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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47818836262841087572019-02-15T11:56:40.015-05:00WAPPP WireNews and updates from the Women and Public Policy Program of Harvard Kennedy School.Lindsey email@example.com://feedburner.google.comSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with NewsGatorSubscribe with My AOLSubscribe with BloglinesSubscribe with NetvibesSubscribe with GoogleSubscribe with PageflakesSubscribe with PlusmoSubscribe with Live.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-23792156906118241372018-03-06T12:37:00.003-05:002018-03-06T12:37:54.324-05:00Can Female Role Models Reduce the Gender Gap in Science? Evidence from Classroom Interventions in French High Schools with Clémentine Van EffenterreWomen are underrepresented among technical degree holders and STEM workers, and the gender segregation in these occupations has remained fairly consistent over time. How can we design interventions that might help fix the gender gap in science? WAPPP Postdoctoral Fellow Clémantine Van Effenterre presented the results of her study on the effects of STEM role models in the classroom.

SETTING

This study focused on French high school students in year 10 and year 12. At the end of year 10, students choose to specialize in a science, social science, or humanities track, conditional on performance in these areas. At the end of year 12, students sit for their graduation exam, the Baccalauréat, which is the gateway to pursuing higher education. In order to gain entry to certain higher education tracks, year 12 students can opt to pursue highly selective prep classes (classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles), including in science.

Women are slightly overrepresented in year 10 science courses, but are underrepresented in science in year 11 and year 12, as well as in the selective science classes préparatoires.

DESIGN

This study was a large-scale randomized experiment, with control groups and treatment groups of year 10 and year 12 students. Students in treatment groups had a one-hour session with a female STEM role model, either a "professional" (private employees in a STEM field) or a "researcher" (PhD candidates or post-doctoral students in the sciences). The role models presented on career prospects and wage rates in the sciences versus the humanities, the diversity of jobs in the sciences, and the underrepresentation of women in STEM jobs.

In addition to sharing their own experiences, the role models showed two videos. The first emphasized that men and women have the same "science potential" and that there are no biologically-determined sex differences with respect to science aptitude. The second video focused on how much workers in STEM occupations enjoy their workplace culture and work/life balance, as well as the shorter-than-expected duration of many science degree programs.

Dr. Van Effenterre and her colleagues surveyed students on the intensity of their stereotypical views of STEM jobs and women in science and their choice of school tracks, and collected data on their grades and higher education admission outcomes.

RESULTS

Beliefs

Students in the treatment group, both male and female, changed their beliefs regarding careers in science and women in science. Female year 10 students were less likely to think that studying for a science degree takes a long time, that science jobs are dreary or solitary, or that it is hard to achieve work-life balance in STEM. With respect to women and science, the intervention emphasized underrepresentation and debunking biological essentialism. While students reduced their stereotypical beliefs in this area, they were more likely to think that "women like science less than men" and that "progress for women in science is slow."

This is an interesting result: after the intervention, students are aware that men are disproportionately represented in science, but that the reason is not biologically determined. To make sense of this state of affairs, Dr. Van Effenterre and her colleagues hypothesize, students think that women must either not like science and not pursue it, or go into STEM fields and face discrimination or other obstacles to success in the field.

The effect sizes were larger for female students, but male students changed their beliefs too; the intervention may have been more salient for female students, but had an effect for all treated students.

School Tracks

This study revealed no change in track choices for year 10 students, but year 12 students in the treatment group significantly increased their likelihood of pursuing selective preparatory STEM programs: male students' participation increased by 38% and female students' by 20%, which are large increases over the low baseline for these selective programs.

Dr. Van Effenterre and her colleagues were initially puzzled by the lack of movement for year 10 students, but realized that student's track choices are in some ways predetermined by past academic performance and other social factors, and are likely very hard to change with a small intervention.

MECHANISMS

The role models may have impacted students' beliefs and choices in a variety of ways: students may have been inspired to increase their effort to gain access to science jobs or may have experienced a boost in self-confidence or sense of fit in STEM roles after interacting with role models.

