More Deadly than Male
Does Gender Matter for Political Leadership? The Case of U.S. Mayors
Fernando Ferreira & Joseph Gyourko
NBER Working Paper, December 2011
Abstract:
What are the consequences of electing a female leader for policy and political outcomes? We answer this question in the context of U.S. cities, where women's participation in mayoral elections increased from negligible numbers in 1970 to about one-third of the elections in the 2000's. We use a novel data set of U.S. mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005, and apply a regression discontinuity design to deal with the endogeneity of female candidacy to city characteristics. In contrast to most research on the influence of female leadership, we find no effect of gender of the mayor on policy outcomes related to the size of local government, the composition of municipal spending and employment, or crime rates. While female mayors do not implement different policies, they do appear to have higher unobserved political skills, as they have a 6-7 percentage point higher incumbent effect than a comparable male. But we find no evidence of political spillovers: exogenously electing a female mayor does not change the long run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city or of female candidates in local congressional elections.
----------------------
The Gender Gap in Executive Compensation: The Role of Female Directors and Chief Executive Officers
Taekjin Shin
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2012, Pages 258-278
Abstract:
While many studies have explored the issue of women's representation among top management, little is known about the gender gap in compensation among those who reached the top. Using data on 7,711 executives at 831 U.S. firms, this study investigates social-psychological factors that explain the gender gap in executive compensation. Consistent with theories on social identity and demographic similarity effects, the gender gap in executive pay is smaller when a greater number of women sit on the compensation committee of the board, which is the group responsible for setting executive compensation. However, the presence of a female chief executive officer (CEO) is not associated with the compensation of female non-CEO executives working under the female boss. The findings highlight the need to study women's representation on corporate boards.
----------------------
Jimmy's Baby Doll and Jenny's Truck: Young Children's Reasoning About Gender Norms
Clare Conry-Murray & Elliot Turiel
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
To assess the flexibility of reasoning about gender, children ages 4, 6, and 8 years (N = 72) were interviewed about gender norms when different domains were highlighted. The majority of participants at all ages judged a reversal of gender norms in a different cultural context to be acceptable. They also judged gender norms as a matter of personal choice and they negatively evaluated a rule enforcing gender norms in schools. Older children were more likely to show flexibility than younger children. Justifications obtained from 6- and 8-year-olds showed that they considered adherence to gender norms a matter of personal choice and they viewed the rule enforcing gender norms as unfair.
----------------------
Confidence Mediates the Sex Difference in Mental Rotation Performance
Zachary Estes & Sydney Felker
Archives of Sexual Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
On tasks that require the mental rotation of 3-dimensional figures, males typically exhibit higher accuracy than females. Using the most common measure of mental rotation (i.e., the Mental Rotations Test), we investigated whether individual variability in confidence mediates this sex difference in mental rotation performance. In each of four experiments, the sex difference was reliably elicited and eliminated by controlling or manipulating participants' confidence. Specifically, confidence predicted performance within and between sexes (Experiment 1), rendering confidence irrelevant to the task reliably eliminated the sex difference in performance (Experiments 2 and 3), and manipulating confidence significantly affected performance (Experiment 4). Thus, confidence mediates the sex difference in mental rotation performance and hence the sex difference appears to be a difference of performance rather than ability. Results are discussed in relation to other potential mediators and mechanisms, such as gender roles, sex stereotypes, spatial experience, rotation strategies, working memory, and spatial attention.
----------------------
Sex differences in brain volume are related to specific skills, not to general intelligence
Miguel Burgaleta et al.
Intelligence, January-February 2012, Pages 60-68
Abstract:
It has been proposed that males would show higher mean scores than females in general intelligence (g) because (1) men have, on average, larger brains than women, and (2) brain volume correlates with g. Here we report a failure to support the conclusion derived from these premises. High resolution MRIs were acquired in a sample of one hundred healthy young participants for estimating total, gray, and white matter volumes. Participants also completed an intelligence battery - comprising tests measuring abstract, verbal, and spatial abilities - that allowed the extraction of g scores. Results showed consistent relations between sex differences in brain volumes and non-g spatial and verbal skills but not for g.
----------------------
Girls, girls, girls: Gender composition and female school choice
Nicole Schneeweis & Martina Zweimueller
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gender segregation in employment may be explained by women's reluctance to choose technical occupations. However, the foundations for career choices are laid much earlier. Educational experts claim that female students are doing better in math and science and are more likely to choose these subjects if they are in single-sex classes. One possible explanation is that coeducational settings reinforce gender stereotypes. In this paper, we identify the causal impact of the gender composition in coeducational classes on the choice of school type for female students. Using natural variation in the gender composition of adjacent cohorts within schools, we show that girls are less likely to choose a traditionally female dominated school type and more likely to choose a male dominated school type at the age of 14 if they were exposed to a higher share of girls in previous grades.
----------------------
Sex and need for power as predictors of reactions to disobedience
Kristin Sommer et al.
