recent and prominent example of a woman who has been criticized for being “too masculine” or, in more coded language, “too ambitious and eager.”

Similarly, Asians are commonly stereotyped as being more feminine and less masculine compared to whites or blacks. In 2012, Jennifer L. Berdahl and Ji-A Min examined stereotypes of East Asians (Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese) and found that they are expected to be as competent and warm as whites—but also less dominant (i.e., masculine). And a 2015 study of “gender profiling” by Erika Hall, Adam Galinsky, and Katherine Phillips found that because Asians are seen as more feminine than whites and blacks, they are seen as better fits for feminine rather than masculine positions. This could pose barriers when Asians seek positions—like police officer or banker—that are historically seen as masculine.

The third bias, “maternal wall,” refers to women finding themselves confronted with the stereotype that they lose their work commitment and competence after having kids. Men who have children don’t typically face this same stereotype in the workplace.

There is evidence suggesting that Asian women are faced with particular biases and challenges around motherhood in professional contexts. In the same 2014 study of women scientists by Williams and colleagues, Asian women described more pressure from their families to have children than whites and blacks, and also felt more responsible to cover for colleagues who are mothers compared to Latina and white women. At the same time, Asian women were more frequently told by colleagues that they should work fewer hours after having children compared to black and Latina mothers. So Asian-American women face more pressure from their families to have children, while also experiencing more pressure from colleagues to work less after having children.

The fourth bias, “tug of war,” refers to when gender bias fuels conflict among women. In some instances, having a sexist work environment can lead women to want to distance themselves from their gender group in different ways, including by criticizing other women.

Based on the interviews reported by Williams and colleagues, Asian women had to compete with other women for a “woman’s spot” –i.e, a position intended to be filled by a woman—at higher levels than white and Latina women. This seems to suggest that for Asian women, there is more (or at least greater perceptions) of a “zero sum” situation when it comes to the workforce and women colleagues, where one woman’s gain is another woman’s loss.

Ultimately, what strikes us is that there are clear intergroup differences in how women experience and are exposed to these four different patterns of bias, depending on their racial background. Asian women’s experiences can be significantly different from black women’s experiences, and in order to create an equal and inclusive workplace for all, it is important to be aware of such differences.

Future research should look at the ways in which biases and prejudice against women compare to those against racial minorities, and study which type of interventions are most effective in reducing the effects of such biases. More study is also needed on the intersections of race and gender when it comes to workplace bias. A greater understanding and awareness of the parallels and differences between the biases that women and racial minorities face can result in more effective and efficient interventions in the workplace designed to promote inclusion for all.

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With him, I bolted to Montezooma’s Revenge, a graduate-level ride. I was fortunate enough to be taller than the red line they make you stand against to measure your height. The riders who didn’t make the cut were asked to step aside. Their getting shot down on a technicality didn’t bother me then. Later, I thought about that red line every time I encountered a situation where I felt I’d come up short.

When I was 20 years old, I transitioned from civilian to soldier. Many a night throughout basic training, I went to bed with a lump in my throat, wishing I were a civilian again, wishing I had never stepped into the recruiting office that day. But in 1996, my mother flew out of LAX to Fort Jackson, South Carolina to see me graduate basic training and head off to Military Occupational School in Fort Lee, Virginia. Four years later, I left the service (honorable discharge, I’m proud to say) and ran a route at the now-closed uniform company Cintas in Long Beach, California for three years before moving on to Puritan Bakery in Carson.

During the interview at Puritan, the lead supervisor asked me if I’d ever driven a step van with a manual transmission. I hadn’t. I was just shy of the red line. He said he needed a driver by the following week. Could I learn by then? I said yes. I remember thinking I’d never learn to drive stick-shift in time. But I did. I drove for Puritan until a DUI in my own vehicle ended my career as a route driver. Even though I haven’t spoken to anyone down at my old place of employment, I’m thankful that man, as well as the rest of the supervisors over there, was willing to let me through the turnstile despite my being under the red line.

When I was 30, I went back to school. I encountered the red line again. Sometimes I was tall enough; a professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills once shook my hand and said, “You nailed it,” in reference to a final paper I had written. Sometimes, I wasn’t. At Harbor College, a professor slapped me with a bad grade in a political science class. I wanted to run back to Camp Snoopy. But I managed to make it through university. Barely, but I managed.

My recent transition from undergraduate to graduate student in English has not been smooth. Abstracts, annotated bibliographies, and researching secondary sources can make me feel like I’m below the red line. I knew how to march. I knew how to replace a mop head. I knew how to slide trays of wheat, white, rye, and hamburger buns into bread racks. I didn’t have to know Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. I didn’t have to analyze scholarly texts. I worried about knocking out four stops–that’s driver-speak for deliveries–per hour, not understanding the author’s intent in a canonical work. But I’m in too deep now. If I quit and go back to the warehouse, I’ll never be able to tell anyone that I survived the academic version of Montezooma’s Revenge.

The gatekeepers at California State University, Dominguez Hills are not like the gatekeeper at Montezooma’s Revenge. Sure, I got a “C” in Shakespeare, a “D” on an annotated bibliography. But they tell me to suck it up and drive on. They tell me to adapt and overcome. Back at Harbor College, the late Dr. Borell gave me an “F” on an assignment. She told me to rewrite the paper. I was too short to ride, she said, but she let me through the turnstile anyway.

