A fair shot
Gender Performance in the NCAA Rifle Championships: Where is the Gap?
Nadav Goldschmied & Jason Kowalczyk
Sex Roles, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current study aimed to compare shooting performance between male and female athletes during the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Rifle Championship from the 2007 to 2013 seasons. This sport is distinct from most competitive sports as it requires little physical exertion, so physiological/ biomechanical differences between the genders that generally bring about superior performance by males relative to females may have only minimal effect on shooting performance. NCAA competitions, unlike Olympic shooting events today, allow male and female shooters to compete against each other. Using archival data covering a period of 7 years from both the team and individual tournaments, 555 scores of the best 149 shooters among mostly U.S. collegiate athletes (the best of whom went on to compete in the Olympics) were analyzed using a generalized estimating equation (GEE) model. We found no differences in performance between the genders both during team and individual competitions. The results suggest that Olympic shooting is exercising a “separate and (un)equal” policy which should be reconsidered.
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Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines
Sarah-Jane Leslie et al.
Science, 16 January 2015, 262-265
Abstract:
The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women’s underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.’s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans’ underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.
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Incentives to Identify: Racial Identity in the Age of Affirmative Action
Francisca Antman & Brian Duncan
University of Colorado Working Paper, December 2014
Abstract:
It is almost universally assumed that race is an exogenously given trait that is not subject to change. But as race is most often self-reported by individuals who must weigh the costs and benefits of associating with minority groups, we ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. To address this question, we link racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies in higher education, contracting, and employment. Consistent with supporting evidence showing that individuals from underrepresented minority groups face an incentive to identify under affirmative action, we find that once affirmative action is outlawed, they are less likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, we find that individuals from overrepresented minority groups, who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action, are more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action is banned. To our knowledge, this is the first study to document a causal relationship between racial self-identification and economic incentives in the United States. As such, it has broad implications for understanding the impact of affirmative action policies, estimating broader trends in racial disparities, and the emerging literature on the construction of race and individual identity.
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State liberalism, female supervisors, and the gender wage gap
David Maume & Leah Ruppanner
Social Science Research, March 2015, Pages 126–138
Abstract:
Whereas some are concerned that the gender revolution has stalled, others note the rapid increase in women’s representation in the ranks of management, and the reduction of wage inequality in larger and more active welfare states. Although these latter trends portend an attenuation of gender inequality, their effects on the gender pay gap in the U.S. are understudied due to data limitations, or to the assumption that in the U.S. pay is determined by market forces. In this study we extend research on the determinants of the gender wage gap by examining sex-of-supervisor effects on subordinates’ pay, and to what degree the state’s commitment to equality conditions this relationship. We pooled the 1997 and 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce surveys to estimate hierarchical models of reporting to a female supervisor and wages, with theoretically important predictors at the individual level, and at the state of residence (an index composed of women’s share of legislators, a measure of the liberal leanings of the state, and the size of the public sector relative to the labor force). We found that state effects on pay were mixed, with pay generally rising with state liberalism on the one hand. On the other hand, working for a female boss significantly reduced wages. We discussed the theoretical implications of our results, as well as the need for further study of the career effects on subordinates as women increasingly enter the ranks of management.
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“You Were the Best Qualified”: Business Beyond the Backlash Against Affirmative Action
Benton Williams
Journal of Policy History, Winter 2015, Pages 61-92
"In this article, I will juxtapose these two simultaneous and seemingly contradictory developments of the 1980s: on one hand, the successful ideological campaign against affirmative action waged by Ronald Reagan and his political appointees and supporters, and on the other, the entrenchment of affirmative practices in the private sector. The seeming contradiction is partially attributable to the federal government’s weakness in affecting private-sector affirmative action — with limited power either to enforce or to dismantle private employers’ hiring practices — and partially attributable to developments within the private sector, especially corporate recognition of the need for 'diverse' workforces and specific human resource management strategies that became prominent in the 1980s."
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Martha Cecilia Bottia et al.
Economics of Education Review, April 2015, Pages 14–27
Abstract:
The underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is problematic given the economic and social inequities it fosters and the rising global importance of STEM occupations. This paper examines the role of the demographic composition of high school faculty — specifically the proportion of female high school math and science teachers — on college students’ decisions to declare and/or major in STEM fields. We analyze longitudinal data from students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina public secondary schools and attended North Carolina public universities. Our results suggest that although the proportion of female math and science teachers at a school has no impact on male students, it has a powerful effect on female students’ likelihood of declaring and graduating with a STEM degree, and effects are largest for female students with the highest math skills. The estimates are robust to the inclusion of controls for students’ initial ability.
