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Devah Pager, Pioneering Scholar On Racial Discrimination In Employment, Dead At 46

Devah Pager, Pioneering Scholar On Racial Discrimination In Employment, Dead At 46

Written by Ann Brown

Nov 12, 2018

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Harvard University sociologist Devah Pager, whose groundbreaking 2003 doctoral dissertation explored the impact of racial discrimination on the employment of Black men, died last week of pancreatic cancer at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was surrounded by family and friends.

She was just  46.

Pager’s works as a pioneering scholar changed the way we think of mass incarceration and racial discrimination in employment. Her research exposed structural racism as well as offering insight on how to change this.

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“Described by as a ‘force of nature’ by a colleague at Harvard, where she was the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Sociology of Public Policy, Pager received top honors from the American Sociological Association for her Ph.D dissertation — ‘The Mark of a Criminal Record,’ — that revealed “the powerful effects of race” on hiring decisions and contributed to inequalities in the criminal justice system,” ThinkProgress reported.

“She showed convincingly that discrimination against ex-felons is profound, and she developed policies that could combat that,” says Jason Beckfield, chair of Harvard’s Sociology Department.

He added: “She was a force of nature who accomplished a superhuman quantity and quality of work in a tragically short amount of time, and her impact on scholarship and policy is hard to overstate. She did work of global scope and tremendous depth that is unusual in its combination of rigor and creativity and relevance.”

Devah Pager
Devah Pager at Harvard University, where she was a professor of sociology and public policy. In her seminal work, she documented what she called the “powerful effects of race” on hiring decisions.CreditCreditvia Harvard University

 

Pager was born in Honolulu in 1972, to an Australian pediatrician and a South African computer scientist. She graduated from UCLA before going on to earn her Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here she already had begun to make her mark. “Her dissertation, ‘The Mark of a Criminal Record,’ was awarded top honors from the American Sociological Association. It also helped inform the ‘Ban the Box’ campaign, which sought to persuade employers to remove the check box on hiring applications that asks about criminal record,” The Harvard Gazette reported.

For her research, Pager sent paired teams of men — a team of Black men and a team of white men —  to go on job interviews with 350 prospective employers in greater Milwaukee. Each man presented identical background that included a year-and-half prison sentence for cocaine possession.

“After analyzing the findings, she found that hiring managers were far more likely to give jobs to a white man with a felony conviction than to an equally qualified black man without a criminal record,” ThinkProgress reported.

“This suggests that being Black in America today is essentially like having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding employment,”  Pager said of her research in a 2016 video interview with the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Thirty-three states and more than 150 cities and counties have adopted “ban-the-box” policies.

In 2007, Pager published “Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration,” which the Association for Humanist Sociology named book of the year. Among her other accolades was an Early Career Award from the Poverty, Inequality, and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association.

Pager joined the sociology faculty at Harvard in 2013. She later served as director of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and as Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute.

Pager is survived by her husband, Mike, and son, Atticus.

 

 

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