About

David Pedulla is Professor of Sociology and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. His research agenda examines the processes and mechanisms leading to social inequality in labor markets and organizations. He focuses on understanding the consequences of organizational policies and practices for various workplace outcomes, as well as how nonstandard employment arrangements shape the social, economic, and political outcomes of workers. His research has been published in leading academic journals such as the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces. In 2020, he published his book, Making the Cut, with Princeton University Press. His work has received support from prominent organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Prior to his current position at Harvard, he was a faculty member at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Demographic economics
• Social psychology
• Economics
• Public economics
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Gender studies
• Labour economics
• Economic growth
• Demography

Selected publications

• Amplifying Negative Perceptions or Raising the Bar? How Social Context Shapes Discrimination

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  articleSenior author

  How does the social context of decision-making shape discrimination? Bringing together strands of literature that have remained largely separate, we theorize two ways that the social context may affect discrimination: (1) altering the link between a social characteristic and perceptions (“amplifying negative perceptions”), and (2) altering the link between perceptions and treatment by decision-makers (“raising the bar”). While the former has been explored extensively, the latter has remained underdeveloped. Empirically, we present evidence from a set of pre-registered survey experiments examining hiring decisions, using the case of job quality as a social context. First, we show that an experimental manipulation of job quality alters interview and hiring recommendations—our proxies for discrimination—for applicants with certain stigmatized characteristics. However, we find limited evidence that job quality shapes the negative perceptions of job applicants from those groups, such as concerns about being hardworking, suggesting that discrimination increases even though negative perceptions are not amplified. Instead, we show that evaluating applicants for good jobs exacerbates the effect of similarly negative perceptions on hiring outcomes—respondents “raise the bar” when evaluating candidates for higher quality jobs. Our findings advance the understanding of how social contexts shape discrimination, highlighting the potential power of altering the link between perceptions and outcomes to address discrimination.

  PublisherDOI

• Remote Work, Gender, and Hiring

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-06-10

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Remote Work, Gender, and Hiring

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-06-10

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• More Than a Match: “Fit” as a Tool in Hiring Decisions

  Work and Occupations · 2023-12-17 · 13 citations

  article

  The concept of “fit” has become important for understanding hiring decisions and labor market outcomes. While social scientists have explored how fit functions as a legitimized evaluative criterion to match candidates to jobs in the hiring process, less is known about how fit functions as a hiring tool to aid in decision-making when hiring decisions cannot—or should not—be justified. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 53 hiring professionals, we develop a theoretical argument that hiring professionals can use fit as a tool to circumvent legitimized hiring criteria and justify their hiring goals. Specifically, we show how hiring professionals use fit as a tool to explain their hiring decisions when these decisions cannot or should not be justified and we outline two mechanisms through which this process occurs: (1) fit as a tool for circumventing human capital concerns, and (2) fit as a tool to circumvent hiring policies based upon social characteristics. We argue that fit is more than an evaluative criterion for matching individuals to jobs. Hiring professionals deploy fit as a tool to justify their decisions amid uncertainty and constraint. Fit, then, becomes a placeholder when these hiring decisions are not able to be justified through legitimized means. Our findings reveal some of the potential negative consequences of using fit during the hiring process and contribute important theoretical insights about the role of fit in scholarship on inequality and labor markets.

  PublisherDOI

• Gender Differences in the Geographic Breadth of Job Search: Examining Job Applications

  Social Problems · 2023-10-05 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Where one lives and works is increasingly important in shaping economic opportunities. Yet, women, particularly partnered women, are less likely than men to relocate for a job, potentially serving as a key force in the production of gender labor market stratification. We examine why women’s geographic job mobility is lower than men’s, building on theoretical insights about the structural features of the labor market as well as how households make decisions. Our contribution arises from examining job applications rather than completed job moves. This enables us to examine the behavior of job seekers independent of employers’ hiring decision-making that may shape the findings in scholarship that focuses on completed job moves. We draw on an original dataset that captures detailed, prospective information on the job applications submitted by a national, probability-based sample of job seekers. Our findings indicate that even at the application stage, partnered women – but not women who have never been married – are less likely than comparable men to apply for a job requiring a move. This pattern holds even after accounting for structural features of the labor market. Theories of gendered household dynamics appear to better explain our findings for partnered individuals than theories of household economic maximization.

  PublisherDOI

• Can Customers Affect Racial Discrimination in Hiring?

