Not very ladylike
April Sutton, Amanda Bosky & Chandra Muller
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Tensions between the demands of the knowledge-based economy and remaining, blue-collar jobs underlie renewed debates about whether schools should emphasize career and technical training or college-preparatory curricula. We add a gendered lens to this issue, given the male-dominated nature of blue-collar jobs and women’s greater returns to college. Using the ELS:2002, this study exploits spatial variation in school curricula and jobs to investigate local dynamics that shape gender stratification. Results suggest a link between high school training and jobs in blue-collar communities that structures patterns of gender inequality into early adulthood. Although high school training in blue-collar communities reduced both men’s and women’s odds of four-year college enrollment, it had gender-divergent labor market consequences. Men in blue-collar communities took more blue-collar courses, had higher rates of blue-collar employment, and earned similar wages relative to otherwise comparable men from non-blue-collar communities. Women were less likely to work and to be employed in professional occupations, and they suffered severe wage penalties relative to their male peers and women from non-blue-collar communities. These relationships were due partly to high schools in blue-collar communities offering more blue-collar and fewer advanced college-preparatory courses. This curricular tradeoff may benefit men, but it appears to disadvantage women.
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Gargi Bhattacharya & Margaret Stockdale
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the critique in public discourse that sexual harassment (SH) victim advocates, particularly women and feminists, ignore the quality of evidence in a SH claim and are reluctant to find evidence of a false accusation. To balance the inquiry, the study also examined whether right wing authoritarians (RWAs) also ignore evidence quality and presume such claims are false accusations. Participants were 961 U.S. adults (51% female) who completed an online experiment in which they read either a gender harassment (GH) or unwanted sexual attention (USA) scenario of hostile work environment SH and rated the scenario on severity, perceived guilt of the accused, belief that the accused should receive negative job consequences, and likelihood that the claimant was making a false accusation. Scenarios varied by the strength of the evidence in support of the SH claim. Participants completed measures of identification with and support for feminism, RWA, and demographic variables. Results found that contrary to expectations, evidence had a stronger effect on women’s, feminists’, and feminism supporters’ perceptions and to a lesser extent RWAs’ perceptions of the scenarios. When evidence was weak, women and feminists, compared to others, were less supportive of the prosecution, but when evidence was strong they were more supportive of the prosecution than were others. These findings address criticisms that advocates for gender equity and victim’s rights, particularly women and feminists, are unable to reach fair judgments of SH complaints.
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Allison Mann & Thomas DiPrete
Sociological Science, July 2016
Abstract:
Using the lens of expectation states theory, which we formalize in Bayesian terms, this article examines the influences of national performance and self-assessment contexts on gender differences in the rate of aspiring to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations. We demonstrate that girls hold themselves to a higher performance standard than do boys before forming STEM orientations, and this gender “standards gap” grows with the strength of a country’s performance environment. We also demonstrate that a repeatedly observed paradox in this literature — namely, that the STEM gender gap increases with a more strongly gender-egalitarian national culture — vanishes when the national performance culture is taken into account. Whereas other research has proposed theories to explain the apparent paradox as an empirical reality, we demonstrate that the empirical relationship is as expected; net of the performance environment, countries with a more gender-egalitarian culture have a smaller gender gap in STEM orientations. We also find, consistent with our theory, that the proportion of high-performing girls among STEM aspirants grows with the strength of the national performance environment even as the overall gender gap in STEM orientations grows because of offsetting behavior by students at the lower end of the performance distribution.
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Catherine Taylor
American Journal of Sociology, July 2016, Pages 49–89
Abstract:
Women in male-dominated occupations report negative workplace social climates, whereas most men in female-dominated occupations report positive workplace social climates. Using a laboratory experiment mimicking the negative workplace social climates experienced by these token women, the author examines whether women are more sensitive to negative workplace social climates than men are or if, instead, men and women react similarly. Using salivary cortisol, the author finds that token men and token women are equally likely to exhibit a physiological stress response to social exclusion on the basis of gender. A second experiment shows that token men and token women who are socially included do not exhibit physiological stress response. Findings imply that (1) social exclusion on the basis of gender may be associated with physiological stress response and consequent negative health outcomes and (2) combined social-structural and social-interactional components of token women’s workplace climates would be stressors to both men and women workers.
