About

Ming D. Leung is an Associate Professor at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on careers, hiring, and labor markets, with particular emphasis on issues related to diversity and discrimination in the workforce. He studies how career transitions within and between jobs influence the likelihood of being hired and promoted, and explores contemporary platform markets such as virtual freelancing, mobile gig-economy work, and crowdfunding. Dr. Leung holds a PhD in Business Administration from Stanford University, an MBA in Strategy and Marketing from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and a BS in Business and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been published in top management and sociology journals, including Organization Science, Management Science, the American Journal of Sociology, and the American Sociological Review. His research has been featured on NPR Science Friday and in the Financial Times. He has advised companies such as UpWork, Google, Wonolo, Atipica, and Intel on hiring and diversity initiatives. Dr. Leung resides in Southern California with his wife and three children.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Political Science
• Accounting
• Public relations
• Cancer research
• Economics
• Endocrinology
• Management
• Finance
• Biology
• Physical therapy
• Cell biology
• Surgery
• Business

Selected publications

• From Interests to Outcomes: Exploring Gendered Pathways in Careers

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Despite decades of research and organizational efforts to address gender inequities, disparities in career outcomes between women and men remain one of society’s grand challenges. Women continue to encounter barriers to advancement, as they still earn less than men, are underrepresented in upper-level management roles, and are overrepresented in lower-status occupations. The persistence of these gaps, even with the increased societal focus on gender equity, suggests the need to further explore why and how women are still systematically disadvantaged in work and careers. This symposium brings together four papers that examine gender differences in early career interests, subsequent career trajectories, and ultimately career outcomes to provide a comprehensive understanding of how gender influences work and careers. Drawing from diverse theoretical perspectives and empirical settings, these papers address pressing questions about the challenges that women face and the mechanisms that perpetuate gender disparities in careers. The final paper, however, examines a potential context when women may actually be advantaged relative to comparable men—despite women’s systemically worse outcomes —providing a nuanced perspective on gender dynamics. Together, the four papers consider foundational early career interests that shape trajectories, labor market behaviors, professional setbacks, and senior management outcomes. By drawing on large, unique datasets across multiple contexts—spanning early career preferences, freelancing platforms, Hollywood film production, and corporate promotions—the studies highlight how individual, organizational, and societal factors interact, leading to gender differences in career outcomes. The influence of societal gender equality on career interest gender gaps Author: Rong Su; University of Iowa Author: Geraldo Padilla; University of Iowa Author: Nicholas Lowery; University of Iowa The glass trap: How horizontal job stratification leads to divergent career trajectories Author: Simon (Seongbin) Yoon; University of California Irvine Author: Ming De Leung; University of California Irvine Who pays the price for failure? Film production teams and career death after a box office bomb Author: Kaisa E. Snellman; INSEAD Author: Isabelle Solal; ESSEC Business School Author: Kamil Stronski; INSEAD Author: Eric Luis Uhlmann; INSEAD Premium or penalty? Differential effects of gender and race on internal promotions to top management Author: Tiantian Yang; University of Pennsylvania

  PublisherDOI

• Addressing Gender Inequality in Organizations: New Insights on the Impact of Employer Practices

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Employer practices powerfully shape gender inequality in organizations by allocating opportunities and specifying how work should be accomplished. In this symposium, we bring together scholars who share a concern about understanding how employer practices can be a source of change for reducing gender inequality in organizations. The five papers in this symposium each shed light on how particular employer practices—remote training, sorting of employees into career paths, assignment of work tasks, tenure extensions, and work-life policies—affect women’s wage and career outcomes. Our discussant, Lauren Rivera, a leading scholar in the study of workplace inequality, will close our symposium by synthesizing the presented papers and facilitating a discussion with the audience regarding the future directions for this important topic. Through this symposium, we aim to generate new insights about how scholars can continue to study and improve the research on employer practices and gender inequality in organizations.

  PublisherDOI

• Applying While Black: The Collateral Effects of Racial Differences in Work Histories

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2025-05-20 · 2 citations

  article

  It is well known that hiring practices that treat job seekers differently by race contribute to racial disparities in employment. Yet, practices that treat job seekers equivalently may also contribute to racial disparities if there are pre-existing racial differences among the applicants. We focus on employers’ prominent practice of using job seekers’ work histories to make inferences about their suitability for jobs. Scholars and practitioners alike have long assumed that work histories are race neutral because they result from job seekers’ strategic choices about where to apply and what jobs to accept. However, Black job seekers face structural constraints—namely, anticipating and experiencing racial discrimination—that restrict the job search strategies and resulting jobs available to them. As a result, they are less likely than their White peers to construct the work histories that employers value—those composed of prior experience closely related to the job at hand and specialized within a narrow domain of work. These differences in work histories contribute to the racial disparities that Black job seekers experience. We test and find support for this argument, using over 490,000 job applications for all 3,683 publicly posted jobs over seven years at two U.S. technology companies. This study contributes to the literature on racial discrimination and categorization in labor markets by uncovering a novel pathway through which race shapes employment.

  PublisherDOI

• Evaluative Heterogeneity: Causes, Consequences, and Future Directions

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  Evaluations are ubiquitous in contemporary business, and a wide range of scholarly work has addressed how the social markers (i.e. legitimacy, status, reputation, gender, race, etc.) of products, individuals, and organizations influence average marginal perceptions of quality. Despite the potential managerial implications, only more recently have scholars directly explored the amount of consensus in such evaluations. This symposium brings together scholars interested in heterogeneity in evaluations to explore questions such as: In what settings might we expect to observe more or less consensus in evaluations? Where are the challenges and opportunities related to the measurement of consensus and its consequences? Through this panel we hope to develop “consensus” about the most promising questions in this space and the best ways to approach them.

