A world of women
Second-Order Statistical Discrimination
Tilman Klumpp & Xuejuan Su
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The low representation of female workers in elite jobs is sometimes attributed to a tail effect: If the human capital distribution exhibits less variation among females than among males, then even with comparable average human capital there will be fewer females in the right tail than males. This paper offers an explanation for why the human capital distribution might have this property. We show that the belief that the female human capital distribution has a lower variance than the male distribution can be self-fulfilling, in that it provides individuals with incentives to invest in human capital such that the resulting distribution exhibits exactly this characteristic. If this happens, fewer females are employed in high-end jobs (a "glass ceiling" effect). The average productivity of female workers may at the same time be higher than that of male workers.
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Male and Female Pronoun Use in U.S. Books Reflects Women's Status, 1900-2008
Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell & Brittany Gentile
Sex Roles, November 2012, Pages 488-493
Abstract:
The status of women in the United States varied considerably during the 20th century, with increases 1900-1945, decreases 1946-1967, and considerable increases after 1968. We examined whether changes in written language, especially the ratio of male to female pronouns, reflected these trends in status in the full text of nearly 1.2 million U.S. books 1900-2008 from the Google Books database. Male pronouns included he, him, his, himself and female pronouns included she, her, hers, and herself. Between 1900 and 1945, 3.5 male pronouns appeared for every female pronoun, increasing to 4.5 male pronouns during the postwar era of the 1950s and early 1960s. After 1968, the ratio dropped precipitously, reaching 2 male pronouns per female pronoun by the 2000s. From 1968 to 2008, the use of male pronouns decreased as female pronouns increased. The gender pronoun ratio was significantly correlated with indicators of U.S. women's status such as educational attainment, labor force participation, and age at first marriage as well as women's assertiveness, a personality trait linked to status. Books used relatively more female pronouns when women's status was high and fewer when it was low. The results suggest that cultural products such as books mirror U.S. women's status and changing trends in gender equality over the generations.
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Criminal Violence, Political Resources, and Women's Political Success
David Jacobs et al.
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This analysis tests overlooked sociological hypotheses about women's presence in the state legislatures and the House of Representatives. Stereotypes about women suggest that shifts in social conditions affect these political outcomes by making such stereotypes more or less salient. Findings indicate that beliefs about female competencies - such as women's purported unwillingness to endorse violent solutions - should reduce support for female candidates when increases in violent crime create demands for increasingly severe punishments. Since women also are typecast as being more protective of vulnerable populations than males, states with larger minority populations should have additional women in both legislatures. Pooled time-series models based on 1,127 state-years show that fewer women were present in the state legislatures or in state delegations to the House after increases in the murder rates. States with larger minority populations, however, had more women in these two legislative bodies. Our results support claims that under researched social conditions produce political climates that either benefit or harm women who seek these offices.
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Marital Status Bias in Perceptions of Employees
Alexander Jordan & Emily Zitek
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, September/October 2012, Pages 474-481
Abstract:
Three studies documented effects of marital status on perceptions of employees or prospective employees. In Experiment 1, participants rated a married female job applicant as less suitable for employment than a single counterpart. In Experiment 2, participants again perceived a female job applicant less favorably when she was married; in contrast, a male applicant was perceived more favorably when married. In Experiment 3, participants predicted that a recently married woman's job performance and dedication would decline, whereas a recently married man's dedication was predicted to rise; this difference made participants more willing to lay off the woman than the man.
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Appearance-Based Politics: Sex-Typed Facial Cues Communicate Political Party Affiliation
Colleen Carpinella & Kerri Johnson
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2013, Pages 156-160
Abstract:
Consequential political judgments often rely on facial appearance, yet the facial cues that compel such judgments remain unspecified. We predicted that judgments of political party affiliation, and by extension their accuracy, rely on the sex-typicality of facial cues (i.e., the degree of facial masculinity and femininity). In Study 1, we found that among Republicans/Conservatives in the 111th U.S. House of Representatives, women were significantly more sex-typical than men. This was not true for Democrats/Liberals. In Study 2, we examined the relationship between sex-typicality of facial cues and social judgments. We found that the accuracy of Republican categorizations was positively related to feminine cues in women but negatively related to masculine cues in men. In contrast, the opposite pattern was true for Democratic categorizations. Facial sex-typicality mediated the interaction between politician sex and party and perceiver party affiliation judgments. We discuss the implications that these findings have for electoral politics.