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Jessica Ellis, Bailey Fosdick & Chris Rasmussen
PLoS ONE, July 2016
Abstract:
The substantial gender gap in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce can be traced back to the underrepresentation of women at various milestones in the career pathway. Calculus is a necessary step in this pathway and has been shown to often dissuade people from pursuing STEM fields. We examine the characteristics of students who begin college interested in STEM and either persist or switch out of the calculus sequence after taking Calculus I, and hence either continue to pursue a STEM major or are dissuaded from STEM disciplines. The data come from a unique, national survey focused on mainstream college calculus. Our analyses show that, while controlling for academic preparedness, career intentions, and instruction, the odds of a woman being dissuaded from continuing in calculus is 1.5 times greater than that for a man. Furthermore, women report they do not understand the course material well enough to continue significantly more often than men. When comparing women and men with above-average mathematical abilities and preparedness, we find women start and end the term with significantly lower mathematical confidence than men. This suggests a lack of mathematical confidence, rather than a lack of mathematically ability, may be responsible for the high departure rate of women. While it would be ideal to increase interest and participation of women in STEM at all stages of their careers, our findings indicate that if women persisted in STEM at the same rate as men starting in Calculus I, the number of women entering the STEM workforce would increase by 75%.
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Joseph Gardner & John Woolley
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing from the literature on deliberative conditions, we analyze thirty years of verbatim transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The transcripts provide a rare opportunity for the systematic empirical analysis of deliberative conditions. The importance of the FOMC, and its recent policy failures, makes the case particularly interesting. Deliberative scholars argue that deliberation should occur in a setting where participants are free and equal. Using a unique set of deliberative measures, our model shows that FOMC members do enjoy deliberative freedom. In contrast, we find inequalities in rates of participation. Some deviation from equality may be reasonable. However, we demonstrate a sustained pattern of gender inequality in participation that could in turn influence the FOMC’s policy choices and which is difficult to justify on any grounds.
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High Power Mindsets Reduce Gender Identification and Benevolent Sexism Among Women (But Not Men)
Andrea Vial & Jaime Napier
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine how feelings of power affect gender identification and the endorsement of sexism. Participants wrote essays about a time when they felt powerful or powerless (Studies 1–3) or about an event unrelated to power (Studies 2–3). Then, they reported how much they identified with their gender group. When primed with high power, women reported lower levels of gender identification, as compared to those primed with low power (Studies 1–2) and to a control condition (Studies 2–3). In Study 3, we also found that women primed with high power endorsed benevolent (but not hostile) sexism less than women in both the low power and control conditions (Study 3). Power had no impact on men's gender identification or sexism.
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Men set their own cites high: Gender and self-citation across fields and over time
Molly King et al.
Stanford University Working Paper, June 2016
Abstract:
How common is self-citation in scholarly publication and does the practice vary by gender? Using novel methods and a dataset of 1.5 million research papers in the scholarly database JSTOR published between 1779-2011, we find that nearly 10% of references are self-citations by a paper's authors. We further find that over the years between 1779-2011, men cite their own papers 56% more than women do. In the last two decades of our data, men self-cite 70% more than women. Women are also more than ten percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previous work at all. Despite increased representation of women in academia, this gender gap in self-citation rates has remained stable over the last 50 years. We break down self-citation patterns by academic field and number of authors, and comment on potential mechanisms behind these observations. These findings have important implications for scholarly visibility and likely consequences for academic careers.
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Lester Lusher & Vasil Yasenov
University of California Working Paper, June 2016
Abstract:
Sleep studies suggest that girls go to sleep earlier, are more active in the morning, and cope with sleep deprivation better than boys. We provide the first causal evidence on how gender differences in sleep cycles can help explain the gender performance gap. We exploit over 240,000 assignment-level grades from a quasi-experiment with a community of middle and high schools where students' schedules alternated between morning and afternoon start times each month. Relative to girls, we find that boys' achievement benefits from a later start time. For classes taught at the beginning of the school day, our estimates explain up to 16% of the gender performance gap.
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Who Has the Advantage? Race and Sex Differences in Returns to Social Capital at Home and at School
Mikaela Dufur et al.
Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, September 2016, Pages 27–40
Abstract:
A growing body of literature suggests that social capital is a valuable resource for children and youth, and that returns to that capital can increase academic success. However, relatively little is known about whether youth from different backgrounds build social capital in the same way and whether they receive the same returns to that capital. We examine the creation of and returns to social capital in family and school settings on academic achievement, measured as standardized test scores, for white boys, black boys, white girls, and black girls who were seniors in high school in the United States. Our findings suggest that while youth in different groups build social capital in largely the same way, differences exist by race and sex as to how family social capital affects academic achievement. Girls obtain greater returns to family social capital than do boys, but no group receives significant returns to school social capital after controlling for individual- and school-level characteristics.
