Waiting for Wonder Woman
Christopher Cotton, Frank McIntyre & Joseph Price
NBER Working Paper, October 2010
Abstract:
Using data from multiple-period math competitions, we show that males outperform females of similar ability during the first period. However, the male advantage is not found in any subsequent period of competition, or even after a two-week break from competition. Some evidence suggests that males may actually perform worse than females in later periods. The analysis considers various experimental treatments and finds that the existence of gender differences depends crucially on the design of the competition and the task at hand. Even when the male advantage does exist, it does not persist beyond the initial period of competition.
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Hard Won and Easily Lost: The Fragile Status of Leaders in Gender-Stereotype-Incongruent Occupations
Victoria Brescoll, Erica Dawson & Eric Luis Uhlmann
Psychological Science, forthcoming
"When they did not make any mistake, male and female police chiefs, along with male and female women's college presidents, were accorded similar status. However, when female police chiefs and male women's college presidents made a mistake, they were accorded significantly less status, and viewed as less competent, than their gender-congruent counterparts...Thus, the high status achieved by some men and women in gender-incongruent occupations can be unstable, vulnerable, and ultimately fragile. Though women and minorities have made progress in reaching high-status positions, the present research draws attention to an unsettling bias that may readily undermine these achievements."
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Shannon Holleran, Jessica Whitehead, Toni Schmader & Matthias Mehl
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past research has examined women's subjective satisfaction in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), but the actual events that correlate with disengagement have not been identified. In this study, workplace conversations of 45 female and male STEM faculty were sampled using the Electronically Activated Recorder, a naturalistic observation method, coded for research or socializing content, and correlated with self-reported job disengagement. Both men and women were less likely to discuss research in conversations with female as compared to male colleagues, and when discussing research with men, women were rated as less competent than men. Consistent with the idea that women in STEM experience social identity threat, discussing research with male colleagues was associated with greater disengagement for women, whereas socializing with male colleagues was associated with less disengagement. These patterns did not hold for men. These findings point to the unique challenges women face in STEM disciplines.
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The Birth of Legal Aid: Gender Ideologies, Women, and the Bar in New York City, 1863-1910
Felice Batlan
Law and History Review, November 2010, Pages 931-971
Abstract:
At the New York Legal Aid Society's twenty-fifth anniversary banquet in 1901, Arthur von Briesen, the Society's longtime president, ended the evening with the following acknowledgement: "Before we separate I beg to be permitted to say a few words on...the valuable aid which the Society has received from the women of New York. I want you to understand that without them we could not have prospered, without their assistance we could not have done the work...Their energetic efforts in our behalf, their clear understanding of the duties...has enabled us to increase not only the forte and our power for good, but enabled us to create a special branch in which the cases of women can be specially considered by an able lawyer who is also a woman." Here Briesen publicly recognized women's efforts on behalf of legal aid as benefactors, supporters, volunteers, and lawyers. The audience that evening would not have been surprised to learn that a woman lawyer now would be providing legal services to women clients, for this was not a new phenomenon. The Society already employed a number of women lawyers. Furthermore women formally untrained in law, but nonetheless acting as lawyers, had prior to the turn of the century provided legal services to poor women through New York City's Working Women's Protective Union (WWPU). As I demonstrate, the origins of legal aid lay in the provision of legal services to poor women - often by other women.
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Michelle Budig & Melissa Hodges
American Sociological Review, October 2010, Pages 705-728
Abstract:
Earnings inequality has grown in recent decades in the United States, yet research investigating the motherhood wage penalty has not fully considered how the penalty itself, and the mechanisms producing it, may vary among low-wage, middle-wage, and high-wage workers. Pooling data from the 1979 to 2004 waves of the NLSY and using simultaneous quantile regression methods with fixed effects, we test whether the size of the motherhood penalty differs across the distribution of white women's earnings, and whether the mechanisms explaining this penalty vary by earnings level. Results show that having children inflicts the largest penalty on low-wage women, proportionately, although a significant motherhood penalty persists at all earnings levels. We also find that the mechanisms creating the motherhood penalty vary by earnings level. Family resources, work effort, and compensating differentials account for a greater portion of the penalty among low earners. Among highly paid women, by contrast, the motherhood penalty is significantly smaller and largely explained by lost human capital due to childbearing. Our findings show that estimates of average motherhood penalties obscure the compounded disadvantage mothers face at the bottom of the earnings distribution, as well as differences in the type and strength of mechanisms that produce the penalty.
