The female advantage in college academic achievements and horizontal sex segregation

This study offers a structural explanation for the female advantage in college completion rates, stressing the importance of horizontal sex segregation across fields of study in shaping educational outcomes and gender inequality. Results from a nationally representative sample of students who matriculated at 4-year institutions in 1995 reveal a high level of gender segregation by field of study. Field of study creates the immediate learning environment for the students and between-major differences in academic and social arrangements—such as different grading norms, academic intensity, size and social support—shape both female and male performance. We find that this variation is a key factor in the creation of the female advantage in grades and graduation likelihood. The simulation we conduct demonstrates that if sex integration were achieved and both groups had the male distribution of majors, the female advantage in graduation likelihood and grades, which remains after socioeconomic and academic factors are netted out, would be substantially reduced.     

作为一种性别政治的文学叙事——以张爱玲的“参差对照”为个案

如何从文学叙事层面对性别政治进行有效分析,一直是20世纪中国女性文学研究所面临的难点之一。张爱玲利用细节与宏大的变奏,探索了女性与政治新的关联方式,但在性别政治内涵方面建构性不够;借助重复,张爱玲对女性与历史的关系进行了富有深意的改写,但离家别国之后个人生命体验的萎缩,又使得这一改写更多停留在技术层面上。因而,张爱玲的参差对照的叙事仍然是一种未完成的性别政治表现形式,体现了中国语境中性别政治实践的艰难。     

Revisiting the Bott thesis on kin networks and marriage

Studying families in post-war London, Elizabeth Bott hypothesized that tight-knit kinship networks fostered gender segregated, rather than joint, conjugal role-relationships for husband and wife. Addressing this hypothesis with 2001 International Social Survey Program for 29 countries, this paper considers one aspect of joint role-relationships - whether married women prefer to turn to their husband, as opposed to kin, for household help and emotional support. Women with tight-knit kin who fill multiple functions in their lives are less likely to prefer to rely on husbands. Residential mobility is associated with greater reliance on the spouse, but there is no indication that the importance of kinship is diminished when mobility is controlled.     

State contexts and the criminalization of marital rape across the United States

Spousal exemptions from rape prosecution persist in many US states’ criminal codes thereby compromising women’s rights to bodily self-control and personhood. Power resources theory—which emphasizes that given limited resources, groups act strategically to achieve goals—and gender stratification perspectives guided an event history analysis of the likelihood of marital rape criminalization in US states between 1978 and 2007. Findings suggest criminalization is influenced by the expected marginal benefit of law reform, women’s relative socioeconomic resources, and racial heterogeneity. This research highlights the importance of considering how existing laws, group resources, and intersecting social cleavages influence the expansion of women’s rights.     

Solving the crisis: When agency is the preferred leadership for implementing change

Glass-cliff research shows that female leaders are preferentially selected in a crisis to signal change and not for their leadership qualifications. In parallel, the management literature urges for agentic “masculine” leadership to turn around organizations in crisis. We hypothesized that, regardless of their gender, agentic leaders should be preferred to communal leaders if leadership qualifications and actual change potential motivate leader selection. Three experimental studies demonstrated that agentic (vs. communal) candidates were perceived to match poorly-performing (vs. strongly-performing) companies. This effect was accounted for by perceptions of agentic candidates' higher suitability, higher task-orientation (versus person-orientation), and higher change potential. We discuss that women face ambiguity as to why they become leaders in crisis contexts: because they are perceived as signaling change, stereotypically linked to their gender, or for their perceived agentic qualities as leaders. In contrast, men become crisis leaders due to their perceived agentic change potential.     

Paradox versus dilemma mindset: A theory of how women leaders navigate the tensions between agency and communion

A wealth of literature documents that women leaders can face simultaneous and yet conflictual demands for both agency and communion, due to the incongruence of their leader role and gender role demands. However, we still know little about why some women cope with the tensions between agency and communion better than others and what implications are involved. Using a paradox perspective, we develop a theoretical model to explain how women leaders experience and respond to agency-communion tensions, which impacts their intrapersonal and interpersonal outcomes. Specifically, we propose that in response to experiencing tensions fueled by the dual demands for agency and communion, women leaders can adopt a paradox mindset that simultaneously embraces agency and communion, or a dilemma mindset that dichotomizes agency and communion. The paradox mindset helps women leaders build psychological resilience, identity coexistence, and leadership effectiveness, whereas those who adopt a dilemma mindset experience depleted resilience, identity separation, and lowered leadership effectiveness. Further, our model highlights individual, interpersonal, and organizational conditions that shape women's experience and stimulate a paradox mindset versus a dilemma mindset. We conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications of our model.     

Diversity preferences among employees and ethnoracial workplace segregation

Ethno-racial workplace segregation increases already existing ethno-racial inequality. While previous research has identified discriminatory employers as drivers of workplace segregation, this study addresses the role of the employees. Sociological and social psychological theory suggest that people prefer to surround themselves with people who positively confirm their social identity or who contribute with higher group status. Through web-based surveys, we measure employee attitudes and preferences concerning ethno-racial workplace diversity, to what extent they differ by ethnicity/race, and if they contain intersectional patterns. Thereafter, we use simulation models to analyze the consequences for workplace segregation that these preferences would have, if realized.The main survey results showed that all ethno-racial groups favored their own in-group as colleagues, especially European Americans. As a secondary choice, the respondents preferred the out-group with the highest labor market status. Intersectional patterns were identified, as minority women were preferred as colleagues over minority men. Our simulation model, based on the results of two surveys on stated vs. indirectly revealed preferences, showed that employee preferences were at best not diverse enough to desegregate workplaces. When based on the most common preferences (i.e. excluding a few outliers), the simulations even suggested that these preferences can cause segregation. We relate these findings to Schelling's model of segregation.     

Exploring gender and elder abuse from the perspective of professionals

We conducted an online survey of professionals working in two Canadian provinces to learn about their knowledge of elder abuse from a gender-based perspective. A total of 169 professionals (90% women) completed a survey in either French or English. Five topic areas emerged from the analysis: the influence of gender on the risk of abuse; types of abuse detected; knowledge gaps; capacity to respond to gender-based abuse; and awareness of resources. To gain further insight into these results, we conducted three focus groups with a total of 24 professionals. Professionals held relatively little recognition of, or knowledge about, gender related to elder abuse. Our results indicate the need to develop educational and awareness raising opportunities for professionals who work with abused older adults in both French and English to identify and respond to the unique needs of older women and men.