Thomas A. DiPrete
Thomas DiPrete is an American-born sociologist from Cranston, Rhode Island. DiPrete received his B.S. in Humanities and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University.
Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, DiPrete served on the faculties of the University of Chicago, Duke University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Currently, DiPrete serves as Giddings Professor of sociology, co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy, co-director of the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality at Columbia University, and a member of the faculty of the Columbia Population Research Center.
DiPrete's research interests encompass social stratification and mobility, education, economic sociology, family, demography, and quantitative methodology. His research has focused on applying quantitative methods to the study of social and gender inequality in education and in the workforce. His ongoing projects include the study of gender differences in educational performance, job attainment, and fields of study. Additionally, he has studied the relationship between education and earnings inequality. However, he has also done extensive work in the field of unequal compensation of corporate executives, including developing the leapfrog theory. His works have introduced several widely-known theories of sociology. He has been described as one of the most influential figures in modern studies of educational inequality and CEO compensation.
Biography
Early life
Born in 1950 in Rhode Island, he was raised in an Italian-American community in Cranston. His father Albert was second generation Italian and a dentist. His mother Jeanne Casey had Irish and French Canadian roots. He attended Catholic schools in Rhode Island and then went to MIT.Family: Married to Katherine Ewing, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University before moving to Columbia as a professor of religion and director of the South Asia Institute while specializing in Islam, Sufism, and South Asia.
Educational background
- 1972: Earned a B.S. humanities and science from MIT, blending coursework in philosophy with applied mathematics.
- 1975: Completed an M.A. in mathematical statistics at Columbia University while pursuing doctoral studies.
- 1975: Completed M.Phil. in sociology at Columbia University while pursuing doctoral studies.
- 1978: Received Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia, advised by interdisciplinary methodologist Arthur Goldberger.
Academic career
- University of Chicago
- Duke University
- University of Wisconsin–Madison
- Columbia University
Research contributions
Job attainment
DiPrete researched the impact of equal employment opportunity initiatives in the early 1970s. More specifically, he investigated the impact this had on the upward mobility of lower-level employees. Previously, professionalization acted as a status divider. It increased the status gap between upper- and lower-level jobs by creating distinct administrative and professional career lines that couldn't be attained by those working in lower-level jobs. For professional jobs, DiPrete recognized that candidates needed to have a college education. The professional and non-professional career lines in the federal government were made distinct formally with the Classification Act of 1923. While administrative jobs do not require the same level of education as professional jobs do, the lines to attain them were manipulated. The United States Civil Service Commission included four career lines in the general administrative and clerical occupational group in 1941, where many administrative roles were. By 1957, three out of these 64 career lines were exclusively administrative, and by 1983, it went up to eleven.EEO programs attempted to reverse this separation. DiPrete's findings found that in 1973, about 10,000 federal employees were benefiting from EEO programs. Consequently, lower-level employees accomplished significant status promotion. A greater proportion of upper-level entry positions were filled by lower-level employees who had been promoted. While certain professional roles required a college education for proper training, the grades of upper- and lower-level positions overlapped in the middle levels of white-collar jobs. Therefore, the lower-level employees could get promoted through additional training on the job. About 90% of these lower level employees were women, and about half were minorities. Therefore, these initiatives mainly benefited them. Still, DiPrete's findings showed that female and minority lower-level employees were not more likely to get a promotion compared to male and white colleagues.
Gender and educational achievement
DiPrete's research explores the role of gender in shaping student experience within the educational system as well as the role of school environments in shaping gender disparities in academic achievement. Their work challenged the idea that innate differences between boys and girls account for the underperformance of male students in academic settings relative to female students. While some scholars argued that schools foster a demasculinized learning environment, DiPrete' and Buchmann's theory suggested that masculinity is shaped by learning environments, ultimately influencing how male students perceive academic engagement. In contrast, their theory suggested that peer culture for female students is less likely to stigmatize academic engagement as "un-feminine".DiPrete and Buchmann also investigated the role of social and behavioral skills in academic performance. Their research found that male students receive roughly the same academic benefits from these skills as female students. However, their research found that female students enter school with stronger social and behavioral skills. These skills are positively correlated with reading and math performance. Furthermore, DiPrete and Buchmann found that additional factors such as socioeconomic status and the presence of a biological father in the household are associated with stronger social and behavioral skills.