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Stereotype Threat Affects Financial Decision Making
Priyanka Carr & Claude Steele
Psychological Science, October 2010, Pages 1411-1416
Abstract:
The research presented in this article provides the first evidence that one's decision making can be influenced by concerns about stereotypes and the devaluation of one's identity. Many studies document gender differences in decision making, and often attribute these differences to innate and stable factors, such as biological and hormonal differences. In three studies, we found that stereotype threat affected decision making and led to gender differences in loss-aversion and risk-aversion behaviors. In Study 1, women subjected to stereotype threat in academic and business settings were more loss averse than both men and women who were not facing the threat of being viewed in light of negative stereotypes. We found no gender differences in loss-aversion behavior in the absence of stereotype threat. In Studies 2a and 2b, we found the same pattern of effects for risk-aversion behavior that we had observed for loss-aversion behavior. In addition, in Study 2b, ego depletion mediated the effects of stereotype threat on women's decision making. These results suggest that individuals' decision making can be influenced by stereotype concerns.
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Gender and Entrepreneurship as a Career Choice: Do Self-assessments of Ability Matter?
Sarah Thébaud
Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2010, Pages 288-304
Abstract:
The gender gap in entrepreneurship has typically been understood through women's structural disadvantages in acquiring the resources relevant for successful business ownership. This study builds on resource-based approaches to investigate how cultural beliefs about gender influence the process by which individuals initially come to identify entrepreneurship as a viable labor-market option. Drawing on status characteristics theory, this study evaluates (1) how cultural beliefs about gender and entrepreneurship influence self-assessments of entrepreneurial ability, and (2) the extent to which such assessments account for the gender gap in business start-ups. Results suggest that women are significantly less likely to perceive themselves as able to be an entrepreneur and they hold themselves to a stricter standard of competence when compared to similarly situated men. This gender difference in self-assessments accounts for a significant portion of the gender gap in entrepreneurship after controlling for relevant resources. Additional analyses reveal that significant gender differences in self-assessed ability persist among established business owners.
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The effect of negative performance stereotypes on learning
Robert Rydell, Michael Rydell & Kathryn Boucher
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Stereotype threat (ST) research has focused exclusively on how negative group stereotypes reduce performance. The present work examines if pejorative stereotypes about women in math inhibit their ability to learn the mathematical rules and operations necessary to solve math problems. In Experiment 1, women experiencing ST had difficulty encoding math-related information into memory and, therefore, learned fewer mathematical rules and showed poorer math performance than did controls. In Experiment 2, women experiencing ST while learning modular arithmetic (MA) performed more poorly than did controls on easy MA problems; this effect was due to reduced learning of the mathematical operations underlying MA. In Experiment 3, ST reduced women's, but not men's, ability to learn abstract mathematical rules and to transfer these rules to a second, isomorphic task. This work provides the first evidence that negative stereotypes about women in math reduce their level of mathematical learning and demonstrates that reduced learning due to stereotype threat can lead to poorer performance in negatively stereotyped domains.
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David Tzuriel & Gila Egozi
Child Development, September/October 2010, Pages 1417-1430
Abstract:
A sample of 116 children (M = 6 years 7 months) in Grade 1 was randomly assigned to experimental (n = 60) and control (n = 56) groups, with equal numbers of boys and girls in each group. The experimental group received a program aimed at improving representation and transformation of visuospatial information, whereas the control group received a substitute program. All children were administered mental rotation tests before and after an intervention program and a Global-Local Processing Strategies test before the intervention. The results revealed that initial gender differences in spatial ability disappeared following treatment in the experimental but not in the control group. Gender differences were moderated by strategies used to process visuospatial information. Intervention and processing strategies were essential in reducing gender differences in spatial abilities.
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Melanie Steffens, Petra Jelene & Peter Noack
Journal of Educational Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many models assume that habitual human behavior is guided by spontaneous, automatic, or implicit processes rather than by deliberate, rule-based, or explicit processes. Thus, math-ability self-concepts and math performance could be related to implicit math-gender stereotypes in addition to explicit stereotypes. Two studies assessed at what age implicit math-gender stereotyping can be observed and what the relations between these stereotypes and math-related outcomes are in children and adolescents. Implicit math-gender stereotypes could already be detected with Implicit Association Tests (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) among 9-year-old girls. Adolescent girls showed stronger implicit gender stereotypes than adolescent boys, who, on average, did not reveal implicit gender-stereotypic associations. Girls also already showed an implicit affinity to language versus math at 9 years of age. In a regression analysis, implicit math-gender stereotypes predicted academic self-concepts, academic achievement, and enrollment preferences above and beyond explicit math-gender stereotypes for girls but (with the exception of achievement) not for boys. These findings suggest implicit gender stereotypes are an important factor in the dropout of female students from math-intensive fields.
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The Effect of Instructor Race and Gender on Student Persistence in STEM Fields
Joshua Price
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The objective of this study is to determine if minority and female students are more likely to persist in a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) major when they enroll in classes taught by instructors of their own race or gender. Using data from public four-year universities in the state of Ohio, I analyze first semester STEM courses to see if the race or gender of the instructor effects persistence of initial STEM majors in a STEM field after the first semester and first year. Results indicate that black students are more likely to persist in a STEM major if they have a STEM course taught by a black instructor. Similar to previous findings, female students are less likely to persist when more of their STEM courses are taught by female instructors.
