Managers, Reporting Structures, and Re-Orgs: Volatility and Inequality in Early-Career Engineering and Implications for Educators

Shannon Katherine Gilmartin; Sara Jordan-Bloch

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Conference: 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Baltimore , Maryland
Publication Date: June 25, 2023
Start Date: June 25, 2023
End Date: June 28, 2023
Conference Session: Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY) Technical Session 1
Tagged Divisions: Equity and Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 42
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--43537
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/43537
Download Count: 969

Paper Authors

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Shannon Katherine Gilmartin Stanford University orcid.org/0000-0001-8925-3271

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Shannon K. Gilmartin, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scholar at the Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab and Adjunct Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University.

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biography

Sara Jordan-Bloch Stanford University

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Sara Jordan-Bloch, PhD, is a sociologist and senior research scholar at the Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab, where she also directs the Seeds of Change initiative.

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Abstract

Engineering education increasingly emphasizes the development of both socio-organizational and technical skills as students prepare to graduate and enter the workforce. Still, given uneven opportunities around internships, co-ops, and career information networks, students may have little visibility into what a typical “org chart” looks like at a company, or how often they might expect a new manager or supervisory line in their first years on the job—much less what these types of changes mean for their professional advancement. Candid conversation about workplace structure is particularly important to “lift the hood” on everyday organizational practices that reproduce gender and racial inequality in engineering work. Students may move from one unequal context to the next without enough discussion about how to navigate seemingly neutral, mundane aspects of job ladders that can systematically advantage majority groups.

For this study, we bring to light new data on job ladders that can inform this type of expanded discussion. We focus on early-career engineers and the gendered, racialized dimensions of their reporting locations in their new jobs, where “reporting location” is defined as their location in their “org chart” and their distance from (or proximity to) senior leaders. We conduct analyses of novel longitudinal personnel data for over 5,000 employees in the software engineering unit of a technology company in the United States—the type of firm that hires large numbers of recent engineering graduates across different sub-fields and provides competitive compensation and benefits. We map what the overall organization looks like in terms of rank and reporting structure, and then zero in on the reporting structure for the youngest cohort of software engineering professionals, those with fewest years in the workforce. We describe how their reporting structure changes over time, by gender, race/ethnicity, and engineering role (e.g., software developer versus QA roles).

Using multivariate statistical models, we examine whether changes in their reporting location—specifically, moving closer to senior leaders or farther away from them—are related to getting a promotion and/or getting assigned to a new manager (i.e., getting “re-org’ed”). We ask whether these relationships differ by gender and race, and consider how these relationships have significant consequence for gender and racial equality at this and similar companies. Our findings suggest that in our focal early-career cohort, White men have a reporting advantage relative to all other race/gender groups over just a three-year span, especially in support engineering and project management positions.

As we consider our findings in context of sociological understandings of organizational inequality, we look ahead to conversation with engineering faculty and undergraduates. We brainstorm how engineering educators can build deeper understanding of these organizational processes into everyday classes and programs. We consider the need for more research on workplace practices that frame and stratify early-career engineers’ experiences, and more translation of those findings to day-to-day “toolkits” for new engineers.

Citation
Format

Gilmartin, S. K., & Jordan-Bloch, S. (2023, June), Managers, Reporting Structures, and Re-Orgs: Volatility and Inequality in Early-Career Engineering and Implications for Educators Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43537

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Engineering education increasingly emphasizes the development of both socio-organizational and technical skills as students prepare to graduate and enter the workforce. Still, given uneven opportunities around internships, co-ops, and career information networks, students may have little visibility into what a typical “org chart” looks like at a company, or how often they might expect a new manager or supervisory line in their first years on the job—much less what these types of changes mean for their professional advancement. Candid conversation about workplace structure is particularly important to “lift the hood” on everyday organizational practices that reproduce gender and racial inequality in engineering work. Students may move from one unequal context to the next without enough discussion about how to navigate seemingly neutral, mundane aspects of job ladders that can systematically advantage majority groups.    

For this study, we bring to light new data on job ladders that can inform this type of expanded discussion. We focus on early-career engineers and the gendered, racialized dimensions of their reporting locations in their new jobs, where “reporting location” is defined as their location in their “org chart” and their distance from (or proximity to) senior leaders. We conduct analyses of novel longitudinal personnel data for over 5,000 employees in the software engineering unit of a technology company in the United States—the type of firm that hires large numbers of recent engineering graduates across different sub-fields and provides competitive compensation and benefits. We map what the overall organization looks like in terms of rank and reporting structure, and then zero in on the reporting structure for the youngest cohort of software engineering professionals, those with fewest years in the workforce. We describe how their reporting structure changes over time, by gender, race/ethnicity, and engineering role (e.g., software developer versus QA roles). 

Using multivariate statistical models, we examine whether changes in their reporting location—specifically, moving closer to senior leaders or farther away from them—are related to getting a promotion and/or getting assigned to a new manager (i.e., getting “re-org’ed”). We ask whether these relationships differ by gender and race, and consider how these relationships have significant consequence for gender and racial equality at this and similar companies. Our findings suggest that in our focal early-career cohort, White men have a reporting advantage relative to all other race/gender groups over just a three-year span, especially in support engineering and project management positions.  

As we consider our findings in context of sociological understandings of organizational inequality, we look ahead to conversation with engineering faculty and undergraduates. We brainstorm how engineering educators can build deeper understanding of these organizational processes into everyday classes and programs. We consider the need for more research on workplace practices that frame and stratify early-career engineers’ experiences, and more translation of those findings to day-to-day “toolkits” for new engineers.

AU  - Shannon Katherine Gilmartin
AU  - Sara Jordan-Bloch
CY  - Baltimore , Maryland
DA  - 2023/06/25
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Managers, Reporting Structures, and Re-Orgs: Volatility and Inequality in Early-Career Engineering and Implications for Educators
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/43537
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--43537
ER  -