Iron Ladies
Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Does Gender Matter?
Renée Adams & Patricia Funk
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A large literature documents that women are different from men in their choices and preferences, but little is known about gender differences in the boardroom. If women must be like men to break the glass ceiling, we might expect gender differences to disappear among directors. Using a large survey of directors, we show that female and male directors differ systematically in their core values and risk attitudes, but in ways that differ from gender differences in the general population. These results are robust to controlling for differences in observable characteristics. Consistent with findings for the population, female directors are more benevolent and universally concerned but less power oriented than male directors. However, in contrast to findings for the population, they are less tradition and security oriented than their male counterparts. They are also more risk loving than male directors. Thus, having a woman on the board need not lead to more risk-averse decision making.
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Does female representation in top management improve firm performance? A panel data investigation
Cristian Dezsö & David Gaddis Ross
Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that female representation in top management brings informational and social diversity benefits to the top management team, enriches the behaviors exhibited by managers throughout the firm, and motivates women in middle management. The result should be improved managerial task performance and thus better firm performance. We test our theory using 15 years of panel data on the top management teams of the S&P 1,500 firms. We find that female representation in top management improves firm performance but only to the extent that a firm's strategy is focused on innovation, in which context the informational and social benefits of gender diversity and the behaviors associated with women in management are likely to be especially important for managerial task performance.
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Lori Beaman et al.
Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Exploiting a randomized natural experiment in India, we show that female leadership influences adolescent girls' career aspirations and educational attainment. A 1993 law reserved leadership positions for women in randomly selected village councils. Using 8453 surveys of adolescents aged 11 to 15 and their parents in 495 villages, we find that, compared to villages that were never reserved, the gender gap in aspirations closed by 25% in parents and 32% in adolescents in villages assigned to a female leader for two election cycles. The gender gap in adolescent educational attainment is erased, and girls spent less time on household chores. We find no evidence of changes in young women's labor market opportunities, suggesting that the impact of women leaders primarily reflects a role model effect.
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Women Empowerment and Economic Development
Esther Duflo
NBER Working Paper, December 2011
Abstract:
Women empowerment and economic development are closely related: in one direction, development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women; in the other direction, empowering women may benefit development. Does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion? This paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment-development nexus, and argues that the inter-relationships are probably too weak to be self-sustaining, and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women.
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The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages
Martha Bailey, Brad Hershbein & Amalia Miller
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Decades of research on the U.S. gender gap in wages describes its correlates, but little is known about why women changed their career paths in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper explores the role of "the Pill" in altering women's human capital investments and its ultimate implications for life-cycle wages. Using state-by-birth-cohort variation in legal access, we show that younger access to the Pill conferred an 8 percent hourly wage premium by age fifty. Our estimates imply that the Pill can account for 10 percent of the convergence the gender gap in the 1980s and 30 percent in the 1990s.
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Shaki Asgari, Nilanjana Dasgupta & Jane Stout
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three experiments tested whether and when exposure to counterstereotypic ingroup members enhances women's implicit leadership self-concept. Participants read about professional women leaders framed as similar to versus different from most women (Experiment 1) or having the same versus different collegiate background as participants (Experiment 3). Experiment 2 manipulated similarity by giving false feedback about participants' similarity to women leaders. In all cases, seeing women leaders reduced implicit self-stereotyping relative to controls but only when they were portrayed as similar to one's ingroup (Experiment 1) and oneself (Experiments 2-3). Leaders portrayed as dissimilar either had no effect on self-beliefs (Experiment 1 and 3) or increased implicit self-stereotyping (Experiment 2). Dissimilar leaders also deflated participants' career goals and explicit leadership beliefs (Experiment 3). Finally, implicit self-beliefs became less stereotypic regardless of whether women believed the similarity feedback, but explicit self-beliefs changed only when they believed the feedback to be true (Experiment 2).