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How Costly Is Diversity? Affirmative Action in Light of Gender Differences in Competitiveness
Muriel Niederle, Carmit Segal & Lise Vesterlund
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Affirmative action is often criticized for causing reverse discrimination and lowering the qualifications of those hired under the policy. However, the magnitude of such adverse effects depends on whether the best suited candidate is hired absent the policy. Indeed affirmative action may compensate for the distortion discrimination imposes on the selection of candidates. This paper asks whether affirmative action can have a similar corrective impact when qualified individuals fail to apply for a job. We evaluate the effect of introducing a gender quota in an environment where high-performing women fail to enter competitions they can win. We show that guaranteeing women equal representation among winners increases their entry. The response exceeds that predicted by the change in probability of winning and is in part driven by women being more willing to compete against other women. The consequences are substantial as the boost in supply essentially eliminates the anticipated costs of the policy.
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Floor Rink, Michelle Ryan & Janka Stoker
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In two scenario-based studies, we found that women and men evaluate glass-cliff positions (i.e., precarious leadership positions at organizations in crisis) differently depending on the social and financial resources available. Female and male participants evaluated a hypothetical leadership position in which they would have both social and financial resources, financial resources but no social resources, or social resources but no financial resources. Women evaluated the position without social resources most negatively, whereas men evaluated the position without financial resources most negatively. In Study 2, we found that women and men considered different issues when evaluating these leadership positions. Women's evaluations and expected levels of influence as leaders depended on the degree to which they expected to be accepted by subordinates. In contrast, men's evaluations and expected levels of acceptance by subordinates depended on the degree to which they expected to be influential in the position. Our findings have implications for the understanding of the glass-cliff phenomenon and gendered leadership stereotypes.
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Karin Hederos Eriksson & Anna Sandberg
Negotiation Journal, October 2012, Pages 407-428
Abstract:
In this study, we investigated if and how gender differences in the propensity to initiate a negotiation are affected by the gender of the counterpart in the negotiation. We enlisted 204 Swedish students to take part in an experiment in which they had to decide whether to initiate a negotiation for higher compensation. In line with previous research, we found that men were more likely than women to initiate a negotiation: 42 percent of the male and 28 percent of the female participants initiated a negotiation. The gender difference, however, was only large and statistically significant when the negotiation counterpart was a woman. With a female negotiation counterpart, women were less likely than men to initiate a negotiation by 24 percentage points, while with a male negotiation counterpart, the gender difference was only 5 percentage points and not statistically significant. This result suggests that the gender of the negotiation counterpart should be taken into consideration when analyzing gender differences in initiation of negotiation.
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An Empirical Analysis of the Gender Gap in News Consumption
Christine Benesch
Journal of Media Economics, Summer 2012, Pages 147-167
Abstract:
Survey results reveal that women consume less news than men. This article empirically analyzes this gender gap and explores several explanations. In the United States, the gender gap cannot be explained by differences in education, income, and other socio-demographics or by differences in preferences and job benefits of news consumption. However, the dual burden of paid and household work appears to be one of the drivers of the gender gap. In a cross-country comparison, the gender gap is linked to measures of gender equality in the economy and in politics.
