Ladylike
Spoiled Milk: An Experimental Examination of Bias Against Mothers Who Breastfeed
Jessi Smith, Kristin Hawkinson & Kelli Paull
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing from the objectification literature, three experiments tested the hypothesis that breastfeeding mothers are the victims of bias. In Study 1, participants rated a woman who had breastfed as incompetent. Study 2 replicated these effects and determined that the bias was specific to conditions that sexualized the breast. In Study 3, participants interacted with a confederate in which attention was drawn to her as a mother, as a mother who breastfeeds, as a woman with sexualized breasts, or in a neutral condition. Results showed the breastfeeding confederate was rated significantly less competent in general, in math and work specifically, and was less likely to be hired compared to all other conditions, except for the sexualized breast condition. Importantly, the breastfeeding mother emphasis and the sexualized breast emphasis resulted in equally negative evaluations. Results suggest that although breastfeeding may be economical and healthy, the social cost is potentially great.
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Anticipating Public Performance: Do Women Fear Appearing Intellectually Less Able?
Judith Larkin & Harvey Pines
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, March 2011, Pages 682-698
Abstract:
Two ecologically valid studies involving anticipated public performance offer insight into women's tendencies to avoid placing their abilities under a spotlight. First, in an experimental study, women felt less comfortable than did men and experienced more personal risk when they anticipated that their test scores would be public. Second, in a naturalistic observational setting, students taking an experiential forensic psychology course were required to perform intellectually challenging activities in public. Women displayed more concern about the course requirements than did men, and subsequently dropped the course in disproportionate numbers. Higgins' (1997) regulatory focus theory provides a theoretical framework for interpreting the data.
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Evidence that gendered wording in job advertisements exists and sustains gender inequality
Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen & Aaron Kay
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) contends that institutional-level mechanisms exist that reinforce and perpetuate existing group-based inequalities, but very few such mechanisms have been empirically demonstrated. We propose that gendered wording (i.e., masculine- and feminine-themed words, such as those associated with gender stereotypes) may be a heretofore unacknowledged, institutional-level mechanism of inequality maintenance. Employing both archival and experimental analyses, the present research demonstrates that gendered wording commonly employed in job recruitment materials can maintain gender inequality in traditionally male-dominated occupations. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated the existence of subtle but systematic wording differences within a randomly sampled set of job advertisements. Results indicated that job advertisements for male-dominated areas employed greater masculine wording (i.e., words associated with male stereotypes, such as leader, competitive, dominant) than advertisements within female-dominated areas. No difference in the presence of feminine wording (i.e., words associated with female stereotypes, such as support, understand, interpersonal) emerged across male- and female-dominated areas. Next, the consequences of highly masculine wording were tested across 3 experimental studies. When job advertisements were constructed to include more masculine than feminine wording, participants perceived more men within these occupations (Study 3), and importantly, women found these jobs less appealing (Studies 4 and 5). Results confirmed that perceptions of belongingness (but not perceived skills) mediated the effect of gendered wording on job appeal (Study 5). The function of gendered wording in maintaining traditional gender divisions, implications for gender parity, and theoretical models of inequality are discussed.
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Taxes, Health Insurance, and Women's Self-Employment
Malathi Velamuri
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
I examine whether the availability of health coverage through the spouse's health plan influences a married woman's decision to become self-employed. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) introduced a tax subsidy for the self-employed to purchase their own health insurance. I test whether this "natural" experiment induced more women without spousal health insurance coverage to select into self-employment. The most conservative difference-in-difference estimates based on an analysis of employed women indicate that the incidence of self-employment among single women rose by 10% in the post-TRA86 period, while a multinomial specification based on a sample of both employed and nonemployed women suggests that the increase was about 13%.
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Gender, Source Country Characteristics, and Labor Market Assimilation among Immigrants
Francine Blau, Lawrence Kahn & Kerry Papps
Review of Economics and Statistics, February 2011, Pages 43-58
Abstract:
Using 1980-2000 Census data to study the impact of source country characteristics on married adult immigrants' labor supply assimilation profiles, we find that immigrant women from countries with high female labor supply persistently work more than those from low-female-supply countries. While both groups of women work less than comparable natives on arrival, women from high-female-participation countries eventually close the gap with natives entirely, and women from low-female-labor supply countries eliminate most of it. Men's labor supply is unaffected by source country female participation, suggesting that the findings on women reflect notions of gender roles.