Dr. Van Effenterre and her colleagues examined the impact of the treatment on the grades the students obtained on the Baccalauréat, compared to students' grades on other standardized exams. On average, there was no significant response to the treatment in terms of grades on the Baccalauréat for male or female students, and so the "increased effort" mechanism does not necessarily explain the observed effect.

Role models in the "professionals" category had a greater impact on both the decision to choose a science track and admittance to it compared to "researchers" for both male and female students. One limitation of this study was that the role models were only quasi-randomized, but it appears that the "professionals" may have been more relevant and compelling to students than the "researchers," which presents additional questions about how to tailor the best type of role model for students to achieve the intended effect.

CONCLUSION

Experiences with female STEM role models can be an effective policy tool to change beliefs and outcomes for male and female students, even in a limited, one-hour intervention. Dr. Van Effenterre emphasized that closing gender gaps today impacts the next generation: if they can see it, they can be it.

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2018/03/can-female-role-models-reduce-gender.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-34419599534429939202018-02-12T09:40:00.000-05:002018-02-12T09:40:04.221-05:00The Influence of Sexual Orientation and Race on Gender Prescriptive Stereotypes with Sa-kiera HudsonGender stereotypes are powerful forces that shape collective expectations and are socialized from an early age; these stereotypes are not just descriptive, but also prescriptive, stating what sorts of things men and women should and should not do based on their gender.

Rule congruity theory helps to explain why these prescriptive stereotypes are often a source of backlash: men and women are evaluated negatively when the role that they occupy is incongruent with the stereotypes of their gender. Negative evaluations can come from both descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes – women can spark descriptive backlash in leadership roles if there are few other women in leadership, and prescriptive backlash if the traits she displays violates one's notions of how women should behave.

Rule congruity theory has sparked a great deal of research, but researchers generally haven't interrogated who or what we mean when we say "men" or "women." Research on role congruity theory and gender generally presumes straight, white, middle-class individuals, which gives reason to believe that prescriptive stereotypes of women don't fully encompass lesbian women or women of color.

Taking an intersectional perspective may reveal that societal expectations are unique based on other identities. Importantly, less than 20% of studies on race include women, and less than 10% of studies on gender include race: there is an enormous amount of work to be done in intersectional psychology.

The first WAPPP Seminar of the semester featured Sa-kiera Hudson, PhD Candidate in Psychology at Harvard University and WAPPP Fellow, presenting research on intersectional identities and gender stereotypes. In particular, Hudson questions whether rule congruity theory is adequate to explain intersectional identities and, if not, how the theory should be modified.

Study 1

Hudson's first study incorporated sexual orientation as an additional identity. Existing literature suggests that in the realm of stereotypes, gay men and straight women are presumed to be similar, as are lesbian women and straight men, because of their similar sexual preferences.

In this study, individuals were given a list of 70 traits, some of which were more stereotypically masculine, feminine, or neutral (e.g. "assertive," "warm and kind," "honest"), and asked to rate whether that trait was desirable for straight and gay men and women, for men and women without a sexual orientation identifier, and for straight or gay people, without specifying gender.

Hudson hypothesized three expected patterns: stability in gender stereotypes, evidence of heterocentrism, and evidence of gender inversion.

1. Stability in gender stereotypes: Hudson's findings were substantially the same as a similar study from 2002, which indicates that prescriptive gender stereotypes are relatively stable and haven't changed much in the last 15 years.

2. Evidence of heterocentrism: There was no trait for which respondents' rankings of desirable traits for a "man" deviated from those for a "straight man," nor "woman" from "straight woman" or "person" from "straight person." This finding suggests that when individuals are rating a person without a sexual orientation identifier, they presume straightness. While this isn't surprising, it is useful: very few studies directly demonstrate heteronormativity in judgments like these.