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Exploring the relationship between math anxiety and gender through implicit measurement
Orly Rubinsten, Noam Bialik & Yael Solar
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, October 2012
Abstract:
Math anxiety, defined as a negative affective response to mathematics, is suggested as a strong antecedent for the low visibility of women in the science and engineering workforce. However, the assumption of gender differences in math anxiety is still being studied and results are inconclusive, probably due to the use of explicit measures such as direct questionnaires. Thus, our primary objective was to investigate the effects of math anxiety on numerical processing in males and females by using a novel affective priming task as an indirect measure. Specifically, university students (23 males and 30 females) completed a priming task in which an arithmetic equation was preceded by one of four types of priming words (positive, neutral, negative, or related to mathematics). Participants were required to indicate whether the equation (simple math facts based on addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division) was true or false. People are typically found to respond to target stimuli more rapidly after presentation of an affectively related prime than after an affectively unrelated one. In the current study, shorter response latencies for positive as compared to negative affective primes were found in the male group. An affective priming effect was found in the female group as well, but with a reversed pattern. That is, significantly shorter response latencies were observed in the female group for negative as compared to positive targets. That is, for females, negative affective primes act as affectively related to simple arithmetic problems. In contrast, males associated positive affect with simple arithmetic. In addition, only females with lower or insignificant negative affect toward arithmetic study at faculties of mathematics and science. We discuss the advantages of examining pure anxiety factors with implicit measures which are free of response factors. In addition it is suggested that environmental factors may enhance the association between math achievements and math anxiety in females.
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Understanding the Gender-Pay Gap in the Federal Workforce Over the Past 20 Years
Benjamin Bolitzer & Erin Godtland
American Review of Public Administration, November 2012, Pages 730-746
Abstract:
This article examines how the pay gap between men and women in the federal workforce changed over the period 1988-2007 and what factors contributed to the pay gap. To do this, we use a decomposition method to analyze the most recent data available for a representative sample of federal employees. We find that the pay gap - the difference between men's and women's average pay before controlling for factors that affect pay - declined dramatically over the 20-year period. Most of this decline is because women and men in the federal workforce have become more similar over time in their levels of education and work experience and the jobs they perform in the federal government.
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Does My Boss's Gender Matter? Explaining Job Satisfaction and Employee Turnover in the Public Sector
Jason Grissom, Jill Nicholson-Crotty & Lael Keiser
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, October 2012, Pages 649-673
Abstract:
Substantial literatures exist examining public personnel turnover and the role of gender in public management. We bring these two strands of research together to test hypotheses concerning the impact of manager gender on the job satisfaction and turnover of public sector workers. In particular, we test whether manager gender influences satisfaction and turnover per se versus the competing claim that gender congruence between managers and employees, regardless of gender, is the relevant construct. Using data from a nationally representative sample of public school teachers and principals and employing a fixed effects design that implicitly compares male and female employees in the same school, we find evidence that supervisor gender matters for satisfaction and turnover. We also find important effects of gender congruence, which appear to be driven by lower satisfaction and greater turnover among male teachers with female principals.
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Eye of the Beholder: Effects of Perspective and Sexual Objectification on Harassment Judgments
Richard Wiener et al.
Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social Analytic Jurisprudence instructs researchers to study the reciprocal relations between law and peoples' lives by developing empirical descriptions of legal assumptions about human behavior. The present work introduced a new experimental paradigm to test some of those assumptions by studying the impact of sexual objectification in a simulated job interview on performance, sexual harassment judgments, and emotions for women who experienced (akin to complainants), observed (akin to coworkers or witnesses), or predicted (akin to investigators, EEOC officers, mediators, jurors, or judges,) the impact of sexual objectification. Consistent with hypotheses, sexual objectification resulted in worse performance predictions, more sexual harassment, and more negative emotion compared with the control condition, but these effects were moderated by perspective. Overall, predictors estimated worse performance, more sexual harassment, and more negative emotion in response to sexual objectification than observers and experiencers. Anticipated negative emotion and self-referencing explained the effects for predictors. Theoretical and practical implications for legal and psychological theory on sexual harassment, objectification, and affective forecasting are discussed.
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Marie-France Marin et al.
