Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Many Faces Of Class Ceiling: Its Manifestations At Different Career Stages And Ways To Overcome It, Jia Hui Lim

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Even with comparable education and level of competence, workers with lower socioeconomic status (SES) origins are disadvantaged in terms of earnings and occupational attainment. This class gap, or the “class ceiling,” is as large as the gender gap, but poorly understood. In my dissertation, I designed a series of related projects to explain and potentially mitigate the class ceiling problem. Across three projects, I mainly focused on where the problem starts—labor market and newcomer adjustment in organizations. I find that, beyond discrimination and bias that has been the focus of past work, many challenges stem from workers’ own psychology and …