  PublisherDOI

• Reactions, Revisions, and Rehiring: Changes in Employers’ Gendered Preferences in Online Labor Markets

  Organization Science · 2025-03-28 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Employers in online labor marketplaces prefer women over men because of stereotypes that women are more trustworthy. These stereotypes are especially salient in this context because of the uncertainty in online transactions. Yet, employers’ interactions with women and men workers might moderate the influence of trustworthiness stereotypes and, by extension, employers’ hiring preferences for individual women and men as well as gender categories in general. By exploiting rare access to large-scale, longitudinal hiring data from an online labor marketplace, we examine how employers’ interactions with workers shape their subsequent hiring preferences. Using linear probability models with job fixed effects, we find that employers prefer rehiring workers with whom they previously had positive interactions over unknown workers. Men workers benefit more than women workers from positive interactions, suggesting that these interactions decrease the influence of negative stereotypes about men’s trustworthiness. We additionally find that employers prefer hiring workers of the same gender as workers with whom they previously had positive interactions, suggesting that employers’ interactions with individual women and men shape their preferences for hiring women and men in general. These findings point to a nuanced theoretical relationship between employers’ interactions with workers and their social category preferences in hiring under conditions of immense uncertainty. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17383 .

  PublisherDOI

• Approaching or avoiding? Gender asymmetry in reactions to prior job search outcomes by gig workers in female- versus male-typed job domains

  Social Forces · 2025-02-02 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Despite recent increases in females entering male-typed job domains, women are more likely to exit these jobs than men, leading to a “leaky-pipeline” phenomenon and contributing to continued occupational gender segregation. Extant work has demonstrated that women are less likely to reapply to employers who previously rejected them for jobs in male-typed job domains. However, these studies leave unexamined whether women will reapply to other employers in those job domains and, if so, whether this pattern differs in female-typed job domains, hampering our confidence in the contribution of these patterns to gender segregation. This paper investigates whether employer rejection dampens women’s job-seeking persistence more than men’s for all employers and across male versus female job domains. Regression analyses of more than 700,000 applications for over 200,000 job postings by roughly 70,000 freelancers in an online contract labor market demonstrate that women are more likely than men to reduce job-seeking activity from all employers following rejections in the male-typed IT and programming job domain. Women are also more likely than men to seek jobs in other domains outside IT and programming following job-seeking rejection. By contrast, female freelancers in female-typed writing and translation jobs do not exhibit similar gendered behavior patterns. Implications for research on gender segregation, careers, and hiring are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• Voting With Their Feet: Employee Responses to ESG News

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Approaches to the Evaluation of Entrepreneurs, Ventures, and Ideas

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  The symposium’s goal is to bring together and showcase new research on how novel ideas, most prominently within entrepreneurship, are evaluated. This research informs which new individuals, ventures, and ideas are allocated resources and how inequality is produced in the opportunity to participate in innovation. We combine theoretical perspectives on how evaluators assess an idea’s quality under uncertainty and the mechanisms that inform evaluative outcomes, including work on structural conditions of an evaluation process. Do We Devalue Social? How Social Impact Shapes our Financial and Time Commitment to Training Author: Dana Kanze; London Business School The Storytelling Entrepreneur Has No Clothes? Risks and Rewards of Narrative Pitching Author: Brad Turner; MIT Sloan School of Management Evaluation Differences for Generalists across Multiple Hiring Stages Author: Ming De Leung; U. of California, Irvine Author: Simon (Seongbin) Yoon; U. of California, Irvine Author: Uisung David Park; Syracuse U. A Game of Chance? The Role of Luck in Evaluations of Entrepreneurial Ideas Author: Tristan L. Botelho; Yale School of Management Author: Ethan Poskanzer; U. of Colorado Internal Venture or External Founding? Organizational Determinants of Gender Differences Author: Weiyi Ng; National U. of Singapore Author: Eliot Sherman; London Business School

  PublisherDOI

• Ability, Visibility, or Credibility? Occupational Category Spanning with Profile-Based Matching

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  articleSenior author

  The use of online profiles generates new matching opportunities by making worker information public. Workers use occupational labels to signal their expertise concisely. Under this context, workers may attempt to increase their employability by affiliating with multiple occupational categories. While the signaling strategy can be successful by extending the pool of potential recruiters, it may also cause negative reactions due to its lack of focus. The study approaches the dilemma by applying categorization theory from economic sociology. We hypothesize that claiming multiple categories may increase the attention workers receive but decrease their credibility. To test the mechanisms, the study exploits an exogenous change of category visibility in a South Korean job-matching platform. The platform suddenly deleted occupational categories from the user list without prior announcements. The results show that category spanners received greater profile views but fewer interview offers when the occupational affiliations were visible. The decoupling of attention and legitimacy challenges the traditional idea that inattention to category spanners drives the social penalty. The study concludes with implications for the online labor market, platform design, and boundaryless career literature.

  PublisherDOI

• Effect of Corporate Environment Social and Governance Reputation on Employee Turnover

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Accounting
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Weiyi Ng

  National University of Singapore

  9 shared

• Moshe Barach

  University of Minnesota

  4 shared

• Hayagreeva Rao

  The University of Texas at San Antonio

  4 shared

• Giacomo Negro

  Emory University

  4 shared

• Ben Lourie

  3 shared

• Chuchu Liang

  University of California, Irvine

  3 shared

• Michael T. Hannan

  3 shared

• Sibo Lu

  Beijing Jiaotong University

  3 shared