Devah Iwalani Pager (March 1, 1972 – November 2, 2018) was an American sociologist best known for her research on racial discrimination in employment and the American criminal justice system.[2] At the time of her death, she was Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Harvard University.[3][4][5] She was a class of 2011 William T. Grant Scholar.[6]
As part of her doctoral dissertation research Pager conducted an experiment in which she enlisted young men to pose as job applicants with similar characteristics. She found that a black applicant received a callback or job offer half as often as an equally qualified white applicant. A black applicant with a clean record got a callback or job offer about as often as a white applicant with a felony conviction. She later replicated the experiment in 2009 with Bruce Western and Naomi Sugle and found that black applicants without criminal records received fewer callbacks than white applicants with criminal records.[8] The dissertation was awarded the "Best Dissertation Prize" by the American Sociological Association[9] and was later published as a series of articles[10] and a book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
^"Current and Former Scholars". W.T Grant Foundation. 2011. Retrieved 2019-04-13. Devah Pager, Ph.D.: Barriers in the Pathway to Adulthood: The Role of Discrimination in the Lives of Young Disadvantaged Men
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Brent Staples (2009-06-14). "Even Now, There's Risk in 'Driving While Black'". The New York Times. p. A20. Retrieved 2019-04-13. After sending carefully selected test applicants to apply for low-level jobs with hundreds of employers, Ms. Pager found that criminal convictions for black men seeking employment were, in many contexts, "virtually impossible to overcome," partly because those convictions reinforced powerful, longstanding stereotypes.
