Featured in Washington Post
"On the Merits" September 24, 2008
Gender, Race, and Meritocracy in Organizational Careers
Emilio J. Castilla
Merit-based pay plans often aim to distribute rewards without bias. But the results can still favor white men, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor's research shows.

Featured in Boston Globe
"Uncommon Knowledge: Surprising Insights from the Social Sciences" August 10, 2008
Gender, Race, and Meritocracy in Organizational Careers
Emilio J. Castilla
"In a Meritocracy, performance is supposed to determine success. To achieve this goal, many organizations have instituted formal processes to review employee performance. But a process is only as good as the people who run it, and some people may not be entirely objective. A sociologist at MIT was given access to internal records on 8,898 support staff at a large high-tech service-sector company (management didn't allow access to their own records). He found that, while women and minorities could expect the same starting salaries and performance ratings for doing the same job, they could not expect to get the same raises. The effect was quite small, but real..."

Featured in ABC News
"Are You a Victim of Maternal Profiling?" April 25, 2008
Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?
Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik 
In fact, according to a recent study in the American Journal of Sociology, women with children are half as likely to be called back by an employer than childless women with the same qualifications. It's a practice women's rights groups like "Moms Rising" refer to as "maternal profiling."

Featured in Boston Globe
"Uncommon Knowledge: Surprising Insights from the Social Sciences
" April 6, 2008
Conservative Protestants and Wealth: How Religion Perpetuates Asset Poverty
Lisa A. Keister
Do conservative values and conservative economics go hand in hand? A sociologist looked at broad surveys of Americans to find out whether conservative Protestants - the 25 percent of the population belonging to churches that emphasize a literal reading of the Bible, personal conversion, and social activism - accumulated more wealth than other people. The data indicated that conservative Protestants actually accumulated less wealth during their lives; their estimated median net worth was less than half of what it was for the general population.