The Feminine Mystique
If Only They'd Ask: Gender, Recruitment, and Political Ambition
Richard Fox & Jennifer Lawless
Journal of Politics, April 2010, Pages 310-326
Abstract:
Based on data from the second wave of the Citizen Political Ambition Panel Study - our national survey of more than 2,000 "potential candidates" in 2008 - we provide the first thorough analysis of the manner in which gender interacts with political recruitment in the candidate eligibility pool. Our findings are striking. Highly qualified and politically well-connected women from both major political parties are less likely than similarly situated men to be recruited to run for public office by all types of political actors. They are less likely than men to be recruited intensely. And they are less likely than men to be recruited by multiple sources. Although we paint a picture of a political recruitment process that seems to suppress women's inclusion, we also offer the first evidence of the significant headway women's organizations are making in their efforts to mitigate the recruitment gap, especially among Democrats. These findings are critically important because women's recruitment disadvantage depresses their political ambition and ultimately hinders their emergence as candidates.
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Why Do Women Leave Science and Engineering?
Jennifer Hunt
NBER Working Paper, March 2010
Abstract:
I use the 1993 and 2003 National Surveys of College Graduates to examine the higher exit rate of women compared to men from science and engineering relative to other fields. I find that the higher relative exit rate is driven by engineering rather than science, and show that 60% of the gap can be explained by the relatively greater exit rate from engineering of women dissatisfied with pay and promotion opportunities. Contrary to the existing literature, I find that family-related constraints and dissatisfaction with working conditions are only secondary factors. My results differ due to my use of non-science and engineering fields as a comparison group. The relative exit rate by gender from engineering does not differ from that of other fields once women's relatively high exit rates from male fields generally is taken into account.
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Self-Selection and the Forecasting Abilities of Female Equity Analysts
Alok Kumar
Journal of Accounting Research, May 2010, Pages 393-435
Abstract:
This paper investigates whether there are systematic differences between the forecasting style and abilities of female and male analysts, and whether market participants recognize these differences. My key conjecture is that only female analysts with superior forecasting abilities enter the profession due to a perception of discrimination in the analyst labor market. Consistent with this conjecture, I find that female analysts issue bolder and more accurate forecasts and their accuracy is higher in market segments in which their concentration is lower. Further, the stock market participants are aware of the male-female skill differences. They respond more strongly to the forecast revisions by female analysts even though those analysts get less media coverage. The short-term market reaction is incomplete, however, because it is followed by a strong post-revision drift. The perception of abilities is similar in the analyst labor market, where female analysts are more likely to move up to high-status brokerage firms, while their downward career mobility is lower. Collectively, these results indicate that female analysts have better-than-average skill due to self-selection and market participants are at least partially able to recognize their superior abilities.
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The glass cliff: When and why women are selected as leaders in crisis contexts
Susanne Bruckmüller & Nyla Branscombe
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The glass cliff refers to women being more likely to rise to positions of organizational leadership in times of crisis than in times of success, and men being more likely to achieve those positions in prosperous times. We examine the role that (a) a gendered history of leadership and (b) stereotypes about gender and leadership play in creating the glass cliff. In Expt 1, participants who read about a company with a male history of leadership selected a male future leader for a successful organization, but chose a female future leader in times of crisis. This interaction - between company performance and gender of the preferred future leader - was eliminated for a counter-stereotypic history of female leadership. In Expt 2, stereotypically male attributes were most predictive of leader selection in a successful organization, while stereotypically female attributes were most predictive in times of crisis. Differences in the endorsement of these stereotypes, in particular with regard to the ascription of lower stereotypically female attributes to the male candidate mediated the glass cliff effect. Overall, results suggest that stereotypes about male leadership may be more important for the glass cliff effect than stereotypes about women and leadership.
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Roya Ayman, Karen Korabik & Scott Morris
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, April 2009, Pages 852-879
Abstract:
This study investigated the impact of the gender composition of the leader-subordinate dyad on the relationship between leaders' transformational leadership behavior and their subordinates' ratings of the leaders' effectiveness. There were 109 dyads of leaders (58 male, 51 female) paired with a subordinate who was either the same or a different gender from themselves. The relationship between a leader's self-report on transformational leadership and their subordinates' evaluation of their performance was significantly less positive for female leaders with male subordinates than for female leaders with female subordinates. The male and female subordinates of male leaders rated their performance as equally effective, regardless of their levels of transformational leadership.