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Is family a moral capital resource for female politicians? The case of ABC's Commander in Chief
Michele Adams
Media, Culture & Society, March 2011, Pages 223-241
Abstract:
Being perceived as family-engaged is assumed to benefit politicians, augmenting moral capital they can trade for votes and power. Moral capital benefits of family engagement are particularly salient for male politicians, whose relationship to family generally invokes responsibility and strength. Is family engagement a moral capital resource for female politicians, whose stereotypical associations with family invoke dependency and support? This manuscript examines the fictional television series Commander in Chief, the first to seriously engage the issue of a female US president, juxtaposing her political life with her domestic life as a working wife and mother. Analysis of gender stereotypes deployed in the family narrative suggests that family engagement may not represent a moral capital resource for this fictional female politician, undermining the audience's ability to see her as moral capital-worthy in the political sphere. Application is made to actual female politicians in the United States.
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Opting Out and Buying Out: Wives' Earnings and Housework Time
Alexandra Killewald
Journal of Marriage and Family, April 2011, Pages 459-471
Abstract:
It has been proposed that the negative association between wives' earnings and their time in housework is due to greater outsourcing of household labor by households with high-earning wives, but this hypothesis has not been tested directly. In a sample of dual-earner married couples in the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey of the Health and Retirement Study (N = 796), use of market substitutes for women's housework was found to be only weakly associated with wives' time cooking and cleaning. Furthermore, expenditures on market substitutes explain less than 15% of the earnings-housework time relationship. This suggests that use of market substitutes plays a smaller role in explaining variation in wives' time in household labor than has previously been hypothesized.
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The State Street Mile: Age and Gender Differences in Competition Aversion in the Field
Rodney Garratt, Catherine Weinberger & Nick Johnson
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gender differences in "competitiveness," previously documented in laboratory experiments, are hypothesized to play a role in a wide array of economic outcomes. This paper provides evidence of competition aversion in a natural setting somewhere between the simplicity of a laboratory experiment and the full complexity and ambiguity of a labor market. The "State Street Mile" race offers both male and female participants a choice between two different levels of competition. Large, systematic age and gender differences are observed in the relationship between true ability and the decision to enter the more competitive race. Overall, qualified women and older runners are far less likely than qualified young men to enter a competitive race with prizes. However, the fastest young women unanimously enter the competitive race. Therefore, while we confirm age and gender differences in competitiveness in our field setting, the economic consequences to capable young women are rather small.
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Carlo Barone
Sociology of Education, April 2011, Pages 157-176
Abstract:
This article examines the overall strength, the qualitative pattern, and the evolution over time of gender segregation in higher education across eight European countries. Although previous studies have focused primarily on the divide between humanistic and scientific fields, this work indicates that this divide accounts for no more than half of the association between gender and college major. The degree of gender imbalance is highly variable within scientific fields as well as within humanistic fields. We can make sense of these findings once we posit the existence of a second, equally important gender divide that can be described as the care-technical divide. Accordingly, this work develops a topological model to show that these two dimensions together account for more than 90 percent of gender segregation in the countries under study. Moreover, this model can be used to show the noticeable degree of cross-national stability in both the qualitative pattern and the overall strength of gender segregation. The empirical analyses also point to a generalized stagnation of integration of college majors in recent decades. Taken together, these results indicate that gender segregation has stabilized to an almost identical level and displays a similar qualitative pattern in several countries. This suggests that cultural forces underlying gender segregation are highly resilient, not least because they are sustained by a number of structural developments in educational and occupational institutions.
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Edward Kian & Galen Clavio
Journal of Sports Media, Spring 2011, Pages 55-84
Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to determine any significant differences in how reporters for newspapers and online sites framed men's and women's tennis. Articles on the 2007 U.S. Open in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, and online sites produced by ESPN, Fox Sports, and Sports Illustrated were examined. Results showed newspapers were more likely to minimize the athleticism of female athletes, thus strengthening hegemonic masculinity more than the newer medium of online journalism, which produced mixed results.
