The Second Sex?
The Jackie (and Jill) Robinson Effect: Why Do Congresswomen Outperform Congressmen?
Sarah Anzia & Christopher Berry
Stanford Working Paper, August 2009
Abstract:
We argue that the process of selection into political office is different for women than it is for men, which results in important differences in the performance of male and female legislators once they are elected. If voters are biased against female candidates, only the most talented, hardest working female candidates will succeed in the electoral process. Furthermore, if women perceive there to be sex discrimination in the electoral process, or if they underestimate their qualifications for office relative to men, then only the most qualified, politically ambitious females will emerge as candidates. We argue that when either or both forms of sex-based selection are present, the women who are elected to office will perform better, on average, than their male counterparts. We test this cen-tral implication of the theory by using legislators' success in delivering federal spending to their home districts as our primary measure of performance. We find that congresswomen secure rough-ly 9 percent more spending from federal discretionary programs than congressmen. This amounts to a premium of about $49 million per year for districts that send a woman to Capitol Hill. Finally, we find that women's superiority in securing particularistic benefits does not hurt their performance in policymaking: women also sponsor more bills and obtain more cosponsorship support for their legislative initiatives than their male colleagues.
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An Examination of Whether and How Racial and Gender Biases Influence Customer Satisfaction
David Hekman, Karl Aquino, Brad Owens, Terence Mitchell, Pauline Schilpzand & Keith Leavitt
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine whether and how various biases may influence customers' satisfaction evaluations and produce discriminatory judgments for minorities and female service employees. We argue that customer satisfaction evaluations are biased because they are anonymous judgments by untrained raters that usually lack an evaluation standard. In our laboratory and field samples, we find disturbing evidence generally confirming our arguments and suggesting that the presence of nonwhite and women service employees may produce lower aggregated customer satisfaction evaluations which may ultimately hurt individuals and organizations financially.
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Racism, Sexism, and Candidate Evaluations in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
Caitlin Dwyer, Daniel Stevens, John Sullivan & Barbara Allen
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, December 2009, Pages 223-240
Abstract:
In an attempt to understand the extent to which racism and sexism influenced affect toward Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, we analyze data from a national survey conducted in October 2008. Situating our investigation in previous examinations of modern racism and modern sexism, we test competing hypotheses about the role of these attitudes in the 2008 presidential election. Our results suggest that racism had a significant impact on candidate evaluations while sexism did not. We find that respondents who hold racist attitudes expressed negative attitudes toward Obama and positive attitudes toward Palin. When interacted with party identification, racism continued to exert a strong effect, indicating findings that are robust across partisan affiliations. Sexism, on the other hand, did not significantly influence evaluations of either Palin or Obama.
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Prototypes of race and gender: The invisibility of Black women
Amanda Sesko & Monica Biernata
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on racial and gender stereotyping typically focuses on the role of one of these social categories at a time rather than race/gender combinations. We suggest that the relative non-prototypicality of Black women's race and gender results in their "invisibility" relative to White women and to Black and White men (Fryberg & Townsend, 2008; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008). Two studies address whether Black women go "unnoticed" and their voices "unheard," by examining memory for Black women's faces and speech contributions. We found that photos of Black women were least likely to be recognized (Study 1), and statements said by a Black woman in a group discussion were least likely to be correctly attributed (Study 2) compared to Black men and White women and White men. The importance and implications of invisibility as a unique form of discrimination are discussed.
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"The South Arose as One Man": Gender and Sectionalism in Antislavery Petition Debates, 1835-1845
Susan Zaeske
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Fall 2009, Pages 341-368
Abstract:
Debates over female antislavery petitions provoked the first sustained discussion of women's political rights in the history of the U.S. Congress. Analysis of discourse produced on multiple sides of the debate reveals that as interlocutors questioned the womanhood and manhood of their opponents, the debates exceeded issues of constitutionality, escalating to what were perceived as attacks on the very way members and their constituents lived their lives. In the end, House debates over women's antislavery petitions from 1835 to 1845 were waged through a rhetoric of gender and amounted to a battle about who could be considered a citizen of the United States.
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Women Are On, But Not In, the News: Gender Roles in Local Television News
Roger Desmond & Anna Danilewicz
Sex Roles, forthcoming
Abstract:
This investigation examined 580 news stories in the top three local television news programs in a Northeastern U.S. television market for a two-week period. Content analysis was used to determine whether or not there were gender differences in the prevalence of reporters and anchors and in the type of stories they reported. Analysis of newscasts revealed that female reporters were more likely to present human interest and health related stories, while males were more likely to present political stories. Analysis of news sources revealed that male experts were used significantly more often than were female experts as news sources. There was no relationship between time news stories were presented and gender of the reporters or anchors.
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Do Women Pay More for Mortgages?
Ping Cheng, Zhenguo Lin & Yingchun Liu
Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper documents women on average pay more for mortgages than men. The disparity cannot be fully explained by traditional variables such as mortgage features, borrower characteristics, and market conditions. While the persistence of gender disparity may suggest discrimination, we offer a different explanation: women pay higher rates because they are more likely to choose lenders by recommendation while men tend to search for the lowest rate. Our empirical test confirms that search effort is rewarded in marketplace, and suggests that gender disparity in mortgage rates may be addressed by policies aimed at improving women's financial literacy and search skills.
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Richard Lippa, Marcia Collaer & Michael Peters
Archives of Sexual Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Mental rotation and line angle judgment performance were assessed in more than 90,000 women and 111,000 men from 53 nations. In all nations, men's mean performance exceeded women's on these two visuospatial tasks. Gender equality (as assessed by United Nations indices) and economic development (as assessed by per capita income and life expectancy) were significantly associated, across nations, with larger sex differences, contrary to the predictions of social role theory. For both men and women, across nations, gender equality and economic development were significantly associated with better performance on the two visuospatial tasks. However, these associations were stronger for the mental rotation task than for the line angle judgment task, and they were stronger for men than for women. Results were discussed in terms of evolutionary, social role, and stereotype threat theories of sex differences.
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Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests
Rong Su, James Rounds & Patrick Ian Armstrong
Psychological Bulletin, November 2009, Pages 859-884
Abstract:
The magnitude and variability of sex differences in vocational interests were examined in the present meta-analysis for Holland's (1959, 1997) categories (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional), Prediger's (1982) Things-People and Data-Ideas dimensions, and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest areas. Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension. Men showed stronger Realistic (d = 0.84) and Investigative (d = 0.26) interests, and women showed stronger Artistic (d = -0.35), Social (d = -0.68), and Conventional (d = -0.33) interests. Sex differences favoring men were also found for more specific measures of engineering (d = 1.11), science (d = 0.36), and mathematics (d = 0.34) interests. Average effect sizes varied across interest inventories, ranging from 0.08 to 0.79. The quality of interest inventories, based on professional reputation, was not differentially related to the magnitude of sex differences. Moderators of the effect sizes included interest inventory item development strategy, scoring method, theoretical framework, and sample variables of age and cohort. Application of some item development strategies can substantially reduce sex differences. The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.
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When Do Men and Women Make Attributions to Gender Discrimination? The Role of Discrimination Source
Gretchen Sechrist & Courtney Delmar
Sex Roles, November 2009, Pages 607-620
Abstract:
Two experiments examined the effects of discrimination source on men's and women's willingness to make attributions to a sexist experimenter or sexist rules. Students (161 male; 171 females) at a US university were exposed to a discriminatory person, discriminatory rule, or no discrimination. "Experiment 1" demonstrated individuals were less likely to make attributions to a sexist person than an unfair rule, and women were especially reluctant to indicate a person was responsible for their discrimination even when a person was the source. "Experiment 2" showed participants were less likely to indicate an experimenter, and even a rule, was sexist when there was a cost to the perpetrator (i.e., advisor would be notified of the perpetrator's actions) for making such attributions.
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A comparison of new firm financing by gender: Evidence from the Kauffman Firm Survey data
Susan Coleman & Alicia Robb
Small Business Economics, December 2009, Pages 397-411
Abstract:
This study uses data from the new Kauffman Firm Survey to explore gender differences in the use of start-up capital and subsequent financial injections by new firms. We find that, consistent with previous studies, women start their businesses with significantly lower levels of financial capital than men. A new finding from this research is that women go on to raise significantly lower amounts of incremental debt and equity in years two and three. These results hold even controlling for a variety of firm and owner characteristics, including the level of initial start-up capital and firm sales. Our findings also reveal that women rely heavily on personal rather than external sources of debt and equity for both start-up capital as well as follow-on investments. Our findings have implications for further research into gender differences in financing sources and strategies and business outcomes.
