Job fair
Devon Proudfoot, Aaron Kay & Christy Koval
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose that the propensity to think creatively tends to be associated with independence and self-direction — qualities generally ascribed to men — so that men are often perceived to be more creative than women. In two experiments, we found that “outside the box” creativity is more strongly associated with stereotypically masculine characteristics (e.g., daring and self-reliance) than with stereotypically feminine characteristics (e.g., cooperativeness and supportiveness; Study 1) and that a man is ascribed more creativity than a woman when they produce identical output (Study 2). Analyzing archival data, we found that men’s ideas are evaluated as more ingenious than women’s ideas (Study 3) and that female executives are stereotyped as less innovative than their male counterparts when evaluated by their supervisors (Study 4). Finally, we observed that stereotypically masculine behavior enhances a man’s perceived creativity, whereas identical behavior does not enhance a woman’s perceived creativity (Study 5). This boost in men’s perceived creativity is mediated by attributions of agency, not competence, and predicts perceptions of reward deservingness.
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Jessica Salerno & Liana Peter-Hagene
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated whether expressing anger increases social influence for men, but diminishes social influence for women, during group deliberation. In a deception paradigm, participants believed they were engaged in a computer-mediated mock jury deliberation about a murder case. In actuality, the interaction was scripted. The script included 5 other mock jurors who provided verdicts and comments in support of the verdicts; 4 agreed with the participant and 1 was a “holdout” dissenter. Holdouts expressed their opinions with no emotion, anger, or fear and had either male or female names. Holdouts exerted no influence on participants’ opinions when they expressed no emotion or fear. Participants’ confidence in their own verdict dropped significantly, however, after male holdouts expressed anger. Yet, anger expression undermined female holdouts: Participants became significantly more confident in their original verdicts after female holdouts expressed anger — even though they were expressing the exact same opinion and emotion as the male holdouts. Mediation analyses revealed that participants drew different inferences from male versus female anger, which created a gender gap in influence during group deliberation. The current study has implications for group decisions in general, and jury deliberations in particular, by suggesting that expressing anger might lead men to gain influence, but women to lose influence over others (even when making identical arguments). These diverging consequences might result in women potentially having less influence on societally important decisions than men, such as jury verdicts.
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The Disability Employment Puzzle: A Field Experiment on Employer Hiring Behavior
Mason Ameri et al.
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
People with disabilities have low employment and wage levels, and some studies suggest employer discrimination is a contributing factor. Following the method of Bertrand and Mullainathan (2003), new evidence is presented from a field experiment that sent applications in response to 6,016 advertised accounting positions from well-qualified fictional applicants, with one-third of cover letters disclosing that the applicant has a spinal cord injury, one-third disclosing the presence of Asperger’s Syndrome, and one-third not mentioning disability. These specific disabilities were chosen because they would not be expected to limit productivity in accounting, helping rule out productivity-based explanations for any differences in employer responses. Half of the resumes portrayed a novice accountant, and half portrayed an experienced one. The fictional applicants with disabilities received 26% fewer expressions of employer interest than those without disabilities, with little difference between the two types of disability. The disability gap was concentrated among more experienced applicants, and among private companies with fewer than 15 employees that are not covered by the ADA, although comparable state statutes cover about half of them. Comparisons above and below disability law coverage thresholds point to a possible positive effect of the ADA on employer responses to applicants with disabilities, but no clear effects of state laws. The overall pattern of findings is consistent with the idea that disability discrimination continues to impede employment prospects of people with disabilities, and more attention needs to be paid to employer behavior and the demand side of the labor market for people with disabilities.
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High School Experiences, the Gender Wage Gap, and the Selection of Occupation
Michael Strain & Douglas Webber
Temple University Working Paper, August 2015
Abstract:
Using within-high-school variation and controlling for a measure of cognitive ability, this paper finds that high-school leadership experiences explain a significant portion of the residual gender wage gap and selection into management occupations. Our results imply that high-school leadership could build non-cognitive, productive skills that are rewarded years later in the labor market and that explain a portion of the systematic difference in pay between men and women. Alternatively, high-school leadership could be a proxy variable for personality characteristics that differ between men and women and that drive higher pay and becoming a manager. Because high school leadership experiences are exogenous to direct labor market experiences, our results leave less room for direct labor market discrimination as a driver of the gender wage gap and occupation selection.
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Pay Secrecy and the Gender Wage Gap in the United States
Marlene Kim
Industrial Relations, October 2015, Pages 648–667
Abstract:
Legislators and advocates claim that pay secrecy perpetuates the gender wage gap and that the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) should be amended to outlaw these practices. Using a difference-in-differences fixed-effects human-capital wage regression, I find that women with higher education levels who live in states that have outlawed pay secrecy have higher earnings, and that the wage gap is consequently reduced. State bans on pay secrecy and federal legislation to amend the FLSA to allow workers to share information about their wages may improve the gender wage gap, especially among women with college or graduate degrees.