PLoS ONE, October 2012
Abstract:
With the advent of specialized television channels offering 24-hour coverage, Internet and smart phones, the possibility to be constantly in contact with the media has increased dramatically in the last decades. Despite this higher access to knowledge, the impact media exposure has on healthy individuals remains poorly studied. Given that most information conveyed in the media is negative and that upon perception of threat, the brain activates the stress system, which leads to cortisol secretion, we decided to determine how healthy individuals react to media information. Accordingly, we investigated whether reading real negative news (1) is physiologically stressful, (2) modulates one's propensity to be stress reactive to a subsequent stressor and (3) modulates remembrance for these news. Sixty participants (30 women, 30 men) were randomly assigned to either twenty-four real neutral news excerpts or to twenty-four real negative excerpts for 10 minutes. They were then all exposed to a well-validated psychosocial stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), which consists of an anticipation phase of 10 minutes and a test phase of 10 minutes. A total of eight salivary cortisol samples were collected, at 10-minutes intervals, throughout the experimental procedure. One day later, a free recall of the news was performed. Results showed that although reading negative news did not lead to change in cortisol levels (p>0.05), it led to a significant increase in cortisol to a subsequent stressor in women only (p<0.001). Also, women in the negative news condition experienced better memory for these news excerpts compared to men (p<0.01). These results suggest a potential mechanism by which media exposure could increase stress reactivity and memory for negative news in women.
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The Most Egalitarian of All Professions: Pharmacy and the Evolution of a Family-Friendly Occupation
Claudia Goldin & Lawrence Katz
NBER Working Paper, September 2012
Abstract:
Pharmacy has become a female-majority profession that is highly remunerated with a small gender earnings gap and low earnings dispersion relative to other occupations. We sketch a labor market framework based on the theory of equalizing differences to integrate and interpret our empirical findings on earnings, hours of work, and the part-time work wage penalty for pharmacists. Using extensive surveys of pharmacists for 2000, 2004, and 2009 as well as samples from the American Community Surveys and the Current Population Surveys, we explore the gender earnings gap, the penalty to part-time work, labor force persistence, and the demographics of pharmacists relative to other college graduates. We address why the substantial entrance of women into the profession was associated with an increase in their earnings relative to male pharmacists. We conclude that the changing nature of pharmacy employment with the growth of large national pharmacy chains and hospitals and the related decline of independent pharmacies played key roles in the creation of a more family-friendly, female-friendly pharmacy profession. The position of pharmacist is probably the most egalitarian of all U.S. professions today.
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Pervasive patriarchal leadership ideology in seasonal residential summer camp staff
Luc Cousineau & Jennifer Roth
Leadership, November 2012, Pages 421-440
Abstract:
Studies on gender and leadership to date reveal that structural, psychological, and attitudinal barriers disadvantage women in the workplace. Women who work in outdoor recreation programs also face gender stereotypes related to the perceived appropriateness of the social role they play, and level of physical ability; stereotypes which cause employees and co-workers alike to prefer male leaders. One area of outdoor recreation that requires further investigation is live-in summer camps, because of the more nurturant requirements of leaders in these spaces. This paper documents which qualities residential summer camp staff value in leaders, and hypothesizes whether women who work in the more home-like setting of live-in camps face the same attitudinal and social barriers as women in other areas of outdoor recreation. Analysis yielded a distinct gender bias in favor of men, suggesting that even when a more nurturant environment is required, people still perceive men to be the most appropriate leaders. This pervasive gender bias confirms a patriarchal understanding of leadership and the legacy of historical gender roles even in the unexamined, and more feminized, environments of live-in summer camps. It also re-confirms that, despite popular rhetoric in the West about equality and opportunity, everyone is not allowed equal opportunity to lead.