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Ivona Hideg & Lance Ferris
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although sexist attitudes are generally thought to undermine support for employment equity (EE) policies supporting women, we argue that the effects of benevolent sexism are more complex. Across 4 studies, we extend the ambivalent sexism literature by examining both the positive and the negative effects benevolent sexism has for the support of gender-based EE policies. On the positive side, we show that individuals who endorse benevolent sexist attitudes on trait measures of sexism (Study 1) and individuals primed with benevolent sexist attitudes (Study 2) are more likely to support an EE policy, and that this effect is mediated by feelings of compassion. On the negative side, we find that this support extends only to EE policies that promote the hiring of women in feminine, and not in masculine, positions (Study 3 and 4). Thus, while benevolent sexism may appear to promote gender equality, it subtly undermines it by contributing to occupational gender segregation and leading to inaction in promoting women in positions in which they are underrepresented (i.e., masculine positions).
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“Girls should cook, rather than kick!” – Female soccer players under stereotype threat
Johanna Hermann & Regina Vollmeyer
Psychology of Sport and Exercise, September 2016, Pages 94–101
Abstract:
Based on the stereotype threat theory (Steele & Aronson, 1995), we tested if female soccer players’ performance decreased when the stereotype, “females are bad at soccer,” was activated. Additionally, girls under stereotype threat were assumed to experience lower flow while playing soccer and to be more worried, as compared to those in the control condition. The hypotheses were tested in three German soccer clubs (N = 36; age: M = 14.94, SD = 1.22). Participants completed a dribbling task two times (pre-post design) while their time was recorded. Flow and worry were assessed after each dribbling task. In between the two dribbling tasks, the girls read an article about either the incompetence of female soccer players or the growing popularity of soccer. The results showed that girls in the stereotype threat condition needed significantly more time to complete the dribbling task than did those in the control condition. No differences between the two conditions were observed with regard to flow and worry. These findings are discussed in terms of different mediating processes postulated in the stereotype threat literature focusing on sports.
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Jason Clark et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has found that activating self-relevant, negative stereotypes after a task may increase people's certainty about their own poor performance (i.e., stereotype validation). The current research examined how individual differences in stigma consciousness may moderate these effects. Building from past findings, we hypothesized that high stigma consciousness in women would be associated with lower susceptibility to gender stereotype validation — due to heightened motivation to avoid, reject, and/or react against perceived bias. In two studies, participants completed a difficult test on the subject of business economics. When the gender stereotype about business ability was made salient afterward, no evidence of stereotype validation emerged among women high in stigma consciousness. However, for women with lower stigma consciousness, the data suggest that stereotype activation validated negative views of their own performance and, in turn, had an adverse effect on related attitudes and beliefs about their abilities.
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From taste-based to statistical discrimination
William Neilson & Shanshan Ying
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, September 2016, Pages 116–128
Abstract:
Consider hiring managers who care not just about productivity but also some other, unrelated characteristic. If they treat that ascriptive characteristic differently across groups by, for example, valuing beauty more for women than men, then the hired women will be better looking but less productive, on average. This taste-based discrimination, focused entirely on an ascriptive characteristic, can lead to productivity-based statistical discrimination by the firm’s subsequent hiring managers who observe from their workforce that women tend to produce less. This identifies a new channel behind statistical discrimination that arises from the behavior of prior hiring managers.
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Alixandra Yanus & Karen O’Connor
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Summer 2016, Pages 341-358
Abstract:
This article examines the extent to which colleges and universities comply with the proportional opportunity test prescribed during the implementation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Using data from the US Department of Education, we consider proportionality in terms of both roster spots and finances for male and female athletes at Division I colleges and universities. We find that the proportionality gap is particularly large for historically Black colleges and institutions in the South; inequalities exist in terms of both number of athletes and expenditures. These results suggest a need for continued monitoring and enforcement of policy guidelines to ensure equal opportunity for men and women on college campuses.
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"To Bluff like a Man or Fold like a Girl?" – Gender Biased Deceptive Behavior in Online Poker
Jussi Palomäki et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2016
Abstract:
Evolutionary psychology suggests that men are more likely than women to deceive to bolster their status and influence. Also gender perception influences deceptive behavior, which is linked to pervasive gender stereotypes: women are typically viewed as weaker and more gullible than men. We assessed bluffing in an online experiment (N = 502), where participants made decisions to bluff or not in simulated poker tasks against opponents represented by avatars. Participants bluffed on average 6% more frequently at poker tables with female-only avatars than at tables with male-only or gender mixed avatars—a highly significant effect in games involving repeated decisions. Nonetheless, participants did not believe the avatar genders affected their decisions. Males bluffed 13% more frequently than females. Unlike most economic games employed exclusively in research contexts, online poker is played for money by tens of millions of people worldwide. Thus, gender effects in bluffing have significant monetary consequences for poker players.