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Kristin Goss
Politics & Gender, December 2009, Pages 453-489
Abstract:
From World War I through the 1960s, U.S. women's organizations regularly trekked to Capitol Hill to influence congressional foreign policy debates. Yet by the 1990s, these groups had largely disengaged from international affairs. Why? Using an original data set of women's group appearances before Congress from 1916 to 2000, this study documents and explains this puzzling development by exploring the mutually reinforcing linkages among women's identity, claims to issue ownership, and interest group evolution. In the case at hand, the advent of citizen and economic groups competing with women's organizations for ownership of foreign policy questions, coupled with the declining legitimacy of gender "difference" arguments and the resurgence of "sameness" arguments, led women's groups to focus on the dimensions of foreign policy affecting women's rights and status, in particular, and to abandon less explicitly gendered foreign policy issues almost entirely. As multipurpose women's associations declined in vitality, and feminist groups fueled by newly available philanthropic dollars staked claim to women's rights-and-status questions, organized womanhood surrendered much of the foreign-policy issue space over which women had long claimed political authority, and women's groups' presence on Capitol Hill waned.
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Gender and economic voting, revisited
Cindy Kam
Electoral Studies, December 2009, Pages 615-624
Abstract:
In this article, I focus on the extent to which gender structures economic voting in presidential elections from 1980 to 2004. Existing literature suggests that women and men rely on sociotropic and pocketbook considerations to differing degrees. The overriding view is that women vote more sociotropically than men and men vote more egocentrically than women. Contrary to conclusions drawn by scholars and cited by subsequent researchers, I find that men and women alike vote sociotropically - and to essentially the same degree. There is no evidence to suggest that women vote more sociotropically than men. Moreover, pocketbook voting is hard to find - among both men and women. The evidence overall suggests more similarity than difference in women and men's economic voting.
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Sexual Harassment at Work in the United States
Aniruddha Das
Archives of Sexual Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using nationally representative data from the 1992 U.S. National Health and Social Life Survey, this study queried the prevalence and risk factors of lifetime workplace sexual harassment among both women and men. Among those aged 18-60 reporting ever having worked, 41% of women (CI, 37-44) reported any workplace harassment over their lifetime, with men's harassment prevalence significantly lower, at 32% (CI, 29-35). In the youngest age groups (those in their 20s or younger), there was no statistically significant difference between women's and men's harassment prevalence. Multivariate analysis of risk factors suggested that, in contrast to much of the harassment literature, among both genders workplace harassment seemed to have at least as much to do with a system of "routine activities" mechanisms - a victim's conscious or unconscious sexual signaling, more exposure to potential harassers, and a perpetrator's lower cost of harassment - as with unobserved differences in power between victim and perpetrator. Strikingly, both women's and men's harassment was strongly linked to markers of sexualization, whether early developmental factors or behavioral patterns in adulthood - a mechanism insufficiently emphasized in the harassment literature.
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Bosses' Perceptions of Family-Work Conflict and Women's Promotability: Glass Ceiling Effects
Jenny Hoobler, Sandy Wayne & Grace Lemmon
Academy of Management Journal, October 2009
Abstract:
We examine one potential reason for the persistence of the glass ceiling--bosses' perceptions of female subordinates' family-work conflict. Person categorization and social role theories are used to examine whether bosses (both male and female) perceive women as having greater family-work conflict and therefore view them as mismatched with their organization and job. The results support our model: bosses' perceptions of family-work conflict mediated the relationships between subordinate sex and perceptions of person-organization fit, person-job fit and performance. Both types of fit were related to promotability (nomination for promotion and manager-assessed promotability). Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
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Marriage and Emancipation in the Age of the Pill
Lena Edlund & Cecilia Machado
Columbia University Working Paper, October 2009
Abstract:
Women's economic emancipation arguably took off in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While ubiquitous, its origins are not well understood. In an influential paper, Goldin and Katz [2002] pointed to the role of unmarried women's access to the oral contraceptive (the Pill), ushered in by the extension of legal rights to "mature minors" in the late 1960s early 1970s. However, the Pill was FDA approved already in 1960, and many states allowed a minor to marry, thereby emancipating her with respect to medical treatment, including the Pill. By the mid-1970s, the minimum marriage age had been lowered to 18 in almost all states. Exploiting changes in the legal rights of young adults by state, we find evidence that the Pill made early marriage more attractive and facilitated women's educational and occupational attainments. Marriage combined with the Pill, we speculate, may have provided women with the means to pursue higher education at a time of limited student aid and ability to borrow against future earnings.
