Starting Salary Differences Between Women and Men: Organization-Level Findings and an Analysis of Current Policy Options

This study examined the starting salaries paid by over 250 employers to 2,800 university graduates. Of the overall female-male salary difference of $4,396, the majority, or$3,175 (72%), occurred between employers; $1,221 (28$1,221 (28%) of the female-male pay difference. Although adjustment for qualifications such as degree level, grade point average, and college major reduced the pay difference between women and men, our findings indicate that, on average, the same employer pays graduating women 3.5% to 5.8% less than graduating men with similar qualifications

Generic Studies: Their Renewed Importance in Religious and Literary Interpretation

In recent years, the need for a critique of "reader” as rigorous as that which has been developed for "text” and for "author” has become increasingly acute. Whether in the study of religion as story and biography or in interpretative reading in general, a critical notion of reader is essential if the act of reading is to be anything other than mere consumption of texts. Some new way of understanding the hermeneutical circle is required to avert the narcissism latent in the Anselmian model. The notion of "genre” as developed by four recent theorists is helpful in the task of constructing a critique of "reader.” E. D. Hirsch, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Tzvetán Todorov, and Paul Ricoeur have each surpassed the idealist notion of genre as a classificatory device and developed in its place the notion of genre as a generative pinciple. Todorov, for example, illustrates how "form” is a theoretical, as distinct from a descriptive or explanatory, issue According to both Hirsch and Todorov, somewhere between empirical details and metaphysical thematizations lie generic formulations which can assist the reader to organize his/her response to the text and to recognize the probable understanding toward which the conventions of the text are directed. In Gadamer's theory of interpretation, the notion of genre acquires historicity. After Gadamer, genres can no longer be regarded as timeless a priori categories. Rather, because they are constituted by historical reflections, their rise and decline are intrinsic to text-interpretation. Finally, in Ricoeur's theory that generic considerations are correlative principles of production and interpretation, we find a basis for understanding genre as praxis. If we understand reading to be isomorphic to authoring, it becomes clear that the reader can no longer be regarded as the self-evident recipient of text-signification. Genre, in Ricoeur's theory, transforms "speech” into a "work” and points toward a new notion of "reader” as one whose reconstruction of the text is the condition for the possibility of its being a story that "gives life.” This notion of "reader” makes possible a new model of the hermeneutical circle—one which signifies the essential roles of critical thought which follows naive reading and of informed understanding which follows after though

New Directions in Compensation Research: Synergies, Risk, and Survival

We describe and use two theoretical frameworks, the resource-based view of the firm and institutional theory, as lenses for examining three promising areas of compensation research. First, we examine the nature of the relationship between pay and effectiveness. Does pay typically have a main effect or, instead, does the relationship depend on other human resource activities and organization characteristics? If the latter is true, then there are synergies between pay and these other factors and thus, conclusions drawn from main effects models may be misleading. Second, we discuss a relatively neglected issue in pay research, the concept of risk as it applies to investments in pay programs. Although firms and researchers tend to focus on expected returns from compensation interventions, analysis of the risk, or variability, associated with these returns may be essential for effective decision-making. Finally ,pay program survival, which has been virtually ignored in systematic pay research, is investigated. Survival appears to have important consequences for estimating pay plan risk and returns, and is also integral to the discussion of pay synergies. Based upon our two theoretical frameworks, we suggest specific research directions for pay program synergies, risk, and survival

Reframing the Fields

The conception of metaphoric process elaborated by Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell illuminates a key mechanism often involved in the most significant advances in science and religion. Attention to this conceptual device provides a productive way to reframe the relationships and dialogues between the fields. The theory has compelling implications for reframing the understanding of theology and its task

Discrimination by Parts: A Fixed-Effects Analysis of Starting Pay Differences across Gender

A unique employer-level data set is used to provide insight not only to the degree of discrimination that may exist , but also to the source of that potential discrimination. Results from decomposing individual wage equations indicate that, as legislatively defined, employers do not appear to be discriminating against their women hires to a large extent. When aggregated, however, the pay, job placement, and hiring discrimination estimates yield an overall discrimination estimate of a 6% gap in pay between men and women. These results suggest that a more comprehensive approach may be warranted in flagging possible discriminatory behavior.Discrimination; Gender; Pay; Wage; Women

Protein Structural Modularity and Robustness Are Associated with Evolvability

Theory suggests that biological modularity and robustness allow for maintenance of fitness under mutational change, and when this change is adaptive, for evolvability. Empirical demonstrations that these traits promote evolvability in nature remain scant however. This is in part because modularity, robustness, and evolvability are difficult to define and measure in real biological systems. Here, we address whether structural modularity and/or robustness confer evolvability at the level of proteins by looking for associations between indices of protein structural modularity, structural robustness, and evolvability. We propose a novel index for protein structural modularity: the number of regular secondary structure elements (helices and strands) divided by the number of residues in the structure. We index protein evolvability as the proportion of sites with evidence of being under positive selection multiplied by the average rate of adaptive evolution at these sites, and we measure this as an average over a phylogeny of 25 mammalian species. We use contact density as an index of protein designability, and thus, structural robustness. We find that protein evolvability is positively associated with structural modularity as well as structural robustness and that the effect of structural modularity on evolvability is independent of the structural robustness index. We interpret these associations to be the result of reduced constraints on amino acid substitutions in highly modular and robust protein structures, which results in faster adaptation through natural selection