Female advantage in higher education
DiPrete worked with Claudia Buchmann to further investigate the gender gap in educational achievement in the context of higher education. They defined a clear historical shift, finding that while 65% of bachelor's degrees were awarded to men in 1960, 58% of bachelor's degrees were awarded to women by 2004. DiPrete and Buchmann identified many social developments that explain the shift in gender expectations. As traditional gender roles have declined over time, women feel more incentivized to pursue higher education. Women are more likely to enroll in college and stay, whereas men are more likely to drop out.This, in turn, has shifted parental investment patterns in favor of daughters. The growing vulnerability of boys to their family situation is explored by their research. Their data shows that males benefit when they have a father with some education at home but the benefit is no longer present when their father only completed high school or is not present. In recent years, boys who come from less-educated families or absent fathers have become disproportionately disadvantaged. Meanwhile, women who come from the same background exceed men in college completion.
DiPrete and Buchmann further explored the more evident disparities among African Americans in a later study with Anne McDaniel and Uri Shwed. At no time since at least 1940 have black men's college completion rates surpassed those of black women. While the rates of college completion for black people rose steadily over time, it grew more rapidly for women than for men. Black men were particularly adversely affected by race-based exclusion from high status jobs for college graduates including corporate managers and engineers. They found that the rising rate of incarceration of black men mildly contributed to the gender gap in college completion among black people.
DiPrete and Buchmann found that this gender imbalance has caused college administrators to be concerned about campus diversity. In response to the arising changes, there were considerations of affirmative action measures for male applicants in 2004.
Life course mobility
DiPrete conceptualized "mobility regimes" as national configurations of educational systems, labor markets, and welfare policies that collectively determine life course mobility by conditioning both the rates and the consequences of mobility-generating events such as job change or loss, marriage and divorce etc. This framework explains why countries with similar economic development exhibit divergent mobility rates over the life course. Countries can mitigate or enhance mobility either through policies or institutional arrangements that affect the rate at which these mobility events occur, by mitigating or enhancing the financial consequences of these events. Thus, the United States is a country with relatively high rates of mobility events and counter-mobility events. Germany is a country whose institutions dampen the rate of both positive and negative events. Sweden is a country which has relatively high rates of mobility events but its social insurance systems provide relatively high mitigation of their financial consequences.His work highlights how public insurance mitigates socioeconomic risks in intragenerational mobility, with Sweden's welfare policies reducing career volatility compared to the U.S. private insurance via parental wealth also substitutes for weak public systems, perpetuating inequality.
Empirical findings: Comparative analysis across Western nations revealed that absolute mobility declined with rising inequality, while relative mobility remained stable due to offsetting educational access improvements and "glass floor" protections for affluent youth. DiPrete's wealth transmission studies showed U.S. families primarily perpetuate advantage through housing investments and college funding, contrasting with Germany's skill-certification systems and Sweden's welfare-state moderating effects. Educational institutions emerged as critical mediators in his work. Early academic tracking systems were found to amplify origin-based inequality, while college admission processes create non-meritocratic mobility barriers.
Methodological innovations: His 1978 dissertation was perhaps the first application of Cox regression to a social sciences context. His 1990 publication on how covariates could be incorporated into log-linear models for social mobility has been widely applied in stratification research. His work on causal analysis led to a prize-winning demonstration that negative as well as positive selection into "treatments" would emerge when people used a mixture of behavioral decision rules. Several years before the idea entered mainstream empirical sociology and economics, DiPrete had published practical methods for sensitivity analysis in instrumental variables regression. DiPrete was a pioneer in the use of multilevel models to analyze longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data, and he and his associates also pioneered techniques for harmonizing cross-national mobility data across multiple countries including the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden.