The difference
Katie Van Loo & Robert Rydell
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, March 2013, Pages 387-400
Abstract:
This research examined whether feeling powerful can eliminate the deleterious effect of stereotype threat (i.e., concerns about confirming a negative self-relevant stereotype) on women's math performance. In Experiments 1 and 2, priming women with high power buffered them from reduced math performance in response to stereotype threat instructions, whereas women in the low and control power conditions showed poorer math performance in response to threat. Experiment 3 found that working memory capacity is one mechanism through which power moderates the effect of threat on women's math performance. In the low and control power conditions, women showed reduced working memory capacity in response to stereotype threat, accounting for threat's effect on performance. In contrast, women in the high power condition did not show reductions in working memory capacity or math performance in response to threat. This work demonstrates that perceived power moderates stereotype threat-based performance effects and explains why this occurs.
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Beauty and Productivity: The Case of the Ladies Professional Golf Association
Seung Chan Ahn & Young Hoon Lee
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is evidence that attractive looking workers earn more than average looking workers, even after controlling for a variety of individual characteristics. The presence of such beauty premiums may influence the labor supply decisions of attractive workers. For example, if one unit of a product by an attractive worker is more rewarded than that by her less attractive coworker, the attractive worker may put more effort into improving her productivity. We examine this possibility by analyzing panel data for individual female golfers participating in the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour. We found that attractive golfers recorded lower than average scores and earn more prize money than average looking players, even when controlling for player experience and other variables related to their natural talents. This finding is consistent with the notion that physical appearance is associated with individual workers' accumulation of human capital or skills. If the human capital of attractive workers is at least partly an outcome of favoritism toward beauty, then the premium estimates obtained by previous studies may have been downwardly biased.
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Sander Hoogendoorn, Hessel Oosterbeek & Mirjam van Praag
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper reports on a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business studies start up a venture as part of their curriculum. We manipulated the gender composition of teams and assigned students randomly to teams, conditional on their gender. We find that teams with an equal gender mix perform better than male-dominated teams in terms of sales and profits. We explore various mechanisms suggested in the literature to explain this positive effect of gender diversity on performance (including complementarities, learning, monitoring, and conflicts) but find no support for them.
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Male Student Veterans: Hardiness, Psychological Well-Being, and Masculine Norms
Gregory Alfred, Joseph Hammer & Glenn Good
Psychology of Men & Masculinity, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study assessed whether conformity to masculine norms was associated with psychological well-being among 117 college-attending veterans and active-duty service members, and the extent to which hardiness mediated that relationship. Results indicated that greater conformity to masculine norms was associated with lower psychological well-being (r = -.31, p < .001), with hardiness fully mediating that relation.
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Gender and the Gubernatorial Agenda
Brianne Heidbreder & Katherine Felix Scheurer
State and Local Government Review, March 2013, Pages 3-13
Abstract:
Although the number of female governors has more than doubled over the past thirty years, few studies examine whether gender influences the policy interests of governors. To address this gap in the literature, we analyze whether gender affects the policy agendas of governors. Conducting a content analysis of state of the state speeches between 2006 and 2008, we examine whether gender influences the presence of social welfare policies on the policy agendas of governors. Even after controlling for political and situational factors, our results suggest that female governors devote more agenda attention to social welfare policy than their male colleagues.
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Gender and Time for Sleep among U.S. Adults
Sarah Burgard & Jennifer Ailshire
American Sociological Review, February 2013, Pages 51-69
Abstract:
Do women really sleep more than men? Biomedical and social scientific studies show longer sleep durations for women, a surprising finding given sociological research showing women have more unpaid work and less high-quality leisure time compared to men. We assess explanations for gender differences in time for sleep, including compositional differences in levels of engagement in paid and unpaid labor, gendered responses to work and family responsibilities, and differences in napping, bedtimes, and interrupted sleep for caregiving. We examine the overall gender gap in time for sleep as well as gaps within family life-course stages based on age, partnership, and parenthood statuses. We analyze minutes of sleep from a diary day collected from nationally representative samples of working-age adults in the American Time Use Surveys of 2003 to 2007. Overall and at most life course stages, women slept more than men. Much of the gap is explained by work and family responsibilities and gendered time tradeoffs; as such, gender differences vary across life course stages. The gender gap in sleep time favoring women is relatively small for most comparisons and should be considered in light of the gender gap in leisure time favoring men at all life course stages.
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Testosterone and Men's Stress Responses to Gender Threats
Andrew Caswell et al.