3. Gender inversion: Hudson expected to see evidence of gender inversion, similarities between gay men and straight women and between lesbian women and straight men, in addition to differences between gay and straight men that mirror the differences between straight men and straight women. Of the 70 traits, there was evidence of gender inversion for 9: for example, it was less desirable for straight women to be assertive compared to straight men, but more desirable for lesbian women to be assertive compared to gay men.

An additional 12 traits showed evidence of gender asymmetry, where desirability ratings for men or women were the same regardless of sexual orientation, but diverged for the opposite gender. For example, cleanliness was equally desirable for gay and straight men, but for women, there was more pressure for straight women to be clean than for lesbian women. Thirty-four traits displayed evidence of sexual orientation asymmetry – there was gender differentiation for straight and gay men and women, but no difference between gay men and lesbian women. This finding suggests that gender might not matter as much as sexual orientation in terms of how we perceive gay men and lesbian women.

In addition, Hudson presented three other interesting wrinkles from this study:

It is more desirable for lesbians to be assertive, competitive, and forceful compared to straight women, but there was no difference in trait desirability for business sense, career-oriented, or leadership ability, which suggests that it is acceptable for lesbian women to display dominant personality traits, but not in ways that might disturb the status quo of gender hierarchy.

The differences between straight and gay men are much larger than the differences between straight and lesbian women, which suggests that gay men may lose some of the status that comes with being male by virtue of their sexual orientation, while lesbian women don't gain much status above that accorded to straight women.

Finally, Hudson's study revealed some evidence that homosexuality is associated with low status – study respondents found it less desirable for gay men and lesbian women to be loyal, dependable, honest, or enthusiastic, traits that are typically considered neutral and positive.

Study 2

Hudson's second study replicated the first study's methods using race rather than sexual orientation. There are different stereotypes of men and women of different races; for example, white women are stereotyped as submissive and feminine, black women as confident and aggressive. What studies do exist demonstrate that black and white women are treated differently with respect to normative traits – black women are not sanctioned as heavily for "aggressive leadership behaviors" as black men and white women. Something about the interaction of race and gender stereotypes specific to black women may mediate backlash.

Just as in the first study, Hudson found stability of gender stereotypes over time and evidence of eurocentrism: when respondents rated traits for a person without a race marker, their answers most closely matched those given for white individuals, suggesting that they viewed white as the default.

Hudson initially hypothesized that this study would yield evidence of gendered race theory, which posits that black individuals are masculinized. However, the results produced limited evidence for gendered race theory! For black men, it was less desirable to be masculine and more desirable to be feminine compared to the control male target. For black women, it was less desirable to be feminine and more desirable to be masculine compared to the control female target, suggesting that both black men and women are distanced from their gender stereotypes. For 38 traits, there was little gender differentiation among black targets but a significant amount for white targets, again suggesting that gender is not as important as race for stereotypes regarding men and women of color.

Both of these studies revealed that the prescriptive norms for gays and lesbians and for black men and women are mostly feminized norms, which suggests that status might play a role in how gender prescriptive stereotypes are generated for intersectional targets – these stereotypes are less about gender per se and more about relative status. The results of these studies underscore just how much intersectionality matters for contemporary research and the importance of updating existing theories accordingly.

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-influence-of-sexual-orientation-and.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-47195369315187266852017-12-30T14:25:00.002-05:002017-12-30T14:25:53.114-05:00Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies with Kelly BedardIn many highly educated professions, we see a pattern in which the number of female workers drops off over time, as does the share of women in the top earners cohort. Many of these professional tracks have an "up-or-out" quality, like making partner at a law firm or earning tenure at a university. This phenomenon is consistent with women entering lower-income fields or leaving them altogether: what mechanism might explain this effect, and what other implications might this pattern have? The final WAPPP seminar of the semester featured Kelly Bedard, Department Chair and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describing the results of a study on tenure clock-stopping policies in major university economics departments.

