Working to protect rights: Women's civil liberties in cross-cultural perspective

Using data for a majority of the world's countries over a 25- to 55-year period, this paper analyzes cross-cultural heterogeneity in women's civil liberties independently of and relative to men. Civil liberties include the freedoms of discussion and movement, freedom from forced labor, property rights, and access to justice. Regression analyses show that women's civil liberties vary considerably across cultural zones defined by the intersection of religious traditions and geographical regions. These patterns persist even when controlling for factors such as democracy and development. Accounting for women's political representation and educational attainment often reduces but never eliminates these cross-cultural differences; the same is true for embeddedness in world society. In contrast, women's labor force participation all but erases negative cultural effects, and instrumental-variables analyses suggest that this factor is a causal determinant of women's civil liberties. Efforts to improve women's rights should therefore focus on overcoming cultural barriers to their workforce participation.     

Measuring centrality in film narratives using dynamic character interaction networks

The tools of social network analysis offer a promising framework for studying fictional texts and the relational activity of the characters therein. The goal of this paper is to offer both a conceptual refinement of the project of measuring the centrality of characters within narratives using network tools, as well as the proposal of a novel measure with which to do so. Conceptually, we argue that as questions of time, order and sequence are central in narratives, measures of characters’ narrative importance should be based on dynamic network representations which respect the time-ordering of narrative events. We suggest a directed dynamic measure of relative character importance based on character interactions and illustrate it through an examination of gender in the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens. We find that the measure helps illuminate important narrative dynamics which cannot be captured by static measures, and presents a platform on which future character network research can productively build.     

Platform vulnerabilities: harassment and misogynoir in the digital attack on Leslie Jones

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2016, racist, misogynistic harassers attacked comedienne Leslie Jones on Twitter and on her personal website, which they hacked and flooded with sexist and racist imagery stolen largely from her personal accounts. Through a multiplatform discourse analysis of the Leslie Jones attack, this paper examines the connections between platform vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of women of color, as well as the links between the rise of the alt-right and an increase in explicitly racist, misogynistic behaviors. Three key themes emerged from the analysis: messages of support and affirmation; the need for intervention; and the connection between this incident, systemic racism and sexism, and the rise of the alt-right. These themes serve as a bridge between the vulnerabilities of platforms and of women of color in those digital spaces and beyond. The supportive awareness campaigns and calls to action that issue publics launched online attempted to discursively ‘patch’ two perceived vulnerabilities – of Twitter as a platform and of Jones herself. However, in response to these ‘patches,’ members of the alt-right condemned Twitter and mainstream media for marginalizing their conservative voices, using this discourse to bolster their performance of victimization and oppression. Overall, this case study provides insight into the dynamics at work in the rise of the alt-right and online harassment, with particular attention to the significance of digital media, celebrity, and popular feminism in the ongoing political shifts in the United States.     

From glass ceiling to inequality regimes

Women are extremely under-represented in top management and professional positions in all countries, although cross-national variations exist. Women from minority ethnic and racial groups suffer from greater under-representation than do majority group women. The “Glass Ceiling” is a metaphor that describes the gender barriers that produce these patterns. This article suggests that “Inequality Regimes” is a more accurate metaphor, as it stands for gender, race and class barriers that obstruct women's opportunities for advancement at all levels of organizational hierarchy. The article discusses the components of inequality regimes and briefly assesses some efforts to change these practices.     

Explaining differences in gender role attitudes among migrant and native adolescents in Germany: intergenerational transmission,religiosity, and integration

This study examines gender role attitudes of native and migrant adolescents in Germany and attempts to explain why adolescents of Turkish, former Yugoslavian, and Eastern European origin tend to have more traditional attitudes than their native peers. In order to do so, it combines a migrant–native comparative approach that highlights the impact of religiosity and host society integration with an intergenerational transmission perspective that emphasises the continuity of gender role attitudes across generations. The empirical analysis relies on dyadic parent–adolescent data (N?=?2744) from the first wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries. It demonstrates the importance of incorporating intergenerational transmission processes to fully understand attitude differences between natives and migrants: a substantial part of native–migrant gaps in gender role attitudes can be attributed to migrant parents’ more traditional attitudes and a strong transmission of attitudes across generations. Once intergenerational transmission and the influence of religiosity and integration have been accounted for, the remaining differences between gender role attitudes of native and migrant adolescents are small.     

