Started From the Bottom, Now We’re (Working) Here: Workplace Segregation by Social Class Origin

Segregation is a pervasive social phenomenon, separating individuals of different categories or groups across social foci. Workplaces are hubs of the labor market and central to economic outcomes, but may also facilitate cross-cutting social ties. Workplace segregation might exacerbate social inequality and decrease social cohesion. Most work on segregation focuses on salient categories like race and ethnicity, and we know little about segregation by more subtle statuses. Social class background is a case in point, because it is imperfectly observed by individuals involved in social interaction, and is more difficult to measure for total populations. In this paper, we analyze workplace segregation by social class background. We document substantial segregation by social background, over and above counterfactual segregation under random allocation of employees across workplaces. Moreover, we observe segregation levels over and above what would be expected under random allocation conditional on individual and workplace characteristics, including e.g. human capital, occupation, and workplace county. Also, when accounting for our richest set of covariates, employees are somewhat overexposed to coworkers who share their own class background. The excess segregation is the smallest for groups at the bottom of the class origin distribution, and larger at the top.