Research/Areas of Interest
Race and Gender Stratification; Labor Markets; Immigrant Incorporation; Quantitative Methods; Field Experiments; Comparative Sociology; Latin America
Education
- PhD, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, USA, 2017
- MA, Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, USA, 2010
- BA, Sociology, University of California/LA, USA, 2006
Biography
Felipe Dias is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University. Before coming to Tufts, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University. His research agenda evolves around understanding the institutional and organizational bases for social stratification and inequality in the United States and in Latin America. One of the central themes in his current research agenda is understanding how status-based characteristics shape hiring decisions. He is currently working on several projects in this line of research.
In one project, he designed and carried out the first field experiment (audit study) in Brazil to examine how skin color, class status, and gender intersect to produce different patterns of employment discrimination. This project, which has received funding from the National Science Foundation, has been published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. For his work in this area, he was awarded the Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Race, Gender, and Class.
Dr. Dias is also the Principal Investigator of a large-scale field experiment to test for nativity-based discrimination in the United States. In addition to experimentally manipulating the nativity of job applicants (U.S.-born vs foreign-born), the racial background (Hispanic vs White) was also experimentally manipulated. Findings from the field experiment suggest that there is a nativity-penalty in hiring, but the mechanisms driving discrimination vary for Eastern European immigrants and Hispanic immigrants.
Dr. Dias is also working collaboratively with David Pedulla (Stanford), Katie Wullert (Stanford), and John Munoz (Stanford) on a project to examine the organizational bases of racial, gender, and parental status discrimination. In this project, we pair a large-scale survey of employers with an experimental audit study in order to understand how organizational policies and practices (e.g. formalization, work-family policies, affirmative action policies, gender and racial composition of managers) mitigate causal estimates of employment discrimination. In another article from this research, recently published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, we examine whether discrimination against African American job seekers is diffuse across job posting sources. Our findings from this study have implications for studies of racial discrimination, discrimination along other axes of social difference, as well as field-experimental methods more broadly.
Dr. Dias is also working on several projects related to the current COVID-19 pandemic. In one project, which has been recently published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2020.100542) and was featured in The Lily by The Washington Post and the USA Today, he examine the effects of the current pandemic on parental status and gender inequality in employment. In a second project, recently published in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120988397), he examine the the racial gap in employment and layoffs during COVID-19 in the United States. A third paper, co-authored with Joe Chance (doctoral candidate, Tufts), examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigrant employment in the United States. We provide the first evidence about the impact of the new public charge rules on the employment behavior of immigrants during the post-outbreak recovery.
Dr. Dias' current research agenda builds on his previous work on the relationship between economic relations, processes of racialization, and stratification. One project in this line of research examined how labor issues helped shape the construction of racial ideologies and discourses in historical perspective. Using an array of historical data, such as provincial reports, provincial laws, published primary sources, and workforce census data, this project showed that the racial com …
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In one project, he designed and carried out the first field experiment (audit study) in Brazil to examine how skin color, class status, and gender intersect to produce different patterns of employment discrimination. This project, which has received funding from the National Science Foundation, has been published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. For his work in this area, he was awarded the Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Race, Gender, and Class.
Dr. Dias is also the Principal Investigator of a large-scale field experiment to test for nativity-based discrimination in the United States. In addition to experimentally manipulating the nativity of job applicants (U.S.-born vs foreign-born), the racial background (Hispanic vs White) was also experimentally manipulated. Findings from the field experiment suggest that there is a nativity-penalty in hiring, but the mechanisms driving discrimination vary for Eastern European immigrants and Hispanic immigrants.
Dr. Dias is also working collaboratively with David Pedulla (Stanford), Katie Wullert (Stanford), and John Munoz (Stanford) on a project to examine the organizational bases of racial, gender, and parental status discrimination. In this project, we pair a large-scale survey of employers with an experimental audit study in order to understand how organizational policies and practices (e.g. formalization, work-family policies, affirmative action policies, gender and racial composition of managers) mitigate causal estimates of employment discrimination. In another article from this research, recently published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, we examine whether discrimination against African American job seekers is diffuse across job posting sources. Our findings from this study have implications for studies of racial discrimination, discrimination along other axes of social difference, as well as field-experimental methods more broadly.
Dr. Dias is also working on several projects related to the current COVID-19 pandemic. In one project, which has been recently published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2020.100542) and was featured in The Lily by The Washington Post and the USA Today, he examine the effects of the current pandemic on parental status and gender inequality in employment. In a second project, recently published in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023120988397), he examine the the racial gap in employment and layoffs during COVID-19 in the United States. A third paper, co-authored with Joe Chance (doctoral candidate, Tufts), examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigrant employment in the United States. We provide the first evidence about the impact of the new public charge rules on the employment behavior of immigrants during the post-outbreak recovery.
Dr. Dias' current research agenda builds on his previous work on the relationship between economic relations, processes of racialization, and stratification. One project in this line of research examined how labor issues helped shape the construction of racial ideologies and discourses in historical perspective. Using an array of historical data, such as provincial reports, provincial laws, published primary sources, and workforce census data, this project showed that the racial com …