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Anna Egalite, Brian Kisida & Marcus Winters
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research suggests that there are academic benefits when students and teachers share the same race/ethnicity because such teachers can serve as role models, mentors, advocates, or cultural translators. In this paper, we obtain estimates of achievement changes as students are assigned to teachers of different races/ethnicities from grades 3 through 10 utilizing a large administrative dataset provided by the Florida Department of Education that follows the universe of test-taking students in Florida public schools from 2001-02 through 2008-09. We find small but significant positive effects when black and white students are assigned to race-congruent teachers in reading (.004 to .005 standard deviations) and for black, white and Asian/Pacific Island students in math (.007 to .041 standard deviations). We also examine the effects of race matching by students' prior performance level, finding that lower-performing black and white students appear to particularly benefit from being assigned to a race-congruent teacher.
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Seong Soo Oh & Jungbu Kim
Review of Public Personnel Administration, March 2015, Pages 24-46
Abstract:
This study explores how the gender and racial composition of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) portion of the federal workforce has changed, and how female and minority employees with STEM degrees compare with White majorities and those with degrees in non-STEM fields. Using a series of ordinary least square analyses of a 1% random sample of federal employees for 1983, 1996, and 2009, this study finds that gender and racial pay disparities have decreased over the study period, and that the extant gender pay gap can be explained largely by educational attainment, work experience, and particularly by the changing composition in STEM majors. Despite the decrease in pay disparity, a racial pay gap still remains even after controlling for education level, federal experience, and other major factors.
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The Snowballing Penalty Effect: Multiple Disadvantage and Pay
Carol Woodhams, Ben Lupton & Marc Cowling
British Journal of Management, January 2015, Pages 63–77
Abstract:
This paper makes the case that the current single-axis approach to the diagnosis and remedy of pay discrimination is inadequate in the case of multiple disadvantage. While a good deal is known about pay gaps, particularly those affecting women, less is known about those affecting people in other disadvantaged groups and those in more than one such group. This analysis of multiple years of pay data, n = 513,000, from a large UK-based company shows that people with more than one disadvantaged identity suffer a significantly greater pay penalty than those with a single disadvantage. The data also suggest that penalties associated with multiple disadvantage exponentially increase. In other words, disadvantages seem to interact to the detriment of people at ‘intersections’. The paper considers the implications for policies aimed at reducing pay inequalities. These currently take a single-axis approach and may be misdirected.
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Employment Discrimination Lawsuits and Corporate Stock Prices
Elizabeth Hirsh & Youngjoo Cha
Social Currents, March 2015, Pages 40-57
Abstract:
In this study, we examine the financial impact of employment discrimination lawsuit verdicts and settlements on publicly traded firms subject to lawsuits between 1997 and 2008. Using data on 174 sex and race discrimination lawsuits involving 107 publicly traded companies, we assess the effect of lawsuit verdicts and settlements on changes in defendants’ daily stock returns. Findings indicate that verdicts and settlements have an immediate negative impact on defendants’ stock prices. In addition, the negative effect is more pronounced among cases that involve monetary payouts, cases in which the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is a plaintiff and cases that involve sex as opposed to race or national origin discrimination. These results demonstrate the extent to which legal rulings introduce a market penalty for employers and have implications for the study of law, organizations, and market responses to discriminatory behavior.
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Sameer Srivastava & Eliot Sherman
University of California Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
Do female managers ameliorate or instead perpetuate the gender wage gap? Although conceptual arguments exist on both sides of this debate, the preponderance of the empirical evidence has favored the view that female managers are agents of change who act in ways that reduce the gender wage gap. Yet the evidence from which this sociological baseline has emerged comes primarily from cross-establishment surveys, which do not provide visibility into the choices of individual managers. Using longitudinal personnel records from a large information services firm in which managers had considerable discretion to influence employee salaries, we estimate multilevel models that indicate no support for the proposition that female managers act to reduce the gender wage gap among employees who report to them. Consistent with the theory of value threat, we instead find conditional support for the cogs-in-the-machine perspective: In the subsample of high performing supervisors and low performing employees, women who switched from a male to a female supervisor had a lower salary in the following year than men who made the same switch.
