UMass Sociologists Smith-Doerr, Tomaskovic-Devey Receive Top National Honors in their Discipline

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Laurel Smith-Doerr and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, sociology, have been named recipients of top national honors by the American Sociological Association Inequality, Poverty and Mobility section.

Together, the two faculty members and their co-authors were named the 2020 winners of the Devah Pager Award for outstanding article for their 2019 American Journal of Sociology article, “Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies: An Organizational Approach.” The researchers found that in a number of science-based federal agencies, gaps and differential implementation in current standardization schemes create gendered outcomes. The research indicates that the resulting pay gaps between men and women at these agencies can also be associated with the cultural gender frames of the agencies’ field of research.

Additionally, Tomaskovic-Devey and co-author Dustin Avent-Holt of Augusta University were awarded the ASA Inequality, Poverty and Mobility section’s Outstanding Book Award for “Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach.” The book focuses on the organizational production of categorical inequalities, in the context of the intersectional complexity and institutional fluidity that characterize social life.

Smith-Doerr was the inaugural director of the Institute for Social Science Researchat UMass Amherst, and Tomaskovic-Devey is founding director of the UMass Center for Employment Equity and the coordinator of the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network.