Psychology of Men & Masculinity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Given findings suggesting that basal testosterone (T) is a biological marker of dominance striving that buffers people against stress, we examined the role of basal T in men's stress responses (cortisol reactivity) following a private, noncompetitive gender status threat. One-hundred twenty-eight men recruited from a university in the Southeast provided saliva samples both before and 15 minutes after receiving feedback that either threatened or affirmed their gender status. Gender threatening feedback elicited heightened cortisol reactivity among men who were low, but not high, in basal T (interaction f2 = .03). This suggests that men high in T may be buffered from the immediate psychophysiological effects of manhood threats. Discussion considers how these findings add to the literature on basal T and reactions to status threats.
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Updating, Self-Confidence, and Discrimination
Konstanze Albrecht et al.
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this laboratory experiment, we show that people incorporate irrelevant group information when evaluating others. Individuals from groups that perform badly on average receive low evaluations, even when it is known that the individuals themselves perform well. This group-bias occurs both in a gendered setup, where women form the worse performing group, and in a non-gendered setup. The type of discrimination that we identify is neither taste-based nor statistical; it is rather due to conservatism in updating beliefs, and is even more pronounced among women. Furthermore, self-confident men overvalue male performers. When our data is used to simulate a job promotion ladder, we observe that women are driven out quickly.
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Investigation of nonverbal discrimination against women in simulated initial job interviews
Kathleen Hess
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigated nonverbal sex discrimination in simulated initial job interviews with women applicants. It was hypothesized that experienced interviewers would exhibit more negative behaviors while interviewing a woman for a "masculine" job (an incongruent interview), but more positive behaviors while interviewing a woman for a "feminine" job (a congruent interview). It was further hypothesized that the behavior of inexperienced interviewers would remain the same across interviews. Mock initial job interviews were videotaped and nonverbal behaviors were coded. As hypothesized, experienced interviewers exhibited more negative and fewer positive behaviors in the incongruent interviews, whereas inexperienced interviewers did not. Unexpectedly, inexperienced interviewers exhibited more positive and fewer negative behaviors during incongruent interviews. Implications for training to reduce nonverbal discrimination are discussed.
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Ann Mari May, Mary McGarvey & Robert Whaples
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors survey economists in the United States holding membership in the American Economic Association (AEA) to determine if there are significant differences in views between male and female economists on important policy issues. Controlling for place of current employment (academic institution with graduate program, academic institution-undergraduate only, government, for-profit institution) and decade of PhD, the authors find many areas in which economists agree. However, important differences exist in the views of male and female economists on issues including the minimum wage, views on labor standards, health insurance, and especially on explanations for the gender wage gap and issues of equal opportunity in the labor market and the economics profession itself. These results lend support to the notion that gender diversity in policy-making circles may be an important aspect in broadening the menu of public policy choices.
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How Can Women Escape the Compensation Negotiation Dilemma? Relational Accounts Are One Answer
Hannah Riley Bowles & Linda Babcock
Psychology of Women Quarterly, March 2013, Pages 80-96
Abstract:
Policy makers, academics, and media reports suggest that women could shrink the gender pay gap by negotiating more effectively for higher compensation. Yet women entering compensation negotiations face a dilemma: They have to weigh the benefits of negotiating against the social consequences of having negotiated. Research shows that women are penalized socially more than men for negotiating for higher pay. To address this dilemma, the authors test strategies to help women improve both their negotiation and social outcomes in compensation negotiations. In Study 1, communicating concern for organizational relationships improved female negotiators' social outcomes, and offering a legitimate account for compensation requests improved negotiation outcomes. However, neither strategy - alone or in combination - improved both women's social and negotiation outcomes. Study 2 tested two strategies devised to improve female negotiators' social and negotiation outcomes by explaining why a compensation request is legitimate in relational terms. Results showed that, although adherence to the feminine stereotype is insufficient, using these "relational accounts" can improve women's social and negotiation outcomes at the same time. Normative implications of conformity to gender stereotypes to reduce gender pay disparities are discussed.
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Gender and discipline in 5-12-month-old infants: A longitudinal study
Richard Evan Ahl et al.
Infant Behavior and Development, April 2013, Pages 199-209
Abstract:
We examined the effects of infant age and gender on the behaviors of infants and mothers during discipline interactions using longitudinal, naturalistic, home-based, taped observations of 16 mother-infant dyads (eight males and eight females). These observations were conducted between the child ages of 5 and 12 months and used a devised Maternal Discipline Coding System to code for the occurrence of discipline events. During discipline interactions, mothers vocalized longer, used harsher tones, and used more explanations with older compared to younger infants. Male infants were more likely than female infants to cry or whine during discipline events. Mothers of male infants used longer vocalizations, more words, and more affectionate terms than mothers of female infants. Male infants were more difficult during discipline interactions than female infants, but it appeared that mothers of males responded to this difficulty by using milder discipline techniques.