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Is the Gender Gap in College Enrollment Influenced by Nonmarital Birth Rates and Father Absence?
William Doherty, Brian Willoughby & Jason Wilde
Family Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is considerable academic and popular concern about the increasing gender gap in higher education enrollment in the United States. Males now constitute just 43% of the postsecondary enrollment. This research focused on nonmarital birth and father absence as predictors of lower levels of college enrollment for boys versus girls. The authors present two studies. In Study 1, using population data on college attendance and nonmarital birth rates, they found a strong positive association between nonmarital birth rates and the gender gap in college enrollment 18 years later. In Study 2, they examined individual-level data on father absence from birth and college enrollment among young adults. The results indicated that males were at greater risk than females of not attending college if they had experienced father absence from birth. Taken together, the 2 studies suggest that changes in family structure may have contributed to the widening gender gap in higher education.
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The 1990s Shift in the Media Portrayal of Working Mothers
Joanna Motro & Reeve Vanneman
Sociological Forum, forthcoming
Abstract:
A cultural theme of distressed working mothers depicts working mothers as caught between the demands of work and family in an unforgiving institutional context. Susan Faludi first identified this theme as a conservative backlash against feminists' attempts “to have it all.” But a similar narrative helps support demands for more flexible work–family policies and more significant housework contributions from fathers. We explore the actual trends and prevalence of this distressed working mothers theme by coding 859 newspaper articles sampled from the 1981–2009 New York Times. Articles discussing problems for working mothers increased in the mid-1990s and have continued increasing into the twenty-first century. Other themes about problems and benefits for working mothers show quite different trends. There is also an unexpected mid-1990s shift in attention from problems working mothers are having at home to problems at work. The increase in the distressed working mother theme coincides with the mid-1990s stall in the gender revolution. The simultaneity of the cultural, economic, political, and attitude trends suggests that the rise of the distressed working mother theme and the stall in the gender revolution may have mutually reinforced each other over the last two decades.
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TAs Like Me: Racial Interactions between Graduate Teaching Assistants and Undergraduates
Lester Lusher, Doug Campbell & Scott Carrell
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Over the past 40 years, higher education institutions in the U.S. have experienced a dramatic shift in the racial composition of students enrolled in both undergraduate and graduate programs. Using administrative data from a large, diverse university in California, we identify the extent to which the academic outcomes of undergraduates are affected by the race/ethnicity of their graduate student teaching assistants (TAs). To overcome selection issues in course taking, we exploit the timing of TA assignments, which occur after students enroll in a course, and we estimate models with both class and student fixed effects. Results show a positive and significant increase in course grades when students are assigned TAs of a similar race/ethnicity. These effects are largest in classes where TAs are given advanced copies of exams and when exams had no multiple choice questions. We also find that assignment to similar race TAs positively affect both section and office hour attendance, suggesting that TA-student match quality and role model effects are the primary drivers of the results.
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Jessi Smith et al.
Social Psychology of Education, September 2015, Pages 443-466
Abstract:
The worry or concern over confirming negative gender group stereotypes, called stereotype threat, is one explanation for women’s worldwide underrepresentation in undergraduate science classes and majors. But how does stereotype threat translate into fewer women motivated for science? In this quantitative study with a sample from the US, we use Expectancy Value Theory to examine whether and how stereotype threat concerns might influence women’s science identification. To do this, we collected survey data from 388 women enrolled in introductory physics (male-dominated) and biology (female-dominated) undergraduate laboratory classes at three universities. We examined multiple indirect effect paths through which stereotype threat could be associated with science identity and the associated future motivation to engage in scientific research. In addition to replicating established expectancy-value theory motivational findings, results support the novel prediction that one route through which stereotype threat negatively impacts women’s science identity is via effects on perceptions about the communal utility value of science. Especially among women in physics who expressed greater stereotype threat concerns than women in biology, science identification was lower to the extent that stereotype threat reduced how useful science was seen for helping other people and society. Implications for ways to create an inclusive learning context that combats stereotype threat concerns and broadens undergraduate women’s participation in science are discussed.
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Sex Differences in Academic Rank in US Medical Schools in 2014
Anupam Jena et al.
Journal of the American Medical Association, 15 September 2015, Pages 1149-1158
Design, Setting, and Participants We analyzed sex differences in faculty rank using a cross-sectional comprehensive database of US physicians with medical school faculty appointments in 2014 (91 073 physicians; 9.1% of all US physicians), linked to information on physician sex, age, years since residency, specialty, authored publications, National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, and clinical trial investigation. We estimated sex differences in full professorship, as well as a combined outcome of associate or full professorship, adjusting for these factors in a multilevel (hierarchical) model. We also analyzed how sex differences varied with specialty and whether differences were more prevalent at schools ranked highly in research.