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Amy Slater & Marika Tiggemann
Sex Roles, November 2012, Pages 571-581
Abstract:
This study aimed to prospectively examine the role of time since menarche and sport participation in the development of self-objectification in adolescent girls. Participants were 141 female adolescents (M = 14.45 years at Time 1) from Adelaide, South Australia, who completed questionnaires at two time points, approximately 1 year apart. Self-report measures of menarcheal status and onset of menarche, time spent on organised sports, self-objectification, body shame and disordered eating were completed at both time points. Time since menarche was not shown to relate to self-objectification. However, correlations and structural equation modelling revealed that amount of sport was negatively related to later self-objectification. That is, time spent playing sport was predictive of lower self-objectification 1 year later. In addition, the model of objectification was confirmed at two time points providing important evidence for the stability of the model during adolescence. The results provide the first empirical evidence for sport as a potential protective factor to the development of self-objectification in adolescence and provide an important practical suggestion for one way in which girls can attempt to alleviate the development of self-objectification and its harmful consequences.
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Why can't a woman bid more like a man?
Yan Chen, Peter Katuščák & Emre Ozdenoren
Games and Economic Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate gender differences and menstrual cycle effects in first-price and second-price sealed-bid auctions with independent private values in a laboratory setting. We find that women bid significantly higher and earn significantly less than men do in the first-price auction, while we find no evidence of a gender difference in bidding or earnings in the second-price auction. Focusing on the first-price auction, we find that, while the gender gap in bidding and earnings persists over the entire course of the menstrual cycle, bidding of contraceptive pill users follows a sine-like pattern throughout the menstrual cycle, with higher than average bidding in the follicular phase and lower than average bidding in the luteal phase. In comparison, pill non-users have a flat bidding profile throughout the cycle.
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Mina Cikara, Laurie Rudman & Susan Fiske
Journal of Social Issues, June 2012, Pages 263-285
Abstract:
Publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a flagship indicator of scientific prestige, shows dramatic gender disparities. A bibliometric analysis included yoked-control authors matched for PhD prestige and cohort. Though women publish less, at slower annual rates, they are more cited in handbooks and textbooks per JPSP-article-published. No gender differences emerged on variables reflecting differential qualifications. Many factors explain gender discrepancy in productivity. Among top publishers, per-year rate and first authorship especially differ by gender; rate uniquely predicts top-male productivity, whereas career-length uniquely predicts top-female productivity. Among men, across top-publishers and controls, productivity correlates uniquely with editorial negotiating and being married. For women, no personal variables predict productivity. A separate inquiry shows tiny gender differences in acceptance rates per JPSP article submitted; discrimination would be a small-but-plausible contributor, absent independent indicators of manuscript quality. Recent productivity rates mirror earlier gender disparities, suggesting gender gaps will continue.
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The Gendered Consequences of Unemployment Insurance Reforms
Irma Mooi-Reci & Melinda Mills
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines whether a series of unemployment insurance benefit reforms that took place over a 20-year period in the Netherlands had a gendered effect on the duration of unemployment and labor market outcomes. Using longitudinal data from the Dutch Labor Supply Panel (OSA) over the period 1980-2000, and adopting a quasi-experimental design, we test whether seemingly ‘gender neutral' institutional reforms result in a structural disadvantage for women in particular. Our results demonstrate a striking gender similarity in terms of shorter unemployment durations and ultimately less favorable labor market outcomes (lower occupational class, lower wage, part-time and temporary contracts) among both men and women affected by these reforms. Findings also indicate that disadvantaged groups (older and low-skilled female workers) are the most likely to experience a negative effect from state interventions. These findings provide support for the long-term gains of unemployment benefits and their role in operating as "bridges" to better employment.
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Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public
Anastasia Salter & Bridget Blodgett
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Summer 2012, Pages 401-416
Abstract:
As video games have attracted more critical attention and theoretical discourse and games play a more visible part in our media landscape, the modern video game community impacts the wider world of online culture and warrants more detailed study. Using the case of the Dickwolves incident from Penny Arcade.com, the authors address issues of hypermasculinity and sexism within the gaming community and how this lens brings to light issues with a hostile response to the expression of a female identity or femininity. The authors argue that this case highlights how the hypermasculine discourse encourages the overt privileging of masculinity over femininity and discourages women from engaging in gendered discourse within the community.