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Gender Differences in Multitasking Reflect Spatial Ability
Timo Mäntylä
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Demands involving the scheduling and interleaving of multiple activities have become increasingly prevalent, especially for women in both their paid and unpaid work hours. Despite the ubiquity of everyday requirements to multitask, individual and gender-related differences in multitasking have gained minimal attention in past research. In two experiments, participants completed a multitasking session with four gender-fair monitoring tasks and separate tasks measuring executive functioning (working memory updating) and spatial ability (mental rotation). In both experiments, males outperformed females in monitoring accuracy. Individual differences in executive functioning and spatial ability were independent predictors of monitoring accuracy, but only spatial ability mediated gender differences in multitasking. Menstrual changes accentuated these effects, such that gender differences in multitasking (and spatial ability) were eliminated between males and females who were in the menstrual phase of the menstrual cycle but not between males and females who were in the luteal phase. These findings suggest that multitasking involves spatiotemporal task coordination and that gender differences in multiple-task performance reflect differences in spatial ability.
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Women's Empowerment and Gender Bias in the Birth and Survival of Girls in Urban India
Sucharita Sinha Mukherjee
Feminist Economics, Winter 2013, Pages 1-28
Abstract:
Despite improvements in women's work opportunities and educational achievements, women's survival disadvantage is a demographic reality of urban India. A temporal and cross-sectional analysis of the data from the 1991 and 2001 census of India, while reaffirming the positive association between women's employment and the birth and survival of more girls, fails to reconfirm the oft-emphasized positive connection between women's education and increased survival of girls. Relatively high levels of women's education, by being indicative of household socioeconomic status, may be associated with increased ability to discriminate against girls through prenatal sex selection, especially in the presence of cultural biases resulting in low women's rates of participation in paid work, persistence of dowry payments, and lack of women's property rights. As the educational achievements of urban Indian women improve, gender discrimination in the birth and survival of girls may intensify as a cumulative effect of socioeconomic factors continuing to favor sons.
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Leaving Science: Gender Differences in Career Continuity Following a Job Loss
Thomas Moore, Peter Meiksins & Ken Root
Sociological Forum, March 2013, Pages 109-134
Abstract:
This study investigates gender differences in the postdisplacement experience of nonacademic science and engineering (S&E) workers. Using a pooled sample created from the Displaced Worker Surveys conducted between 1994 and 2008, it finds that (1) this S&E work force is particularly vulnerable to job loss and potential career disruption; (2) displaced female S&E workers are more likely than comparable male workers to exit the work force, a gender difference that is conditional on and explained by marital and parental status; and (3) reemployed female S&E workers are also more likely to leave science for non-S&E occupations, but this gender difference is limited to unmarried workers. A concluding section discusses the implications of these findings for interpreting gender differences in career outcomes.
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Exploring the effect of media images on women's leadership self-perceptions and aspirations
Stefanie Simon & Crystal Hoyt
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, March 2013, Pages 232-245
Abstract:
Across two experimental studies, the present research explores how media images depicting counterstereotypical roles for women, compared to those that depict stereotypical roles for women, affect women's gender role beliefs (Study 1) and responses to a leadership situation (Study 2). Study 1 predicted and found that women exposed to images depicting counterstereotypical roles subsequently reported stronger nontraditional gender role beliefs than women exposed to images depicting stereotypical roles. Study 2 then directly assessed the effect of media images of women on female participants' self-reported responses following a leadership task. Women exposed to media images of women in counterstereotypical roles reported less negative self-perceptions and greater leadership aspirations than women exposed to images of women in stereotypical roles. Moreover, negative self-perceptions mediated the relationship between media images and leadership aspirations. Implications for increasing women's representation in the leadership domain are discussed.
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Mentioning Menstruation: A Stereotype Threat that Diminishes Cognition?