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Agentic women and communal leadership: How role prescriptions confer advantage to top women leaders
Ashleigh Shelby Rosette & Leigh Plunkett Tost
Journal of Applied Psychology, March 2010, Pages 221-235
Abstract:
The authors contribute to the ongoing debate about the existence of a female leadership advantage by specifying contextual factors that moderate the likelihood of the emergence of such an advantage. The investigation considered whether the perceived role incongruence between the female gender role and the leader role led to a female leader disadvantage (as predicted by role congruity theory) or whether instead a female leader advantage would emerge (as predicted by double standards and stereotype content research). In Study 1, it was only when success was internally attributed that women top leaders were evaluated as more agentic and more communal than men top leaders. Study 2 showed that the favorable ratings were unique to top-level positions and further showed that the effect on agentic traits was mediated by perceptions of double standards, while the effect on communal traits was mediated by expectations of feminized management skills. Finally, Study 2 showed that top women leaders were evaluated most favorably on overall leader effectiveness, and this effect was mediated by both mediators. Our results support the existence of a qualified female leadership advantage.
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Ulf Mellström
Social Studies of Science, December 2009, Pages 885-907
Abstract:
This paper reports an investigation on how and why computer science in Malaysia is dominated by women. Inspired by recent critical interventions in gender and technology studies, the paper aims to open up more culturally situated analyses of the gendering of technology or the technology of gendering, with the Malaysian case exemplifying the core of the argument. The paper argues along four different strands of critical thought: (1) a critique of the analytical asymmetry in the process of co-production in gender and technology studies; (2) a critique of a western bias in gender and technology studies, advocating more context sensitivity and focus on the cultural embeddedness of gender and technology relations; (3) a critique that pays more attention to spatial practices and body politics in regard to race, class and gender in relation to technology; and (4) a critique of ‘western' positional notions of gender configurations that opens up for more fluid constructions of gender identity, including the many crossovers between relational and positional definitions of femininity and masculinity.
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Peter Hegarty, Anthony Lemieux & Grant McQueen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, March 2010, Pages 375-391
Abstract:
Graphs seem to connote facts more than words or tables do. Consequently, they seem unlikely places to spot implicit sexism at work. Yet, in 6 studies (N = 741), women and men constructed (Study 1) and recalled (Study 2) gender difference graphs with men's data first, and graphed powerful groups (Study 3) and individuals (Study 4) ahead of weaker ones. Participants who interpreted graph order as evidence of author "bias" inferred that the author graphed his or her own gender group first (Study 5). Women's, but not men's, preferences to graph men first were mitigated when participants graphed a difference between themselves and an opposite-sex friend prior to graphing gender differences (Study 6). Graph production and comprehension are affected by beliefs and suppositions about the groups represented in graphs to a greater degree than cognitive models of graph comprehension or realist models of scientific thinking have yet acknowledged.
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The Gender Composition of Workplaces and Men's and Women's Turnover
Magnus Bygren
European Sociological Review, April 2010, Pages 193-202
Abstract:
Using a data set of 721,123 employees in 1,890 Swedish workplaces, the author tests whether employees' propensity to leave a workplace is dependent on the share of the employees of the opposite sex in a workplace. Net of time-invariant workplace heterogeneity, the probability to leave a workplace is found to decrease with the share of employees of the opposite sex. This is true for men as well as women. The results contradict theories suggesting that men and women prefer to work in work settings with a high proportion of employees of their own sex. On the contrary, a plausible explanation of the results is that both men and women prefer work settings with a high proportion of employees of the opposite sex.
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Earnings Inequality and the Changing Association between Spouses' Earnings
Christine Schwartz
American Journal of Sociology, March 2010, Pages 1524-1257
Abstract:
Increases in the association between spouses' earnings have the potential to increase inequality as marriages increasingly consist of two high‐earning or two low‐earning partners. This article uses log‐linear models and data from the March Current Population Survey to describe trends in the association between spouses' earnings and estimate their contribution to growing earnings inequality among married couples from 1967 to 2005. The results indicate that increases in earnings inequality would have been about 25%-30% lower than observed in the absence of changes in the association, depending on the inequality measure used. Three components of these changes and how they vary across the earnings distribution are explored.
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Activities, Productivity, and Compensation of Men and Women in the Life Sciences
Catherin DesRoches, Darren Zinner, Sowmya Rao, Lisa Iezzoni & Eric Campbell
Academic Medicine, April 2010, Pages 631-639
Purpose: To determine whether professional activities, professional productivity, and salaries of life sciences faculty differ by gender. The authors undertook this study because previous studies found differences in the academic experiences of women and men.