Results: In all, there were 30 464 women who were medical faculty vs 60 609 men. Of those, 3623 women (11.9%) vs 17 354 men (28.6%) had full-professor appointments, for an absolute difference of −16.7% (95% CI, −17.3% to −16.2%). Women faculty were younger and disproportionately represented in internal medicine and pediatrics. The mean total number of publications for women was 11.6 vs 24.8 for men, for a difference of −13.2 (95% CI, −13.6 to −12.7); the mean first- or last-author publications for women was 5.9 vs 13.7 for men, for a difference of −7.8 (95% CI, −8.1 to −7.5). Among 9.1% of medical faculty with an NIH grant, 6.8% (2059 of 30 464) were women and 10.3% (6237 of 60 609) were men, for a difference of −3.5% (95% CI, −3.9% to −3.1%). In all, 6.4% of women vs 8.8% of men had a trial registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, for a difference of −2.4% (95% CI, −2.8% to −2.0%). After multivariable adjustment, women were less likely than men to have achieved full-professor status (absolute adjusted difference in proportion, −3.8%; 95% CI, −4.4% to −3.3%). Sex-differences in full professorship were present across all specialties and did not vary according to whether a physician’s medical school was ranked highly in terms of research funding.
Conclusions and Relevance: Among physicians with faculty appointments at US medical schools, there were sex differences in academic faculty rank, with women substantially less likely than men to be full professors, after accounting for age, experience, specialty, and measures of research productivity.
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David Card & Laura Giuliano
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
Low income and minority students are under-represented in gifted education programs. One explanation for this pattern is that the usual process for identifying gifted students, through parent and teacher referrals, systematically misses many potentially qualified disadvantaged students. We use the experiences in a large urban school district following the introduction of a universal screening program for second grade students to study this hypothesis. With no change in the standards for gifted eligibility the screening program led to large increases in the fractions of economically disadvantaged students and minorities placed in gifted programs. Comparisons of the newly identified gifted students with those who would have been placed in the absence of screening show that blacks and Hispanics, free/reduced price lunch participants, English language learners, and girls are all systematically "under-referred" in the traditional parent/teacher referral system.
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Compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable
Francesca Gino, Caroline Ashley Wilmuth & Alison Wood Brooks
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women are underrepresented in most high-level positions in organizations. Though a great deal of research has provided evidence that bias and discrimination give rise to and perpetuate this gender disparity, in the current research we explore another explanation: men and women view professional advancement differently, and their views affect their decisions to climb the corporate ladder (or not). In studies 1 and 2, when asked to list their core goals in life, women listed more life goals overall than men, and a smaller proportion of their goals related to achieving power at work. In studies 3 and 4, compared to men, women viewed high-level positions as less desirable yet equally attainable. In studies 5–7, when faced with the possibility of receiving a promotion at their current place of employment or obtaining a high-power position after graduating from college, women and men anticipated similar levels of positive outcomes (e.g., prestige and money), but women anticipated more negative outcomes (e.g., conflict and tradeoffs). In these studies, women associated high-level positions with conflict, which explained the relationship between gender and the desirability of professional advancement. Finally, in studies 8 and 9, men and women alike rated power as one of the main consequences of professional advancement. Our findings reveal that men and women have different perceptions of what the experience of holding a high-level position will be like, with meaningful implications for the perpetuation of the gender disparity that exists at the top of organizational hierarchies.
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Public Universities, Equal Opportunity, and the Legacy of Jim Crow: Evidence from North Carolina
Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd & Jacob Vigdor
NBER Working Paper, September 2015
Abstract:
College attendance and completion in the U.S. are strongly correlated with race and socioeconomic background. Do public postsecondary institutions themselves exacerbate pre-college disparities, or reduce them? We address this question using longitudinal data linking the records of students at North Carolina’s public four-year universities to their public K-12 records. As a result of an institutional structure forged during the period of Jim Crow segregation, black students who attend the state’s public university system are likely to experience markedly more racial isolation in college than they did in middle school. Another, more positive consequence of this structure is to boost in-state public four-year college enrollment and graduation by African-American students relative to white students with similar backgrounds. Conditional on enrolling in one of the state’s public universities, however, black students lag behind whites in grades and graduation rates. Regarding socioeconomic background, we find that lower-status youth are less likely to enter the system and less likely to succeed once they enter than those with higher status. The socioeconomic gap in graduation rates among matriculants has, however, declined in recent years.
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Racial and Gender Disparities in the Physician Assistant Profession
Darron Smith & Cardell Jacobson
Health Services Research, forthcoming
Objective: To examine whether racial, gender, and ethnic salary disparities exist in the physician assistant (PA) profession and what factors, if any, are associated with the differentials.
Data Sources/Study Setting: We use a nationally representative survey of 15,105 PAs from the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA).
Principle Findings: Women represent nearly two-thirds of the profession but receive approximately $18,000 less in primary compensation. The differential reduces to just over $9,500 when the analysis includes a variety of other variables. According to AAPA survey, minority PAs tend to make slightly higher salaries than White PAs nationally, although the differences are not statistically significant once the control variables are included in the analysis.
Conclusions: Despite the rough parity in primary salary, PAs of color are vastly underrepresented in the profession. The salaries of women lag in comparison to their male counterparts.