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The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth & Paul Irwing
PLoS ONE, January 2012, e29265
Background: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. However, research in this area has suffered from significant methodological limitations. We advance a set of guidelines for overcoming those limitations: (a) measure personality with a higher resolution than that afforded by the Big Five; (b) estimate sex differences on latent factors; and (c) assess global sex differences with multivariate effect sizes. We then apply these guidelines to a large, representative adult sample, and obtain what is presently the best estimate of global sex differences in personality.
Methodology/Principal Findings: Personality measures were obtained from a large US sample (N = 10,261) with the 16PF Questionnaire. Multigroup latent variable modeling was used to estimate sex differences on individual personality dimensions, which were then aggregated to yield a multivariate effect size (Mahalanobis D). We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES, the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). These are extremely large differences by psychological standards.
Significance: The idea that there are only minor differences between the personality profiles of males and females should be rejected as based on inadequate methodology.
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Gender differences in risk behaviour: Does nurture matter?
Alison Booth & Patrick Nolen
Economic Journal, February 2012, Pages F56-F78
Abstract:
Using a controlled experiment, we investigate if individuals' risk preferences are affected by (i) the gender composition of the group to which they are randomly assigned, and (ii) the gender mix of the school they attend. Our subjects, from eight publicly funded single-sex and coeducational schools, were asked to choose between a real-stakes lottery and a sure bet. We found that girls in an all-girls group or attending a single-sex school were more likely than their coed counterparts to choose a real-stakes gamble. This suggests that observed gender differences in behaviour under uncertainty found in previous studies might reflect social learning rather than inherent gender traits.
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Iwan Barankay
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, September 2011
Abstract:
Performance rankings are a pervasive feature of life. Behavioral theories suggest that knowing one's rank may shape effort directly due to its effect on self-image. In a randomized control trial with full time employees (n=527) for whom rankings convey no direct financial benefits, we study the long run productivity consequences of privately informing them about their performance rank. First, perhaps surprisingly, showing employees their rank actually reduces their performance and this result is driven by the demoralizing effect of being informed of a worse than expected rank. Second, the treatment effect is gender specific, as only men, but not women, reduce their performance which, upon further analysis, is due to the fact that women are less heedful of their rank than men. Rankings are a plausible candidate for a behavioral incentive scheme as they speak to well established theories of interpersonal comparisons and self-image yet this study documents their detrimental effect on performance. This paves the way for further research to improve the design of rank feedback to exploit rank preferences in a way that it raises performance.
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Can Personality Explain what is Underlying Women's Unwillingness to Compete?
Julia Müller & Christiane Schwieren
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as men do and are less willing to enter a competition than men. In this paper, we use personality variables to understand the underlying motives of women (and men) to enter a competition or avoid it. We use the Big Five personality factors, where especially neuroticism has been related to performance in achievement settings. We first test whether scores on the Big Five are related to performance in our experiment, and second how this is related to incentives. We can show that the sex difference in the willingness to enter a competition is mediated by neuroticism and further that neuroticism is negatively related to performance in competiton. This raises the possibility that those women who do not choose competitive incentives "know" that they should not.
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Gender Differences in Entrepreneurial Propensity
Philipp Koellinger, Maria Minniti & Christian Schade
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using data from representative population surveys in 17 countries, we find that the lower rate of female business ownership is primarily due to women's lower propensity to start businesses rather than to differences in survival rates across genders. We show that women are less confident in their entrepreneurial skills, have different social networks and exhibit higher fear of failure than men. After controlling for endogeneity, we find that these variables explain a substantial part of the gender gap in entrepreneurial activity. Although, of course, their relative importance varies significantly across countries, these factors appear to have a universal effect.
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Culture and gender inequality: Psychological consequences of perceiving gender inequality
Zoe Kinias & Heejung Kim
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, January 2012, Pages 89-103
Abstract:
Previous research linking perceptions of gender inequality and psychological well-being were considered in light of the proposition that people from different cultures differ in their beliefs about how justifiable gender inequality is, and this research investigated these differences and their psychological consequences using cross-cultural comparisons. The results show that Hong Kong Chinese women saw gender inequality as less unjust (Study 1) and less unfair (Study 2) and valued gender equality less (Study 2) than European American women did. Gender inequality caused anger (Study 1) and predicted reduced life satisfaction (Study 2) more among European American women than among Hong Kong Chinese women. Implications for cross-cultural tolerance are discussed.