Method: In 2007, the authors conducted a mailed survey of 3,080 life sciences faculty at the 50 universities whose medical schools received the greatest amount of National Institutes of Health funding in 2004. The response rate was 74% (n = 2,168). The main outcome measures were a faculty member's total number of publications; number of publications in the past three years; average impact score of the journals in which he or she had published; professional activities; work hours per week; the numbers of hours spent specifically in teaching, patient care, research, professional activities, and administrative activities; and annual income.
Results: Among professors, the women reported greater numbers of hours worked per week and greater numbers of administrative and professional activities than did the men. Female faculty members reported fewer publications across all ranks. After control for professional characteristics and productivity, female researchers in the life sciences earned, on average, approximately $13,226 less annually than did their male counterparts.
Conclusions: Men and women in the academic life sciences take on different roles as they advance through their careers. A substantial salary gap still exists between men and women that cannot be explained by productivity or other professional factors. Compensation and advancement policies should recognize the full scope of the roles that female researchers play.
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David Wozniak, William Harbaugh & Ulrich Mayr
University of Oregon Working Paper, December 2009
Abstract:
In experiments, women are less likely than men to choose competitive compensation mechanisms, such as tournaments. We replicate this result and show that giving feedback about relative performance makes high ability females more likely to compete, makes low ability men less likely to compete, and makes the gender difference insignificant. We then use between and within-subjects differences to show that, without relative performance feedback, women in the low-hormone phase of their menstrual cycle are less likely to enter tournaments than at other times. Relative performance feedback also eliminates these effects.
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The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled
Paula England
Gender & Society, April 2010, Pages 149-166
Abstract:
In this article, the author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities or jobs. The gender egalitarianism that gained traction was the notion that women should have access to upward mobility and to all areas of schooling and jobs. But persistent gender essentialism means that most people follow gender-typical paths except when upward mobility is impossible otherwise. Middle-class women entered managerial and professional jobs more than working-class women integrated blue-collar jobs because the latter were able to move up while choosing a "female" occupation; many mothers of middle-class women were already in the highest-status female occupations. The author also notes a number of gender-egalitarian trends that have stalled.
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Bystander Sexism in the Intergroup Context: The Impact of Cat-calls on Women's Reactions Towards Men
Stephenie Chaudoir & Diane Quinn
Sex Roles, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the fact that sexism is an inherently intergroup phenomenon, women's group-level responses to sexism have received relatively little empirical attention. We examine the intergroup reactions experienced by 114 female students at a U.S. university in New England who imagined being a bystander to a sexist cat-call remark or control greeting. Results indicate that women experienced greater negative intergroup emotions and motivations towards the outgroup of men after overhearing the cat-call remark. Further, the experience of group-based anger mediated the relationship between the effect of study condition on the motivation to move against, or oppose, men. Results indicate that bystanders can be affected by sexism and highlights how the collective groups of men and women can be implicated in individual instances of sexism.
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Peter Hegarty, Nila Watson, Laura Fletcher & Grant McQueen
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
A preference to name stereotypically masculine before stereotypically feminine individuals explains why men are typically named before women, as on the Internet, for example (Study 1). Heterosexual couples are named with men's names first more often when such couples are imagined to conform to gender stereotypes (Studies 2 and 3). First-named partners of imaginary same-sex couples are attributed more stereotypically masculine attributes (Study 4). Familiarity bounds these effects of stereotypes on name order. People name couples they know well with closer people first (Study 5), and consequently name familiar heterosexual couples with members of their own gender first (Study 6). These studies evidence a previously unknown effect of the semantics of gender stereotypes on sentence structure in the everyday use of English.
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Occupational Sex Composition and the Gendered Availability of Workplace Support
Catherine Taylor
Gender & Society, April 2010, Pages 189-212
Abstract:
This study examines how occupational sex segregation affects women's and men's perceptions of the availability of workplace support. Drawing on theories of gender and empirical studies of workplace tokenism, the author develops the concept of an occupational minority. Although the notion of tokenism was developed to describe processes at the level of the workplace, the author explores how being a minority at the occupational level affects workers. Using nationally representative data, she finds that in mixed-sex occupations, women report higher levels of workplace support than men; in male-dominated occupations, they perceive relatively low levels of support. Men, by contrast, perceive relatively high levels of workplace support in female-dominated occupations. That is, being a member of a numerical minority in one's occupation is an advantage for men and a disadvantage for women.