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2022-09-21 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While significant scholarship has documented the prevalence of racial discrimination in hiring, less is known about the forces that exacerbate or mitigate it. In this article, we develop a theoretical argument about the ability of customers to influence racial discrimination in hiring, highlighting the role of direct customer communication and its intersection with online review systems. We deploy a novel method to test our argument. Specifically, we draw on original data from a two-part field experiment that first randomly assigned restaurants to receive one of three different email messages from customers and then audited the restaurants to test for racial discrimination in hiring. While our data collection effort was cut short and disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, making our findings more exploratory than initially anticipated, our data provide evidence that customer communication can reduce racial discrimination under certain conditions. We discuss the implications of these findings for scholarship on organizational decision-making, discrimination, and methodological approaches for studying these topics.

  PublisherDOI

• When Do Work-Family Policies Work? Unpacking the Effects of Stigma and Financial Costs for Men and Women

  Work and Occupations · 2022 · 48 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social psychology
  • Demographic economics

  Work-family policies—such as parental leave and flextime—can help to facilitate gender equality in workplaces and in families. But policy use is typically low, varies significantly from one workplace to another, and is often more prevalent among women than men. Extant research suggests that flexibility stigma—workplace norms that penalize workers for utilizing policies that facilitate non-work demands—as well as the financial costs associated with policy use, contribute to this pattern. However, previous studies have been largely correlational in nature, and have had difficulty assessing how these factors may interact with one another to shape gendered patterns of policy use. In this study, we offer novel causal traction on this set of issues. Using an original, population-based survey experiment, we examine how the salience of flexibility stigma and financial costs affect men's and women's intentions to use work-family policies. We find that these factors exert a large direct effect on men's and women's intentions to use work-family policies. Moreover, the gender gap in parental leave use intentions is large in workplace contexts with high flexibility stigma and high financial costs, but this gap narrows significantly under more favorable conditions. Findings point to the importance of organizational contexts and policy design in shaping work-family policy use and, in turn, gender inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• Field Experiments and Job Posting Sources: The Consequences of Job Database Selection for Estimates of Racial Discrimination

  Sociology of Race and Ethnicity · 2021-07-14 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Field experiments have proliferated throughout the social sciences and have become a mainstay for identifying racial discrimination during the hiring process. To date, field experiments of labor market discrimination have generally drawn their sample of job postings from limited sources, often from a single major online job posting website. While providing a large pool of job postings across labor markets, this narrow sampling procedure leaves open questions about the generalizability of the findings from field experiments of racial discrimination in the extant literature. In this paper, we present evidence from a field experiment examining racial discrimination in the hiring process that draws its sample from two sources: (1) a national online job posting website that aligns with previous research, and (2) a job aggregator service that scrapes the web daily in an effort to obtain all online job postings in the United States. While differing in the types of information they collect, we find the job postings drawn from the two sources result in similar estimates of discrimination against Black applicants. In other words, we do not find evidence that racial discrimination varies by the source of the job posting. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for studies of racial discrimination, discrimination along other axes of social difference, as well as field-experimental methods more broadly.

  PublisherDOI

• Making Meaning of Employment Histories

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2020-04-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter draws on in-depth interviews to consider what meanings hiring professionals attribute to nonstandard, mismatched, and precarious employment histories. It does so by mapping the terrain of meanings attributed to different employment experiences. Some of the meanings that employers extract from these types of work experiences clearly violate ideal worker norms and lead to negative perceptions of job applicants' soft skills and personality. Alongside these meanings and signals, however, significant uncertainty is induced in hiring professionals when they encounter workers with these types of employment experiences. In reconciling this uncertainty, hiring professionals turn largely to individualized explanation, rather than structural ones, and make it clear that they “need a narrative” from job applicants that explains their employment experiences, a narrative that workers rarely have the opportunity to provide.

  PublisherDOI

• 3. Making Meaning of Employment Histories: Signals, Uncertainty, and the Need for a Narrative

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2020-05-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Devah Pager

  Harvard University Press

  6 shared

• Sophie Allen

  4 shared

• Sarah Thébaud

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  4 shared

• Aruna Ranganathan

  4 shared

• Livia Baer-Bositis

  Stanford University

  4 shared

• Katariina Mueller-Gastell

  Stanford University

  2 shared

• Bethany J. Nichols

  Stanford University

  1 shared

• Katherine E. Wullert

  Stanford University

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  Harvard University

  2008

• M.A., Sociology

  Harvard University

  2004

• B.A., Sociology

  Harvard University

  2001