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Friederike Gerstenberg, Roland Imhoff & Manfred Schmitt
European Journal of Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research reports the results of three studies showing that individuals with a fragile self-concept in the domain of performance are particularly vulnerable to stereotype threat effects. Specifically, women who explicitly described themselves as rather mathematical but whose implicit self-concepts contradicted these claims were vulnerable to stereotype threat effects on mathematical performance. This effect was robust across three studies, independent of the subtleness or content of the stereotype threat manipulation. Additionally, it was shown that the effect was mediated by anxious worrying (Study 3).
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Are variations in gender equality evident in pornography? A cross-cultural study
Dana Rei Arakawa, Corey Flanders & Elaine Hatfield
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 1960, feminist groups and scholars published critiques of common "male-centric" views of sexuality. They analyzed pornography, traditions as to who initiates sexual encounters, the (non)existence of foreplay, and common (male dominant) sexual positions. Some even said such activities should be abolished. Today, the appropriate role of sexuality, specifically the role of pornography in women's lives, probably sparks the biggest debate among feminists. The majority of research on pornography focuses on its misogynistic biases and maladaptive effects, while the minority of literature contends that pornography can be egalitarian and thus be empowering for women. There is little research to test these competing hypotheses as to the value of pornography for women. This paper was designed to investigate whether or not in societies where men and women are relatively equal in status versus unequal, different kinds of pornography flourishes. Three countries that differed markedly in the status of women (based on their United Nation's Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) ranking published in the 2007/2008 Human Development Report) were selected for comparison: Norway (1), the United States (15), and Japan (54). We then compared the nature of their most popular pornography. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the hypothesis that - consistent with their GEM ranking - popular Norwegian pornography would depict women in more empowered positions than pornography from the United States and Japan. Results supported this hypothesis. This finding could be attributed to the wider variety in Norwegian pornography, e.g. greater variation in the women's age, weight, and body positioning. There were no significant differences in the extent models in the three countries appeared in demeaning positions.
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Combat cuties: Photographs of Israeli women soldiers in the press since the 2006 Lebanon War
Eva Berger & Dorit Naaman
Media, War & Conflict, December 2011, Pages 269-286
Abstract:
For the first time since 1948, Israeli women soldiers took part in combat in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and excelled in their jobs. However, images of women soldiers published in the press, during and after the war, objectify the soldiers in ways that belittle their violent agency. The images tend to sexualize the women soldiers as well as their militarized skill and gear.
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Doomsday Ecology and Empathy for Nature: Women Scientists in "B" Horror Movies
Kasi Jackson
Science Communication, December 2011, Pages 533-555
Abstract:
This article's purpose is to examine representations of women scientists in "B" horror movies. Portrayals of female scientists appearing in these films differ significantly from those in blockbuster films. This is because of three factors: (a) a greater freedom for controversial subject matter in low-budget movies, (b) filmmakers' use of high media attention science and environmental issues to attract an audience, and (c) the influence of Western images that feminize nature and position science as a tool to control both women and nature. The analysis describes three resultant themes in the relationship between filmic women scientists and nature.
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Is Primatology an Equal-Opportunity Discipline?