Over the last few decades, many universities have instituted "clock-stopping policies" for tenure. If a young academic has a child before receiving tenure, they may have an extra year before their tenure evaluation – rather than the usual six years to tenure, a new parent could have seven years of work evaluated, with their tenure clock stopped for one year. Having children is a productivity shock that, though these policies, is taken into account in gauging lifetime productivity.

These clock-stopping policies come in two-flavors: in early iterations, only women were eligible for clock-stopping; more recent policies are gender neutral, such that anyone who has a child can stop their clock. Some universities started with a female-only policy and then switched to gender-neutral. Professor Bedard's research asks: what are the distributional consequences of these policies? How might these policies change the way people think about publishing and fertility strategies?

The simple story would be to consider two individuals, Person A and Person B, going up for tenure. Person A, a woman, has a child, stops her clock, and does no research for a year. Person B, a man, has a child, stops his clock, but does not change anything about his productivity during that year. Under a gender-neutral clock-stopping policy, Person A was not hurt in her tenure evaluation—her productivity was the same in the other years, even with a year of no research. This is precisely what the policy was designed to do, to ensure that faculty who take parental leave are not harmed in their tenure evaluations by their decision to do so. Person B, however, benefited from the policy, with an additional year to write papers that might factor into his tenure decision. Other faculty who did not have children and did not stop their clocks would be just as unaffected as Person A. This benefit to Person B, while the policy is net neutral for everyone else, is something of an odd result – this is not what the policy was designed to do.

If tenure decisions are imperfect – that is, not made strictly on the basis of the six-year timeline, excluding any time in which the clock was stopped – Person B is now pushing up the bar for tenure with his additional year of productivity. Person B will still be able to achieve tenure, but Person A and anyone who has not had a child will have a more difficult time getting over that threshold. This gender-neutral clock-stopping policy therefore has the possibility for some odd distributional consequences, which may be compounded by the additional productivity costs of being pregnant or departmental variation in teaching relief or other parental leave policies.

In addition to tenure decisions, these policies may also affect publishing decisions. Economists tend to focus on the top five journals, which each have a long lag in time to publication. These journals have a low likelihood of acceptance, but a high return if one's article is published. Lower-ranked journals have a higher likelihood, but a lower return. Clock stopping adds an additional time period to this publishing game – with only one time period, a researcher might decide to send a manuscript to a lower-ranked journal for the added likelihood of publication. Without a top-five journal article, they may not receive tenure at their current institution, but likely will somewhere else. With two time periods, faculty are incentivized to send manuscripts first to the top-ranked journals; if the manuscript is rejected, it could always be sent to a lower-ranked journal in the second time period. If this strategy works, there will be obvious gains to those who stop their clocks versus those who don't.

There are multiple avenues through which this effect could be occurring: clock-stopping could change an individual's number of papers and where they are published and could affect tenure decisions and ultimately fertility decisions, which themselves may have publishing or productivity effects.

To test these possibilities, Professor Bedard assembled two unique datasets, one of the clock-stopping policies for each of the top 50 economics departments, as well as an exhaustive list of all assistant professors from 1980-2010. Using course catalogs, online CVs, and LinkedIn, she assembled a dataset of 1600 assistant professors who started their careers at a top 50 economics department who published at least two papers in eight years, along with their complete job histories and publication records.

The first considered metric was probability that an individual would get tenure at the school at which they started their career. In general, tenuring rates are fairly flat for both men and women, though the average rates are higher for men. What happens with the introduction of clock-stopping policies? Accounting for a series of controls, including flexible gender-specific time dummies and gender-specific university fixed effects, female-only clock-stopping policies have almost no effect on tenuring rates. However, gender-neutral clock-stopping policies have an enormous effect: with a gender-neutral clock-stopping policy, male tenure rates rise by 18 percentage points, and female tenure rates fall by 19 percentage points.

