My name is Koji Chavez and I’m an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University. My research focuses on gender and racial inequality in labor markets and in the workplace. I also teach courses on race and ethnicity, work, and research design.
Upcoming Presentations/Conferences and News
- Sometime August 8-12, 2025. ASA Annual Meeting, Chicago. New Approaches to the Job Matching Process. Thematic Session. I’m not sure what I’m presenting yet, but I’m sure it will be inspiring.
- August 8-12, 2025. ASA Annual Meeting, Chicago. Labor Market Session, Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section. Organizer.
- Kate Weisshaar, Tania Hutt, and I just two best paper awards from the American Sociological Association for our article, “Hiring Discrimination Under Pressure to Diversity,” one from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section and one from the Race, Gender, Class section.
- Starting in July, I will become the Associate Director for the Center for Research and Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) at Indiana University. CRRES is an outstanding center that promotions excellent research and training for our next generation of scholars interested in issues of race and ethnicity. I’m excited for this next chapter.
Diversity Commodification in Software Engineering Hiring
I’m working with Dr. Kate Weisshaar and Tania Hutt on a number of projects. We just published a paper that explores patterns of gender and racial discrimination in software engineering hiring. We argue that to understand patterns of gender and racial discrimination, we must incorporate the concept of diversity value—that is, that women and some racial minorities are valued for their contribution to organizational diversity. We theorize a process, which we call diversity commodification, by which decision-makers assign applicants diversity value and incorporate that value into their screening decisions. This study combines a large-scale audit study comparing discrimination across types of job transitions and in-depth interviews with hiring decision-makers. Katie Johnson, Anne Kavalerchik, Katie Furl, and Alyssa Browne were instrumental in keeping this project moving forward. So too have our undergraduate research assistants, including Maria Martinez, Erin Arikan, Olivia DeCrane, Olivia Christensen, Natalia Fuentes-Rohwer, Erika Ross, Maddy Ruprecht, Kemal Perdana, Lexi Hucko, and Kayla Cook. This came out in the American Sociological Review, which you can access here.
All of this research on diversity commodification made me revisit some unpublished research from my dissertation. In retrospect, I think one reason I had trouble publishing these particular findings was that the concept of diversity commodification was not yet developed, and so I was struggling to conceptualize what I was finding. In other words, I was findings something interesting, but I never could articulate what it was a case of. It wasn’t until we came up with the concepts of diversity commodification and diversity value did these previous findings make sense. I went back revisited data, redid the analysis, and published the results in Socius, which you can access here. Essentially, I argue that in software engineering hiring, diversity value also plays a role during the interview evaluations, although the role is far more subtle compared to during the hiring screen.
Diversity Buffering and the Perpetuation of Diversity “Happy Talk”
When conducting the interviews for our diversity commodification project, we noticed a really interesting pattern: while recruiters were deeply disillusioned or resentful toward their firms efforts to increase diversity, managers and interviewers had generally positive or at least neutral feelings toward those practices. In a second, purely qualitative paper, argue that the labor of trying to increase diversity, but also the associated emotional burden and feelings of alienation, is restricted to a small, low-status group — recruiters — while the rest of the organization is shielded from this intimate experience. We conceptualize the insulation of most employees from diversity labor and its discontents, as “diversity buffering.” As a result of diversity buffering, others involved in hiring can form positive, or at least neutral, attitudes and opinions about their firm’s diversity efforts unburdened by the realities of implementation. More broadly, we argue that this general support — or at least passive acceptance — of a firm’s diversity efforts allows firms to continue doing what they are doing without effectively increasing diversity.
This second paper is based on in-depth interviews with recruiters, interview evaluators, and managers involved in the hiring process. I have an excellent graduate student, Alyssa Browne, heavily involved in this project, without whom I’m not sure I could get these interviews off the ground, as well as an excellent (former) undergraduate student, Kayla Cook, who is also heavily involved. Above is a real picture of me doing an interview.
Measuring Individual Diversity Value
One of the ideas coming out of our diversity commodification paper is that employers treat workers as if they were assigning them a “diversity value,” or in other words, their worth in regards to organizational diversity. This idea of valuing someone for their contribution to diversity is probably pretty off-putting, and it was off-putting to the decision-makers doing it, but it was still being done. We thought this was interesting, and so Kate Weisshaar and I wanted to examine this idea more carefully. This time we got Yingjian Liang — who is now going to be a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University — on the project. Our main idea is to measure the extent to which individual characteristics contribute to the their perceived diversity value. These characteristics include race, gender, LGBT status, whether the individual is a veteran, disability status, social class, work history, interests outside of work, political orientation, and work style. We are also interested in how respondents personal evaluations of diversity value differ from how they think corporations value individuals. We are planning to conduct our conjoint experiment this summer.
Did discrimination change during the early COVID-19 pandemic? Yes, yes it did.
This figure is from a paper recently published in Work and Occupations (found here). Kate Weisshaar, Tania Cabello-Hutt, and I find that discrimination patterns changed dramatically in the beginning of the pandemic. Our hunch is that the change in discrimination patterns corresponds to the fact that women and mothers disproportionately left the labor market compared to men and fathers. As women and mothers left, demand for women and mothers increased. We suspect that discrimination levels have returned to pre-pandemic levels given that employment rates for women and mothers have rebounded since the early pandemic time period that we study.
IU Sociology: Not the most elite, but gosh darn it we are consistent. (and our grad students get jobs!)
I’ve been cleaning Sociology department rankings over time. The National Research Council funded a project to evaluate departments in 1982 and 1993. Starting in 1995, the US News and World Report began ranking sociology departments and published new rankings in 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013, and 2017. I put together a fun visualization of the top 25 sociology departments over this time period. These rankings are probably very dumb, but the visualization is cool. And Indiana seems to have a pretty uneventful history of being in the middle of the pack for the last 40 years!
IU sociology is a great place to be with wonderful colleagues and graduate students. If you don’t already know!