Social Influence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Participants played the role of managers in a simulated leadership task that required them to deliver instructions to a subordinate (confederate). The subordinate obeyed or disobeyed the manager's orders. Males reported lower feelings of belongingness and control in response to disobedience, which in turn predicted higher levels of negative affect. Males high (compared to low) in the need for power also reported less positive affect and more anger following disobedience. We suggest that workplace disobedience reflects lack of respect for one's authority, and that for males (but not females) this signals the ineffectiveness of direct influence strategies and a reduced potential for social acceptance. Males with strong needs for power expect deference and hence react most adversely to being disobeyed.
----------------------
Do Female Top Managers Help Women to Advance? A Panel Study Using EEO-1 Records
Fidan Ana Kurtulus & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2012, Pages 173-197
Abstract:
The goal of this study is to examine whether women in the highest levels of firms' management ranks help to reduce barriers to women's advancement in the workplace. Using a panel of more than twenty thousand firms during 1990 to 2003 from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the authors explore the influence of women in top management on subsequent female representation in lower-level managerial positions in U.S. firms. Key findings show that an increase in the share of female top managers is associated with subsequent increases in the share of women in midlevel management positions within firms, and this result is robust to controlling for firm size, workforce composition, federal contractor status, firm fixed effects, year fixed effects, and industry-specific trends. The authors also find that the positive influence of women in top leadership positions on managerial gender diversity diminishes over time, suggesting that women at the top play a positive but transitory role in women's career advancement.
----------------------
"Lights on at the end of the party": Are lads' mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?
Miranda Horvath et al.
British Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research has suggested that some magazines targeted at young men - lads' mags - are normalizing extreme sexist views by presenting those views in a mainstream context. Consistent with this view, young men in Study 1 (n= 90) identified more with derogatory quotes about women drawn from recent lads' mags, and from interviews with convicted rapists, when those quotes were attributed to lads' mags, than when they were attributed to convicted rapists. In Study 2, 40 young women and men could not reliably judge the source of those same quotes. While these participants sometimes voiced the belief that the content of lads' mags was ‘normal' while rapists' talk was ‘extreme', they categorized quotes from both sources as derogatory with equal frequency. Jointly, the two studies show an overlap in the content of convicted rapists' talk and the contents of contemporary lads' mags, and suggest that the framing of such content within lads' mags may normalize it for young men.
----------------------
Cara Wong, Justin Harris & Jason Gallate
Social Neuroscience, Winter 2012, Pages 90-104
Abstract:
By nature, stereotypes require processes of categorization or semantic association, including social information about groups of people. There is empirical evidence that the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) processes domain‐ general semantic information, and supports social knowledge. A recent study showed that inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to the ATL reduced racial stereotypes on an implicit association test (IAT). However, it was not determined whether this was caused by changes to specific social, or general semantic processing, or both. The current study addresses these theoretical issues. The design investigated the effect of rTMS to the left or right ATL, or a sham stimulation, on a social IAT (gender stereotypes), a non-social IAT (living versus non-living associations), and a non-semantic control (Stroop) task. The results showed that low-frequency rTMS to both left and right ATL significantly reduced D-scores on the gender IAT compared to the sham group; however, there were no differences on the non-social IAT or the Stroop. The findings show the ATL has a role in mediating stereotypes, and the decrease of bias after stimulation could be due to weakening of social stereotypical associations either within the ATL or via a network of brain regions connected with the ATL.
----------------------
Heather Haveman & Lauren Beresford
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2012, Pages 114-130
Abstract:
Since 1970, women have made substantial inroads into management jobs. But most women are in lower- and middle-management jobs; few are in top-management jobs. Human capital theory uses three individual-level variables to explain this vertical gender gap: women acquire fewer of the necessary educational credentials than men, women prefer different kinds of jobs than men, and women accumulate less of the required work experience than men. The authors argue that cultural schemas, specifically gender roles and gender norms, explain most individual-level differences between men and women and that when cultural factors are ignored, any observed effects of these factors can be dismissed as spurious. This analysis is based on data on nationally representative samples and the results of published research.
----------------------
Pheromone exposure impairs spatial task performance in young men
Jakob Pietschnig, Ingo Nader & Georg Gittler
Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numerous investigations have addressed the issue of alleged associations of spatial task performance and testosterone levels in healthy adults. In this context, it has been hypothesized that more androgynous levels of free circulating testosterone in men and women may lead to improved spatial task performance and vice versa. In the present placebo-controlled experiment, we examined effects of exposure to pheromones on spatial task performance in a sample of 129 young healthy men. Treatment effects were assessed through methods of Item Response Theory, thus allowing assessment of short-term within-individual changes. Our findings demonstrate impairing effects of pheromone exposure on spatial task performance, which may be explained by elevation of levels of free circulating testosterone because of the pheromone exposure. In all, these impairing effects seem to be robust and are already observable after short exposure to pheromones.