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Agata Szymanowicz & Adrian Furnham
Journal of Gender Studies, Winter 2011, Pages 43-54
Abstract:
This study looked for evidence of cultural stereotypes regarding the different intellectual abilities of men and women. The effects of participants' gender, gender role and the target's sex on the perception of an intelligent person and attitudes towards disclosing high IQ were investigated. Some 121 participants wrote a story following a verbal lead about a highly intelligent male or female. They then answered three questions about IQ disclosure and filled out a Bem Sex Role Inventory. Content analysis showed most differences emerged in participants' views about consequences of high intelligence for one's intimate interpersonal relationships. More negative consequences were predicted for female than male targets. This bias was especially strong for females and feminine participants.
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Racial-Ethnic Differences in U.S. Married Women's and Men's Housework
Liana Sayer & Leigh Fine
Social Indicators Research, April 2011, Pages 259-265
Abstract:
Married women continue to spend more time doing housework than men and economic resources influence women's housework more strongly than men's. To explain this, gender theorists point to how gender figures into identities, family interactions, and societal norms and opportunity structures. The extent of this configuration varies culturally and, in the United States, by race-ethnicity because of how race-ethnicity conditions access to resources and influences gender relations within marriages. Housework levels and gender differences may be lower in Black married couples compared to other couples because of Black women's higher historical levels of employment and consequently long-standing need to balance work and family responsibilities. Race-ethnicity also likely conditions the symbolic meaning and thus association of economic resources and housework. We use pooled time diary data from the 2003 to 2007 American Time Use Study from 26,795 married women and men to investigate how and why race-ethnicity influences housework. Our results indicate Hispanic and Asian women do more cooking and cleaning compared with White and Black women and the inverse relationship between women's earnings and housework is steeper for Hispanic women compared with other women. We find no evidence that married Black men devote more time to housework than White men, either core or occasional, unlike earlier studies.
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Namkje Koudenburg & Ernestine Gordijn
Social Cognition, April 2011, Pages 221-230
Abstract:
In two experiments we examined the influence of meta-stereotypes (beliefs regarding stereotypes that the outgroup has about one's ingroup) in different contexts. In Study 1, we demonstrated that women have the same meta-stereotype about men in dating and work contexts, but experience the meta-stereotype as more positive when dating men, rather than when working together with men. In Study 2, we showed that women intended to behave meta-stereotypically when they liked the man they were going to meet and when the meta-stereotype was experienced as positive (i.e., when women were on a date, rather than at work). Meta-stereotyping mediated this effect, such that liking led to more meta-stereotyping, which in the date context, but not in the work context, increased meta-stereotypic behavioral intentions. Together, these findings show that the valence of a meta-stereotype varies across contexts, which elicits different behavioral intentions as a function of liking of the outgroup.
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Beliefs About Cognitive Gender Differences: Accurate for Direction, Underestimated for Size
Diane Halpern, Carli Straight & Clayton Stephenson
Sex Roles, March 2011, Pages 336-347
Abstract:
Although stereotype accuracy is a large, and often controversial, area of psychological research, surprisingly little research has examined the beliefs people have about gender differences in cognitive abilities. This study investigates the accuracy of these beliefs in a sample of 106 highly educated U.S. adults. Participants provided estimates of male and female performance for 12 cognitive tasks and games. These estimates were compared with published data on gender differences on the same 12 cognitive tasks and games. Results showed that participants were generally accurate about the direction of gender differences, but underestimated the size of gender differences.
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Do Child Care Subsidies Influence Single Mothers' Decision to Invest in Human Capital?
Chris Herbst & Erdal Tekin
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
A child care subsidy is one of the most effective policy instruments to facilitate low-income individuals' transition from welfare to work. Although previous studies consistently find that subsidy receipt is associated with increased employment among single mothers, there is currently no evidence on the influence of these benefits on the decision to invest in human capital. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, this paper examines the impact of child care subsidy receipt on the likelihood of engaging in education and job training activities. We identify the impact of subsidy receipt by exploiting plausibly exogenous geographic variation in the distance that parents must travel from home in order to reach the nearest social service agency that administers the subsidy application process. Results suggest that child care subsidies encourage single mothers to engage in human capital investment. In particular, our instrumental variables estimates imply that subsidy receipt increases the likelihood that a single mother enrolls in courses at a school or university by 13 percentage points and participates in a job training program by 8 percentage points.