What is the mechanism for this effect? Fortunately, these clock-stopping policies do not impact the likelihood of getting tenure somewhere; instead, women seem to be moving and getting tenure at schools other than where they start. Using the complete job histories, Professor Bedard suggests that, conditional on getting tenure somewhere, once clock-stopping policies enter into place, fewer female faculty move to lower-ranked departments. While there is very little upward movement, this means that female faculty are more likely to move laterally, receiving tenure at a school ranked similarly to the one at which they started.

What are the effects of these policies on publishing? Over the first seven years of their careers, 40-50% of female faculty are not publishing in the top five journals, and those that do publish on average one article. Male faculty are somewhat more likely to publish in the top five journals, but still not to a significant degree. Comparing schools with clock-stopping policies (of either flavor) versus those without, over time female faculty at schools with clock-stopping experience, on average, a drop in publishing. By contrast, men experience a consistent increase in publishing success, such that men have, on average, half a publication more in a top 5 journal. Given that most people only publish one article in a top five journal, clock-stopping has a big effect for men with major impacts for publishing success.

The first version of Professor Bedard's paper did not contain any analysis on fertility, but so many people wanted to know that she added an additional section. One major difficulty of studying effects on fertility is acquiring the data: most of the collected data is administrative, and few faculty report whether they have children on their CVs. Instead, Professor Bedard sent emails to each of the faculty members for which she had emails – around 85-90% of the dataset – asking whether the individual had children and, if so, in what year the children were born. The response rate (around 65%) was surprisingly high, but of course was entirely non-random; those who had left the profession were unlikely to respond, while those at higher-ranked schools were far more likely to respond. At schools with a gender-neutral clock-stopping policy, about 56% of pre-tenure faculty have a child, compared to 46% of those without a gender-neutral clock-stopping policy. Based on these data, it appears that clock-stopping does not change total fertility, but may change the timing of fertility.

These results for tenure, publishing, and fertility illuminate the side effects of clock-stopping policies and how they might eliminate burdens for women but confer additional benefits on men.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/12/equal-but-inequitable-who-benefits-from.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-78471210250965669532017-11-26T17:20:00.000-05:002017-11-26T17:20:23.300-05:00Betting the House: How Assets Influence Marriage Selection, Marriage Stability, and Child Investments with Corinne LowHow do we understand the marriage contract from an economic standpoint? Just as value is created, divided, and exchanged in the labor market, so it is on the marriage market. Last week's WAPPP seminar featured Corinne Low, Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as she described the results of her study on marriage and homeownership as a lens into understanding what is valuable about the marriage contract, who reaps value from the marriage contract, and as policies change, how that value is changing over time.

While marriage was previously the universally adopted or aspired to family arrangement, this is no longer the case. There has been a recent increase in cohabitation and nonmarital fertility. However, this change does not necessarily mean that tastes or social values have changed; rather, Professor Low wonders, what in the marriage equation has changed to make people optimize their preferences differently? How has this changed been applied throughout society, where we see a tremendous amount of stratification in rates of marriage based on income, level of education, and race?

The key question in this line of inquiry is what made marriage valuable in the first place, and what made it retain value for some populations and lose value for others?

The marriage contract and nonmarital cohabitation have converged in recent years: the security of marriage has decreased with the advent of unilateral divorce, whereas nonmarital relationships have become more secure with the enforcement of paternity rights and responsibilities outside of marriage. However, there remains one key difference: only in marriage are assets divided up upon divorce. If one person in a cohabitating couple is making all of the mortgage payments, if that relationship breaks up, the other gets nothing. However, in a marriage contract that asset is divided or, very often, assigned to the mother (throughout the presentation, Professor Low referred to this effect in terms of husbands and wives; while this is not universally true, it is disproportionately the case and was used illustratively).

There is, therefore, an important distinction between income, which will be divided in both marital and nonmarital relationships in the form of child support, and asset-sharing, which is unique to the marriage contract.