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New Color Lines: Racial/Ethnic Inequality in Earnings among College-Educated Men
ChangHwan Kim
Sociological Quarterly, Winter 2015, Pages 152–184
Abstract:
Using the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, this study examined four perspectives on new color lines in America — white–nonwhite, black–nonblack, tri-racial, and blurred — among college-educated white, black, Hispanic, and Asian men. Findings show that the color lines have not been consistently drawn but vary by nativity and migration status. Among the native born, the color line for earnings cuts mainly across white and nonwhite when field of study and Carnegie classification are controlled for in addition to other covariates. On the other hand, among members of the 1.5 generation, who obtained both their high school and highest degrees in the United States, the lines are most salient between black and nonblack. Among first-generation immigrants, who completed all their education in a foreign country, and 1.25-generation immigrants, who obtained their high school diploma in a foreign country but earned their highest degree in the United States, there is a gradation of the color line with whites at the top and blacks at the bottom. Despite these mixed results, blacks fall consistently at the bottom of the racial hierarchy and whites at the top, regardless of nativity and migration status. Implications of the findings are discussed.
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Forecasting the experience of stereotype threat for others
Kathryn Boucher, Robert Rydell & Mary Murphy
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2015, Pages 56–62
Abstract:
Women can underperform when they are concerned about confirming negative gender-based math stereotypes; however, little research has investigated whether female and male perceivers have insight into the experiences of stereotype-threatened women. Female and male participants were randomly assigned to take a math test under stereotype-threatening conditions (experiencers) or predict how a woman taking a math test would feel and perform in the same situation (forecasters). Although female and male forecasters expected female experiencers to have more negative emotional reactions than they actually did, forecasters believed that female experiencers would overcome these emotional reactions and perform at a high level — a much higher level than female experiencers actually performed. This discrepancy for performance expectations was driven by forecasters' beliefs that female experiencers could overcome threat. This research suggests that strengthening the perceived link between stereotype threat's impact on emotional experiences and performance outcomes could foster others' appreciation of its insidious influence.
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Marci Cottingham, Rebecca Erickson & James Diefendorff
Sex Roles, forthcoming
Abstract:
(Hochschild 1983) coined the term status shield to theorize men’s status-based protection from the emotional abuses of working in a service job and hence their diminished need to manage emotions as compared to women. Extending this concept, the current study examines how gender operates not merely to shield men from emotional labor on the job but to also shape the relationship between emotional labor and job satisfaction. Using survey data collected from 730 registered nurses (667 women and 63 men) at a large Midwestern hospital system in the U.S., we show that in addition to engaging in less emotional labor than women, men benefit from their emotion management in ways that women do not. Gender moderates the relationship between two dimensions of emotional labor (i.e., surface acting – covering emotion and deep acting) and two outcome measures (i.e., job satisfaction and turnover intention). Results support theoretical claims that men’s privileged status shields them from having to perform emotional labor as frequently as women. Further, when male nurses do perform higher levels of emotional labor, they are shielded from the negative effects of covering emotion and their deep acting correlates with higher job satisfaction — a status bonus — compared to that of their female colleagues. Implications for gender theory, emotional labor, and nursing policy and practice are discussed.
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Sarah Thébaud
University of California Working Paper, November 2014
Abstract:
In this article, I develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that widely shared cultural beliefs about men’s and women’s abilities in the area of entrepreneurship (i.e. “gender status beliefs”) systematically influence the social interactions during which an entrepreneur, particularly an innovative entrepreneur, seeks support from potential stakeholders for his or her new organization. To evaluate this argument, I conducted three experimental studies in the United Kingdom and the United States in which student participants were asked to evaluate the profiles of two entrepreneurs and to make investment decisions for each. The studies manipulated the gender of the entrepreneur and the innovativeness of the business plan. The main finding is consistent across studies: gender status beliefs disadvantage typical women entrepreneurs vis-à-vis their male counterparts, but innovation in a business model has a stronger and more positive impact on ratings of women’s entrepreneurial ability and overall support for their business ideas than it does for men’s. However, the strength of these patterns varies significantly depending on the societal and industry context of the new venture in question. Findings indicate that gender status beliefs can be understood as an important “demand-side” mechanism contributing to gender inequality in aggregate entrepreneurship rates and a micro-level factor affecting the likelihood that a new and novel organization will emerge and survive.
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Victor Lavy & Edith Sand
NBER Working Paper, January 2015
Abstract:
In this paper, we estimate the effect of primary school teachers’ gender biases on boys’ and girls’ academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and sciences during high school. For identification, we rely on the random assignments of teachers and students to classes in primary schools. Our results suggest that teachers’ biases favoring boys have an asymmetric effect by gender — positive effect on boys’ achievements and negative effect on girls’. Such gender biases also impact students’ enrollment in advanced level math courses in high school — boys positively and girls negatively. These results suggest that teachers’ biased behavior at early stage of schooling have long run implications for occupational choices and earnings at adulthood, because enrollment in advanced courses in math and science in high school is a prerequisite for post-secondary schooling in engineering, computer science and so on. This impact is heterogeneous, being larger for children from families where the father is more educated than the mother and larger on girls from low socioeconomic background.