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Ambivalent Sexism and Applicant Evaluations: Effects on Ambiguous Applicants
Amy Nicole Salvaggio, Michelle Streich & Jennifer Hopper
Sex Roles, November 2009, Pages 621-633
Abstract:
The purpose of the current research was to evaluate how gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes affect responses to hypothetical job applicants. In Study 1 (N = 93) undergraduate and graduate students in the Southwestern USA evaluated a male, female, or gender-ambiguous resume. They also completed the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI; Glick and Fiske 1996). Hypotheses were tested using ANOVA. Results suggested that participants who expressed more hostile sexist attitudes evaluated the gender-ambiguous applicant more negatively than a male or female applicant. In Study 2 (N = 117), graduate and undergraduate participants were asked to indicate the gender of the ambiguous applicant. Those who scored high on hostile sexism, and perceived a gender-ambiguous applicant to be male, provided the most favorable evaluations.
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Jürgen Hänggi, Andreas Buchmann, Christian Mondadori, Katharina Henke, Lutz Jäncke & Christoph Hock
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, January 2010, Pages 139-155
Abstract:
Sex differences in visuospatial cognition (VSC) with male advantage are frequently reported in the literature. There is evidence for sexual dimorphisms in the human brain, one of which postulates more gray matter (GM) in females and more white matter (WM) in males relative to total intracranial volume. We investigated the neuroanatomy of VSC independent of general intelligence (g) in sex-separated populations, homogenous in age, education, memory performance, a memory- and brain morphology-related gene, and g. VSC and g were assessed with the Wechsler adult intelligence scale. The influence of g on VSC was removed using a hierarchical factor analysis and the Schmid-Leiman solution. Structural high-resolution magnetic resonance images were acquired and analyzed with voxel-based morphometry. As hypothesized, the clusters of positive correlations between local volumes and VSC performance independent of g were found mainly in parietal areas, but also in pre- and postcentral regions, predominantly in the WM in males, whereas in females these correlations were located in parietal and superior temporal areas, predominantly in the GM. Our results suggest that VSC depends more strongly on parietal WM structures in males and on parietal GM structures in females. This sex difference might have to do with the increased axonal and decreased somatodendritic tissue in males relative to females. Whether such sex-specific implementations of the VSC network can be explained genetically as suggested in investigations into the Turner syndrome or as a result of structural neural plasticity upon different experience and usage remains to be shown.
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Gender Differences in Beliefs on the Returns to Effort: Evidence from the World Values Survey
Raymond Fisman and Maura O'Neill
Journal of Human Resources, Fall 2009, Pages 858-870
Abstract:
We study gender differences in attitudes in the role of luck versus hard work in achieving success using data from the World Values Survey. Women are consistently more likely to report that success is a matter of luck. We consider several potential explanations: workplace discrimination, religion, household responsibilities, and political alignment. Our results favor explanations based on workplace discrimination and household responsibilities.
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Manuela Barreto, Naomi Ellemers, Laura Piebinga & Miguel Moya
Sex Roles, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research demonstrates how women assimilate to benevolent sexism by emphasizing their relational qualities and de-emphasizing their task-related characteristics when exposed to benevolent sexism. Studies 1 (N = 62) and 2 (N = 100) show, with slightly different paradigms and measures, that compared to exposure to hostile sexism, exposure to benevolent sexism increases the extent to which female Dutch college students define themselves in relational terms and decreases the extent to which they emphasize their task-related characteristics. Study 3 (N = 79) demonstrates that benevolent sexism has more pernicious effects when it is expressed by someone with whom women expect to collaborate than when no collaboration is expected with the source of sexism. The implications of these results are discussed.