Scandals, Female Solidarity and Gender: an analysis from the US film industry

Drawing on literature on scandals, stigma and solidarity, in this study we formulated hypotheses about the effects of personal scandals and female solidarity on individual reputation, with a special focus on gender. Given the growing intertwinedness between personal conduct and reputation at work, and given the rise of solidarity movements among individuals within working communities, we theorized that personal scandals negatively affect individual reputation, while female solidarity generates the opposite effect. In addition, we argued that the positive effect of female solidarity on reputation is stronger for women than for men. Moreover, we argued that solidarity might generate a ‘coming back’ effect from personal scandals, by weakening their negative effects. In order to test our hypotheses, we collected secondary data from a variety of sources in the US film industry and we adopted a multi-level longitudinal logistic regression model, using a person-year event dataset including 82 actors and resulting in 2017 observations.