Education, gender, and migration in the context of social change

Although sociologists have identified education as likely determinant of migration, the ways in which education affects migration are unclear and empirical results are disparate. This paper addresses the relationship between educational attainment, enrolment, and migration, focusing on the role of gender and how it changes with evolving social contexts. Using empirical analyses based in Nepal, results indicate that educational attainment has positive effects and enrolment has negative effects on out-migration and including enrolment in the model increases the effect of attainment. In the case of women, with the changing role of gender, increased education and labor force participation, the affect of educational attainment changes drastically over time, from almost no effect, to a strong positive effect. Consideration of enrolment, and the role of gender in education, employment, and marriage may help to explain the disparate results in past research on education and migration.     

Personality traits and gender-specific income expectations in Dutch higher education

In this article we examine gender differences in income expectations of students in higher education. We found quite large gender differences. Men and women differ significantly in the income they expect to earn at the top of their career. We examined how much personality traits contribute to explain gender differences in income expectations, and to what extent personality typologies can add to insights about earnings potential derived from human capital theory. The research shows that personality does affect expected income, that impact goes beyond personality’s indirect effects, which are conveyed largely through gender differences and students’ choice of study subject.

Gender Differences in Subjective Well-Being: Comparing Societies with Respect to Gender Equality

These analyses explore the relationship between gender inequality and subjective well-being. The hypothesis was tested as to whether societal gender inequality is related to the size of gender differences in subjective well-being in various societies. Results come from comparative data sets (World Values Survey, involving 57 countries; OASIS project, involving Norway, England, Germany, Spain and Israel). The size of gender differences varied with the extent of societal gender inequality and the cultural attitudes regarding gender equality in different countries. Including individual resources like education and income in the analyses reduced the size of gender and country differences. Gender differences in subjective well-being could therefore be related to gender specific access to goal relevant resources.     

Debating Appropriate Approaches to Violence in Lihir: The Challenges of Addressing Gender Violence in Papua New Guinea

Recent years have seen a proliferation of initiatives aimed at addressing gender violence both at the national and local levels in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Numerous studies in PNG have noted high levels of violence. This paper takes a range of initiatives in the Lihir Islands, New Ireland Province (NIP), as a case study to discuss the challenges of speaking about, creating policy and attempting to manage gender violence. In Lihir there have been marches against violence, business initiatives to combat violence, outreach programs to villages and training programs for individuals and groups. These changes occur locally within the national context of the establishment of the Family Protection Act in 2013 and the Family Violence and Sexual Action Committee in 2000. Despite the seeming groundswell against gender violence in Lihir, the plans and programs are often met with debate about the terms used, the value of programs or events and their appropriateness. Initiatives are critiqued as externally imposed, colonial or inappropriate for the local context which has implications for programs at both local and national levels.     

The Variable Nature of the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Previous research demonstrates that long-standing gender gaps in political knowledge are often a function of measurement artifacts. This article examines two potential measurement issues – question content and format – to determine whether gender differences in knowledge are sensitive to decisions we make when choosing and constructing knowledge measures. Using an original survey from the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we demonstrate that, while expected gender differences exist when we ask traditional knowledge questions, these gender gaps are ameliorated when we employ items that measure knowledge about women in politics. We also examine gendered response patterns regarding “don’t know” responses, which can deflate women’s knowledge levels. Finally, we examine the determinants of political knowledge for women and men, and uncover an important role for political interest in shaping women’s knowledge levels. These results suggest that scholars should take steps to create political knowledge measures that can most accurately gauge the political capacities of women and men.