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Social Identity and Inequality: The Impact of China’s Hukou System
Farzana Afridi, Sherry Xin Li & Yufei Ren
Journal of Public Economics, March 2015, Pages 17–29
Abstract:
We conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals’ performance under incentives. We focus on China’s household registration (hukou) system, which favors urban residents and discriminates against rural residents in resource allocation. Our results show that making individuals’ hukou identity salient significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students, relative to their local urban counterparts, on an incentivized cognitive task, and consequently significantly lowers their relative ranking in the earnings distribution under the piece rate regime. However, the impact of hukou identity salience is insignificant in the tournament regime, suggesting that its negative effect on migrant students’ performance may be mitigated when competition is introduced. The results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals’ economic performance, and potentially on inequality.
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April Thames et al.
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, January 2015, Pages 105-113
Abstract:
The current study examined ethnic/racial differences in test-related anxiety and its relationship to neurocognitive performance in a community sample of African American (n = 40) and European American (n = 36) adults. The authors hypothesized the following: (a) Test-anxiety related to negative performance evaluation would be associated with lower neurocognitive performance, whereas anxiety unrelated to negative evaluation would be associated with higher neurocognitive performance. (b) African American participants would report higher levels of anxiety about negative performance evaluation than European Americans. (c) European Americans would report higher levels of anxiety unrelated to negative performance evaluation. The first two hypotheses were supported: Ethnic/racial differences in test-taking anxiety emerged such that African Americans reported significantly higher levels of negative performance evaluation, which was associated with lower cognitive performance. The third hypothesis was not supported: African Americans and European Americans reported similar levels of test-anxiety unrelated to negative evaluation.
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Does Society Underestimate Women? Evidence from the Performance of Female Jockeys in Horse Racing
Alasdair Brown & Fuyu Yang
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, March 2015, Pages 106–118
Abstract:
Women are under-represented in many top jobs. We investigate whether biased beliefs about female ability - a form of ‘mistake-based discrimination’ - are partially responsible for this under-representation. We use more than 10 years of data on the performance of female jockeys in U.K. and Irish horse racing - a sport where, uniquely, men and women compete side-by-side - to evaluate the presence of such discrimination. The odds produced by the betting market provide a window onto society's beliefs about the abilities of women in a male-dominated occupation. We find that women are slightly underestimated, winning 0.3% more races than the market predicts. Female jockeys are underestimated to a greater extent in jump racing, where their participation is low. We discuss possible reasons for this association.
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Performance pay, competitiveness, and the gender wage gap: Evidence from the United States
Andrew McGee, Peter McGee & Jessica Pan
Economics Letters, March 2015, Pages 35–38
Abstract:
We show that women in the NLSY79 and NLSY97 are less likely than men to receive competitive compensation. The portion of the gender wage gap explained by compensation schemes is small in the NLSY79 but somewhat larger in the NLSY97.
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No Place Like Home? Familism and Latino/a-White Differences in College Pathways
Sarah Ovink & Demetra Kalogrides
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has argued that familism, defined as a cultural preference for privileging family goals over individual goals, may discourage some Latino/a youth from applying to and attending college, particularly if they must leave home (Desmond and López Turley, 2009). Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study, we find that Latino/a students and parents indeed have stronger preferences than white students and parents for living at home during college. For students, most differences in preferences for proximate colleges are explained by socioeconomic status, academic achievement and high school/regional differences. Moreover, controlling for socioeconomic background and prior achievement explains most racial/ethnic gaps in college application and attendance among high school graduates, suggesting that familism per se is not a significant deterrent to college enrollment above and beyond these more primary factors. However, results indicate generational differences; cultural factors may contribute to racial/ethnic gaps in parental preferences for children to remain at home.
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Elena Lemonaki, Antony Manstead & Gregory Maio
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the present research, we examine the ways in which exposure to hostile sexism influences women's competitive collective action intentions. Prior to testing our main model, our first study experimentally induced high versus low levels of security-comfort with the aim of providing experimental evidence for the proposed causal link between these emotions and intentions to engage in social competition. Results showed that lower levels of security-comfort reduced women's readiness to compete socially with men. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of hostile sexism on women's emotional reactions and readiness to engage in social competition. Consistent with the proposed model, results showed that exposure to hostile beliefs about women (1) increased anger-frustration and (2) decreased security-comfort. More specifically, exposure to hostile sexism had a positive indirect effect on social competition intentions through anger-frustration, and a negative indirect effect through security-comfort.