Joseph Albert Wister, Margaret Stubbs & Chaquica Shipman
Sex Roles, January 2013, Pages 19-31
Abstract:
To investigate menstruation as a stereotype threat that could have the effect of diminishing cognitive performance, 92 undergraduate women from a small, urban university in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States (US) completed two cognitive tasks, a Stroop test, and an SAT-based mathematics test, as well as a Menstrual History Questionnaire (MH) and the Menstrual Attitudes Questionnaire (Brooks-Gunn and Ruble 1980). The MH served as the menstruation stereotype threat. Some women were also presented with positive information about menstruation, which served as the positive prime. The order of materials varied to yield four conditions: Menstruation Threat/No Positive Prime - MH first, then cognitive tasks; Menstruation Threat/Positive Prime - MH first, then positive information, then cognitive tests; Positive Prime/No Menstruation Threat - positive information first, then cognitive tasks, then MH; and No Positive Prime/No Menstruation Threat - cognitive tests first, then MH. In all four conditions, participants completed the Menstrual Attitudes Questionnaire last. Results indicated that participants receiving the Menstruation Threat completed significantly fewer items on the Stroop test. In addition, subjects in the No Positive Prime/Menstruation Threat condition performed more poorly on the Stroop the closer they were to their next period. This effect was absent for the Positive Prime/Menstruation Threat condition and reversed for participants in the Positive Prime/No Menstruation Threat. This suggests that positive priming moderates the relationship between closeness to menstruation and cognitive performance. Implications of the results for addressing stigma associated with menstruation are discussed.
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Georgia Rada Ortner et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Intertemporal choices between a smaller sooner and a larger delayed reward are one of the most important types of decisions humans face in their everyday life. The degree to which individuals discount delayed rewards correlates with impulsiveness. Steep delay discounting has been associated with negative outcomes over a wide range of behaviors such as addiction. However, little is known about the biological foundations of delay discounting. Here, we examine a potential causal link between delay discounting and testosterone, a hormone which has been associated with other types of impulsive behavior. In our double-blind placebo-controlled study 91 healthy young men either received a topical gel containing 50 mg of testosterone (N = 46) or a placebo (N = 45) before participating in a delay discounting task with real incentives. Our main finding is that a single dose administration of testosterone did not lead to significant differences in discount rates between the placebo and the testosterone group. Within groups and in the pooled sample, no significant relationship between testosterone and discount rates was observed. At the same time, we do replicate standard findings from the delay discounting literature such as a magnitude-of-rewards effect on discount rates. In sum, our findings suggest that circulating testosterone does not have a significant effect on delay discounting in young men.
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Gender and the credit rationing of small businesses
Naranchimeg Mijid & Alexandra Bernasek
Social Science Journal, March 2013, Pages 55-65
Abstract:
Rapid small business ownership growth rates among women have motivated research on issues related to gender and small business performance. The importance of credit access for the success of small businesses, as well as evidence that women have less access to credit than male business owners, has led researchers to explore the reasons for this. In this paper, we estimate a model of credit rationing by gender of the business owner. Our results are consistent with previous studies that find higher loan denial rates and lower loan application rates among women compared with men. Testing the robustness of the results we find that women seem to be rationing themselves in the credit market rather than being discriminated against by banks. Reasons for this self-rationing behavior are an important topic for further research.
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Kristen Roche
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Compared to self-employed men, self-employed women have more education but considerably lower earnings, generating differences in the returns to education by gender. This paper finds evidence that men typically benefit from a complementary relationship between education and earnings. However, women are heterogenous in their returns to education. Women who self-employ in traditionally female occupations do not benefit from this complementary relationship, and women who self-employ in traditionally male occupations earn returns that are more similar to the male experience.
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Male Superiority in Spatial Navigation: Adaptation or Side Effect?
Edward Clint et al.
Quarterly Review of Biology, December 2012, Pages 289-313
Abstract:
In the past few decades, sex differences in spatial cognition have often been attributed to adaptation in response to natural selection. A common explanation is that home range size differences between the sexes created different cognitive demands pertinent to wayfinding in each sex and resulted in the evolution of sex differences in spatial navigational ability in both humans and nonhuman mammals. However, the assumption of adaptation as the appropriate mode of explanation was nearly simultaneous with the discovery and subsequent verification of the male superiority effect, even without any substantive evidence establishing a causal role for adaptation. An alternate possibility that the sex difference in cognition is a genetic or hormonal side effect has not been rigorously tested using the comparative method. The present study directly evaluates how well the range hypothesis fits the available data on species differences in spatial ability by use of a phylogenetically based, cross-species, comparative analysis. We find no support for the hypothesis that species differences in home range size dimorphism are positively associated with parallel differences in spatial navigation abilities. The alternative hypothesis that sex differences in spatial cognition result as a hormonal side effect is better supported by the data.