| Given the shortcomings of a human capital approach to account for variability in the performance of scientists and engineers, contextual and dynamic explanations emerged. Among these, an important study by Pelz and Andrews suggests that access to specific work contexts (e.g.: autonomy, leadership experiences, sponsors, diversity in work, other's confidence in one's abilities) helps explain performance differentials. However, their analysis does not consider how these work contexts are distributed across the populations of scientists and engineers. Given what is known about the gendering of science and engineering fields, about women and minorities in these fields, and about evaluations of racial and ethnic group members, the critical question in this study addresses the basis of the allocation of favorable work climates that in turn contribute to high performance in science and engineering.;I argue that the reproduction of inequality is embedded in the structure of social relationships among groups both in the labor force and outside of it. Because the definition of competence is especially ambiguous in science and engineering, prototypes of the ideal scientist and ideal engineer emerged. The prototypes contain implicit, embedded, and non-conscious assumptions about what does and doesn't characterize a competent scientist or engineer. I argue that seemingly irrelevant individual characteristics such as gender, race/ethnicity, and family structure facilitate the cognitive sorting of individuals into groups that conform to the prototype and groups that are less or not conform. Non-conformity creates a disadvantage, while conformity creates an advantage for gaining access to the favorable work contexts that lead to higher performance.;I find that (a) Access to favorable work contexts is sometimes more important than human capital in predicting performance; (b) Group membership has an effect on the access to favorable work contexts, such that: (i) white men are consistently advantaged, U.S. born black females are disadvantaged, while all other non-whites, male and female, experience the absence of advantage; and (ii) married men have more advantage---regardless of their family structures---than single men, or than women in general have disadvantage; and (c) Inequality is pervasive across a wide variety of organizational settings. |