Elsa Addessi, Marta Borgi & Elisabetta Palagi
PLoS ONE, January 2012, Pages e30458
Abstract:
The proportion of women occupying academic positions in biological sciences has increased in the past few decades, but women are still under-represented in senior academic ranks compared to their male colleagues. Primatology has been often singled out as a model of "equal-opportunity" discipline because of the common perception that women are more represented in Primatology than in similar fields. But is this indeed true? Here we show that, although in the past 15 years the proportion of female primatologists increased from the 38% of the early 1990s to the 57% of 2008, Primatology is far from being an "equal-opportunity" discipline, and suffers the phenomenon of "glass ceiling" as all the other scientific disciplines examined so far. In fact, even if Primatology does attract more female students than males, at the full professor level male members significantly outnumber females. Moreover, regardless of position, IPS male members publish significantly more than their female colleagues. Furthermore, when analyzing gender difference in scientific productivity in relation to the name order in the publications, it emerged that the scientific achievements of female primatologists (in terms of number and type of publications) do not always match their professional achievements (in terms of academic position). However, the gender difference in the IPS members' number of publications does not correspond to a similar difference in their scientific impact (as measured by their H index), which may indicate that female primatologists' fewer articles are of higher impact than those of their male colleagues.
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Robert Deaner & Don Mitchell
Evolutionary Psychology, December 2011, Pages 600-621
Abstract:
Recent studies indicate that more men than women run fast relative to sex-specific world records and that this sex difference has been historically stable in elite U.S. runners. These findings have been hypothesized to reflect an evolved male predisposition for enduring competitiveness in "show-off" domains. The current study tests this hypothesis in non-elite runners by analyzing 342 road races that occurred from 1981-2006, most in or near Buffalo, NY. Both absolutely and as a percentage of same-sex finishers, more men ran relatively fast in most races. During the 1980s, as female participation surged, the difference in the absolute number of relatively fast men and women decreased. However, this difference was stable for races that occurred after 1993. Since then, in any given race, about three to four times as many men as women ran relatively fast. The stable sex difference in relative performance shown here for non-elites constitutes new support for the hypothesis of an evolved male predisposition for enduring competitiveness.
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Title IX and the Allocation of Resources to Women's and Men's Sports
Amy Farmer & Paul Pecorino
American Law and Economics Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
As a result of Title IX, there has been a large increase in participation of women in college sports, while men's participation has remained roughly constant. We model the resource allocation decision across sports before and after Title IX was imposed. If the number of sports is held constant, the model predicts an increase in resources devoted to women's sports, matched by an equal decrease in resources devoted to men's sports. Since this is counterfactual, we allow the number of sports to vary. The resulting model is able to replicate the empirically observed response to Title IX.
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Politics, Economic Provisioning, and Suffrage in St. Louis: What Women Said, What Men Heard
Linda Harris Dobkins
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, January 2012, Pages 54-76
Abstract:
One of the enduring questions in history is why any group would choose to share power with another group. The granting of suffrage to American women in 1919 is one of those events in which we seek answers. I focus here on the diversity of women's economic provisioning functions, arguing that, because of that diversity, the granting of suffrage had more political benefits to the men in power and less political risks. The social provisioning status-quo, which had been threatened by the feminist voices of the 19th century, must have seemed to be back under the control of the men in power. In order to consider economic provisioning and politics more specifically, I study the economic profile of women and the political cost/benefit thinking of male legislators in St. Louis, Missouri.
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Gender-based rejection sensitivity and academic self-silencing in women
Bonita London et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Building on prior work on rejection sensitivity, we propose a social-cognitive model of gender-based rejection sensitivity (Gender RS) to account for individual differences in how women perceive and cope with gender-based evaluative threats in competitive, historically male institutions. Study 1 develops a measure of Gender RS, defined as anxious expectations of gender-based rejection. Studies 2-5 support the central predictions of the model: Gender RS is associated with increased perceptions of gender-based threats and increased coping by self-silencing - responses that reinforce feelings of alienation and diminished motivation. Study 2 shows that Gender RS is distinct from overall sensitivity to rejection or perceiving the world through the lens of gender. Study 3 shows that Gender RS becomes activated specifically when gender-based rejection is a plausible explanation for negative outcomes. Study 4 provides experimental evidence that Gender RS predicts lower academic self-confidence, greater expectations of bias, and avoidance of opportunities for further help from a weakness-focused expert evaluator. Study 5 tests the Gender RS model in situ, using daily diaries to track women's experiences during the first weeks in a highly competitive law school. Implications for women's coping with the subtle nature of contemporary sexism are discussed as well as the importance of institution-level checks to prevent the costs of gender-based rejection.