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The Unexpectedly Positive Consequences of Confronting Sexism
Robyn Mallett & Dana Wagner
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Majority-group members expect to dislike those who confront them for prejudiced behavior. Yet if majority-group members are susceptible to the same social constraints as minority-group members, then their public responses to confrontation should be similarly inhibited. A tempered response to confrontation could smooth a potentially problematic social interaction, thereby producing an outcome that is better than expected. Female confederates confronted men during an interpersonal interaction and then had a second conversation. When interpersonally confronted, men reported equally positive evaluations of a sexist and gender-neutral confronter and confrontational interaction. Additionally, after the sexist confrontation, men's compensatory efforts increased mutual liking and this mutual liking then reduced men's use of sexist language. Thus, social forces also constrain those who are confronted as prejudiced, thereby positively influencing intergroup relations.
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Effects of role model deservingness on overcoming performance deficits induced by stereotype threat
Rusty McIntyre, René Paulson, Cheryl Taylor, Amanda Morin & Charles Lord
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that exposure to successful role models can restore performance that had been impaired by stereotype threat, and that some role models are more effective than others. The present research examined the effects of role model deservingness on women's mathematics test performance after being placed under stereotype threat. In Experiment 1, a woman who attained success by herself (deserved) proved a more effective role model than an equally likable and successful woman whose success was handed to her (not deserved). In Experiment 2, women role models proved more effective at combating stereotype threat when their successes were attributable to internal-stable (deserved) than external-unstable (not deserved) causes, an effect that was partially mediated by reduction in extra-task thinking. The results are seen as having implications for theories of stereotype threat and causal attribution.
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Are There Sex Differences in the Genetic and Environmental Effects on Mental Rotation Ability?
Eero Vuoksimaa et al.
Twin Research and Human Genetics, October 2010, Pages 437-441
Abstract:
Probably the most robust sex difference in cognitive abilities is that on average males outperform females in tests of mental rotation. Using twin data we tested whether there are sex differences in the magnitude of genetic and environmental effects on mental rotation test performance and whether the same or different genetic effects operate in females and males. The present study replicated the well-known male advantage in mental rotation ability. The relative proportion of variance explained by genetic effects did not differ between females and males, but interestingly, absolute additive genetic and unique environmental variances were greater in males reflecting significantly greater phenotypic variance in mental rotation test performance in males. Over half of the variance in mental rotation test performance was explained by genetic effects, which suggest that mental rotation ability is a good phenotype for studies finding genes underlying spatial abilities. Results indicate that females and males could be combined for such genetic studies, because the same genetic effects affected mental rotation test performance in females and males.
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Health as a Context for Social and Gender Activism: Female Volunteer Health Workers in Iran
Homa Hoodfar
Population and Development Review, September 2010, Pages 487-510
Abstract:
Having reversed its pronatalist policies in 1988, the Islamic Republic of Iran implemented one of the most successful family planning programs in the developing world. This achievement, particularly in urban centers, is largely attributable to a large women-led volunteer health worker program for low-income urban neighborhoods. Research in three cities demonstrates that this successful program has had a host of unintended consequences. In a context where citizen mobilization and activism are highly restricted, volunteers have seized this new state-sanctioned space and successfully negotiated many of the familial, cultural, and state restrictions on women. They have expanded their mandate from one focused on health activism into one of social, if not political, activism, highlighting the ways in which citizens blur the boundaries of state and civil society under restrictive political systems prevalent in many of the Middle Eastern societies.
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The male-female gap in physician earnings: Evidence from a public health insurance system
Engelbert Theurl & Hannes Winner
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Empirical evidence from US studies suggests that female physicians earn less than their male counterparts, on average. The earnings gap does not disappear when individual and market characteristics are controlled for. This paper investigates whether a gender earnings difference can also be observed in a health-care system predominantly financed by public insurance companies. Using a unique data set of physicians' earnings recorded by a public social security agency in an Austrian province between 2000 and 2004, we find a gender gap in average earnings of about 32%. A substantial share of this gap (20-47%) cannot be explained by individual and market characteristics, leaving labor market discrimination as one possible explanation for the observed gender earnings difference of physicians.
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"Cruising for a Bruising": Women's Flat Track Roller Derby as Embodied Resistance
Natalie Marie Peluso
University of Connecticut Working Paper, August 2010
Abstract:
Contemporary women's roller derby is an amateur, competitive, full-contact team sport played on traditional quad roller skates. Over the course of the last six years, the sport has attracted thousands of women as both participants and fans. Drawing on original empirical research consisting of ethnography, participant observation and in-depth interviewing, I show that roller derby creates performative and discursive opportunities for women to transgress cultural norms regarding the appearance and performance of the female body. Women in roller derby not only challenge gendered norms regarding athleticism, muscularity, attire and appearance, but they also resist dominant cultural expectations regarding body shape and size, reclaim the bruised and broken body as desirable, legitimate, and powerful, and reconceptualize corporeality by adopting narratives of the "robot" and the "cyborg."