My brother Adam, younger than me by 13 months, passed the academic red line before me and showed me it was possible. After he graduated high school with honors, he matriculated at University of California Berkeley. He was the first member of my family to go to university. Neither of my grandparents went to high school—Grandpa cured telephone poles at a lumberyard, and Grandma cleaned fish at one of San Pedro’s canneries for almost 40 years—but they encouraged Adam and me to get an education. We needed the encouragement. I had planned on being a blue-collar man after leaving the military. My brother could’ve been a blue-collar man himself. And there would’ve been nothing wrong with that.

But a math teacher at John Marshall Middle School in Long Beach—a gatekeeper—asked my brother, a Mexican-American kid getting a “C” in math, if he’d be interested in applying to the California Academy of Mathematics and Science at California State University Dominguez Hills. Our mother stayed up all night helping him construct a model of a virus for a presentation, and then woke up early to go to work at the now-closed Pacific Electricord on Redondo Beach Boulevard in Gardena. Our mother could not speak the language of the academy, but, like Prometheus, she wanted her son to have the knowledge the university offers. She couldn’t bring the sun’s light to him, but she could point him in the right direction.

Thanks to that man at John Marshall Middle School and our mother, my brother went to the academy and to college. Now he’s chair of the math department at Fleming Middle School in Lomita. He knows many of his students are too short against the red line, but he doesn’t tell them they shall not pass or ride. Instead, he tells them to run through the turnstile full steam ahead.

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I started in the public workforce system in 1979 with a community job training agency and have seen the system improve over the years. Today’s system is more focused on linking training to jobs, in involving employers, in making data on job placement rates more transparent. The new legislation helps nudge along these improvements.

However, WIOA will not significantly change the system or outcomes. Like its predecessors, the Job Training Partnership Act (1982) and the Workforce Investment Act (1998), WIOA involves modest adjustments to job training approaches (despite hundreds of meetings, conferences, and discussions). The same forms of recruitment, assessment, training, and placement will continue, usually by the same training and placement agencies.

Accompanying the enactment of WIOA, Vice President Joe Biden released a highly touted report on the future of job training, “What Works in Job Training: A Synthesis of the Evidence.” The report is mainly a rehash of the same ideas—sector-based training, employer-driven training—that were being discussed in 1979. It’s filled with empty job training government-speak, such as calls for “coordinated strategies across systems” or “flexible, innovative training strategies.”

In contrast to the limited change in the public workforce system, the private sector job training and placement system today is a frenzy of entrepreneurship, creativity, and energy. Much of this entrepreneurship is centered on Internet job training and placement tools.

A recent study by Transmosis, a nonprofit of tech entrepreneurs working on labor and employment, identified over 100 recently established websites aimed at improving the ability of job seekers to identify and apply for jobs, and/or improving the ability of employers to identify candidates who would be good fits. New websites are launching each week.

Some of these websites target specific industries and occupations, such as Doostang (finance) and Proven (hospitality). These sites can only succeed with the participation of employers, so their success hinges on deep knowledge of the industry and what businesses need. Other websites, such as MindSumo, Take the Interview, and Careerflo, enable job seekers to go beyond the traditional résumé and supplement their applications with video demonstrations, interviews, and portfolios. Still others, like YesGraph and Work4, expand the ability of job seekers to draw on referrals.

There are websites that are trying to expand the opportunities for internships (InternBound, Koofers, LaunchPath Project) and ones trying to expand the opportunities for project-based work (TaskRabbit, Thumbtack). There are more than 20 major websites aimed at helping job seekers better set and manage career goals.

These Internet tools are aimed at generating revenues, as they must be. But talk to the entrepreneurs behind them and you hear a social mission: improving the labor exchange, matching job seekers and employers, or giving job seekers options beyond the black holes of traditional job boards.

One example, Workpop.com, is a Los Angeles start-up founded by Chris Ovitz and Reed Shaffner, who see a better way than the online job boards to connect entry-level restaurant workers (busboys, waiters, bartenders) to job openings. Their site enables workers to apply for jobs through their phones, to store résumés on the site, and to make videos demonstrating what motivates them to do their jobs. Workhands.com, a start-up in San Francisco, is a type of LinkedIn for skilled workers in crafts such as carpentry, welding, and automotive repair. Akimboconnect.com, a start-up in New York and California, helps workers with disabilities better showcase their skills, and helps employers seek out such workers.

To be sure, many of these new websites will not be in operation two or three years from now. Employers have limited funds to spend on job placement, and the number of firms already competing for these dollars is far too many. Other attempts to monetize the job placement services have yet to gain traction.

Still, these entrepreneurs are trying to build a better system, and some will succeed, because they are not about meetings, process, forms. They are about enrolling job seekers, testing ideas, pivoting, adapting, moving on to the next idea.

Their enterprises will never replace the low-tech networking and one-to-one job counseling that remain the best route to employment today. Further, they cannot replace the experience and knowledge that the public workforce has built over the past five decades.

Indeed, the most promising path for better job placement is to integrate the old government workforce system with the innovation of private-sector entrepreneurs. This is starting to happen in Southern California. The South Bay Workforce Investment Board (SBWIB), which oversees the public workforce system in nine cities in south Los Angeles County, has joined with Workpop.com to increase hospitality industry placements, especially for entry-level workers. Workpop is not receiving any public funds—but it is drawing on SBWIB’s research on the hospitality sector and its ability to identify job seekers. SBWIB and its job-seeking clients benefit from Workpop.com’s Internet and mobile tools.

SBWIB director Jan Vogel has been in the training field for nearly 40 years. Rather than be dismissive of the new entrants, he welcomes them. “Partnering with these entrepreneurs enables our job centers to reach more companies and individuals faster and more effectively,” he said. “The new companies optimize the technological spirit that is exploding in California.”

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