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Instructor-Specific Grade Inflation: Incentives, Gender, and Ethnicity
Todd Jewell & Michael McPherson
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: This study attempts to isolate instructor-specific measures that may be sources of grade inflation and to measure their relative importance.
Methods: We estimate a fixed-effects model, using by far the most extensive data set related to grade inflation ever assembled. Our data comprise 48,038 courses taught by 1,871 distinct instructors at a large public university over a two-decade period.
Results: Our results suggest that female faculty members are the most likely to inflate grades, while ethnicity has a lesser effect.
Conclusions: Characteristics of instructors, in particular gender, affect the degree of observed grade inflation, controlling for student- and department-specific effects.
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Can stereotype threat explain the gender gap in mathematics performance and achievement?
Gijsbert Stoet & David Geary
Review of General Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Men and women score similarly in most areas of mathematics, but a gap favoring men is consistently found at the high end of performance. One explanation for this gap, stereotype threat, was first proposed by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999) and has received much attention. We discuss merits and shortcomings of this study and review replication attempts. Only 55% of the articles with experimental designs that could have replicated the original results did so. But half of these were confounded by statistical adjustment of preexisting mathematics exam scores. Of the unconfounded experiments, only 30% replicated the original. A meta-analysis of these effects confirmed that only the group of studies with adjusted mathematics scores displayed the stereotype threat effect. We conclude that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this as a mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics. We argue there are many reasons to close this gap, and that too much weight on the stereotype explanation may hamper research and implementation of effective interventions.
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The Effects of Masculinity and Suspect Gender on Perceptions of Guilt
Charlotte Ward, Heather Flowe & Joyce Humphries
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigated whether perceptions of guilt for both male and female suspects co-varied with masculine physical appearance. In addition, the study tested whether the relationship between masculine physical appearance and perceptions of guilt was dependent upon whether the crime is stereotypically male perpetrated. Participants read one of three crime scenarios (burglary, child abuse and neglect, fraud and forgery) and evaluated the likelihood that suspects of varying masculine appearance committed the crime in question. Masculine physical appearance significantly affected guilt ratings across all crime types for both male and female suspects. Additionally, guilt ratings for male compared with female suspects were higher for burglary, a crime that was viewed as stereotypically male perpetrated by research participants. The results are discussed in relation to applied implications and future research directions.
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The gender earnings gap for physicians and its increase over time
Constança Esteves-Sorenson & Jason Snyder
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
Male physicians outearn women by 13% at the outset of their careers and by 28% eight years later. Conflicting evidence on the existence of a wage gap in medicine stems from the earnings measure used: hourly earnings versus yearly earnings controlling for hours worked.
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Femininity As a City Marketing Strategy: Gender Bending Rotterdam
Marguerite van den Berg
Urban Studies, January 2012, Pages 153-168
Abstract:
Rotterdam organised the festival ‘La City' as an entrepreneurial strategy to upgrade the city's class position, using femininity as a tool. ‘La City' was an attempt to introduce a new economy in Rotterdam: one that is service-based and post-industrial. Rotterdam is a former industrial city and is now trying to establish a new economy and a new spatial organisation. In this article, ‘La City' campaign material, texts on the character of the city and interviews in local newspapers with policy-makers are analysed in the context of the urban renewal and gentrification policies of Rotterdam. This research shows how the city uses femininity as a marketing strategy to ‘cleanse' Rotterdam of its working-class mythology as well as construing a hegemonic gender identity capable of excluding lower-class groups. Rotterdam, according to its own texts, is after bourgeois, feminine inhabitants that ‘lounge' in ‘cocktail bars' to replace the ‘rough' men who worked in the harbour. ‘La City' is one of many strategies to establish genderfication: the production of space for not only more affluent users (as gentrification is often defined), but also for specific gender notions. Genderfication is also established by practices of ‘mixing' urban neighbourhoods and building homes for middle-class families.