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Are the Real Time Costs of Children Equally Shared by Mothers and Fathers?
Olivia Ekert-Jaffé
Social Indicators Research, April 2011, Pages 243-247
Abstract:
This article attempts to estimate the time cost of children in France for couples who do not forgo any income, on the basis of the INSEE 1998-1999 time use survey. Having a child involves an increase in domestic work and/or the dedication of occupational income to pay for childcare. The reduction in "time for oneself" - leisure and personal care, i.e. 24 h less working hours paid or unpaid - is modelled for a dual-earner couple in full-time employment who do not use childcare services to increase his/her leisure time. Taking a couple in full-time employment avoids income endogeneity bias, since income is reduced by career interruption and part-time employment. These estimates account for this selection by full-time paid work. The article shows that time cost is roughly 1 h 30 min a day for a child aged 3-14, and is 4 h a day for each younger child. As this cost rises, the more fathers sacrifice some of their free time. The father and mother of two young children with a childminder thus each have only 11 hours of free time (including sleep) per day. The time cost of a large family (3 children) is equivalent to a full-time job on the labour market. In France, work-life balance policies and family pension entitlements only cover a small part of this cost.
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The effect of attire on expected occupational outcomes for male employees
Catherine Kwantes et al.
Psychology of Men & Masculinity, forthcoming
Abstract:
This between-subjects study investigated the effect of traditional versus nontraditional business attire on attitudes toward men in differing occupations, as well as expected workplace outcomes. Eighty-seven university students were shown one of two possible photos of a single male model and then asked questions regarding expected workplace experiences in 10 different occupations. In one condition the model was wearing traditional attire while in the other he was wearing nontraditional attire. Results indicated that the male wearing nontraditional attire was expected to earn a lower starting salary and experience more verbal harassment compared to the traditionally attired male independent of occupation type. The results also showed that the nontraditionally attired male was perceived to have higher ability in stereotypically female occupations than the traditionally attired model. The traditionally attired male, on the other hand, was thought to have a greater likelihood of being hired into a traditionally male occupation and a greater likelihood of being promoted regardless of occupation type than the nontraditionally attired male. Results suggest that choice of attire for men impacts the expectations related to occupational and career outcomes.
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The effect of investigator gender on lateral tympanic membrane temperature
William Helton & Jason Carter
Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, March 2011, Pages 156-163
Abstract:
The measurement of tympanic membrane temperature (TMT) using hand-held infrared devices is common in both clinical and experimental research. However, the role that measurement context has on TMT has been overlooked. In the present investigation 94 women and men had their right and left TMT measured by either a male or female investigator. Regardless of participant's gender, when measured by a female investigator the right TMT was significantly lower than the left TMT. When measured by a male investigator, both male and female participants had similar right and left TMT. These lateral TMT results correspond with neuropsychological theories regarding threat appraisal.
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The Academic Impact on Children of Maternal Post-Secondary Enrollment
Sarah Estelle
Economics of Education Review, April 2011, Pages 353-364
Abstract:
Numerous empirical studies have found that maternal educational attainment is correlated positively with desirable outcomes for children, including academic achievement. At the same time, little is known about the effect of the timing of mothers' schooling on the same set of child outcomes. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), I find a positive effect of full-time maternal post-secondary enrollment on the reading scores of kindergarten students after controlling for child-specific, time-persistent unobserved heterogeneity. This effect is especially strong when the sample is narrowed to children with married mothers or in households where a father is present. No similar effect is found for kindergarten math scores.
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Tom Sefton et al.
Journal of European Social Policy, February 2011, Pages 20-36
Abstract:
Using data from several large-scale longitudinal surveys, this article investigates the relationship between the work histories and personal incomes (from both public and private sources) of older women in the UK, US and West Germany. By comparing three countries with different welfare regimes and pension systems, we seek to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the life course, pension system and women's incomes in later life. The association between older women's incomes and work histories is strongest in West Germany and weakest in the UK, where there is evidence of a ‘pensions poverty trap' and where only predominantly full-time employment is associated with significantly higher incomes in later life. Work history matters less for widows (in all three countries) and more for recent birth cohorts and more educated women (UK only). The article concludes with a brief discussion of the treatment of women under different pension regimes assessed by the criteria of adequacy, proportionality, vertical equity and horizontal equity.