Home-purchasing, according to Professor Low, may be an important way for husbands to commit to their wives. Because she will be guaranteed at least a share of that valuable asset if the relationship goes south, in her economic calculus it makes sense to invest in the human capital of the children, even if it reduces her own income. Similarly, because the house is at risk, it disincentivizes the husband from unilaterally seeking a divorce. "Betting the House" may be a way of securing the marriage contract.

Investing in children has a cost – if a parent spends time investing in children, they have less time to invest in their own human capital. Generally mothers are the ones making these large investments – women tend to experience a decline in wages after having children, and economically speaking it makes sense for the lower-income partner to invest in children. While marriage used to provide some security for these investments, the marriage contract got more precarious as divorce became easier and more common. However, high-asset individuals can still offer some of this insurance, because those assets will be divided and can provide security for child human capital investments. As such, marriage is really only useful for people who have assets: the decision has less to do with a desire to invest in child human capital than with an ability to secure that investment with assets that can back the marriage contract.

Now that paternity rights and responsibilities are enforced outside of marriage, nonmarital relationships are just as good as marital relationships for individuals without the assets to buy a house – only those with assets get the extra security for their marriage contract. As such, people without assets will flee from marriage, and those with assets will continue to get married. Professor Low and her colleagues set up a model in which nonmarital couples, upon splitting up, would either receive no asset transfer, 1/3 of what the asset transfer in a marital relationship would be, or 2/3 of the marital relationship asset transfer. Under each of these conditions, how do individuals' preferences change with respect to marital and nonmarital relationships? With no nonmarital transfer, people without assets are divided between marital and nonmarital relationships. At the 1/3 transfer level, people without assets significantly increase their nonmarital fertility. At the 2/3 level, still less than what a spouse would get if a marriage split up, people without assets entirely abandon marriage. At each stage, people with assets choose marriage.

This hypothetical bears out in the data: looking at a longitudinal data set of marriages and average home prices in the year of marriage, those who got married in an era of high housing prices were less able to purchase a home when they got married, and therefore they were less able to secure their child human capital investment. While there are certainly other explanations available, couples facing high housing prices at the time of their marriage tend to have fewer children, and their children are more likely to be held back in school. Assets provide commitment value that allows for greater specialization in the home and more optimal investments in children, which makes the marriage contract more valuable.

This data demonstrates that legal changes (unilateral divorce and paternity acknowledgement) and concordant economic change can be responsible for stratification in marital decisions, rather than "tastes" or preferences. This finding has significant implications for policymakers, as the racial gap in assets and homeownership is much larger than the racial gap in income, in part because of redlining and mortgage discrimination practices. The gap in marriage among racial groups that has been attributed to tastes or values can actually be attributed to homeownership or the ability to get a mortgage. If we take marriage seriously as an economic contract, it is evident that policies that change the contracting environment have deep implications. This model provides a contracting explanation for why marriage might lead to greater child investment, without relying on arguments about preferences.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/11/betting-house-how-assets-influence.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-33945537106211953302017-11-15T14:05:00.001-05:002017-11-15T14:05:38.277-05:00Gender Differences in Self and Other-Competition with Johanna Mollerstrom
There is a well-established literature demonstrating that women are less likely to choose to enter competitive settings, even when they are just as able as their would-be competitors. While most of these experiments have been conducted in a laboratory setting, different views toward competition have obvious implications for life outside the lab, including education and career trajectories. However, there has not been a similar investigation about women's attitudes toward self-competition – are women more or less willing to compete against their own previous scores over time? Johanna Mollerstrom, Professor of Economics at Humboldt University, presented the results of three recent experiments on self- and other-competition. <o:p></o:p>

In existing studies, there are generally two mechanisms underlying women's differential interest in competition: women may be more risk-averse, or they may be less (over-?) confident than men. With self-competition, risk aversion and confidence take on slightly different valences: it's still risky to compete against yourself, but risk based on the uncertainty of who you'll be competing against is alleviated. Similarly, confidence may shift when individuals only have to assess their own capacity to improve on previous rounds. There are reasons to believe that self-competition may be different.<o:p></o:p>

STUDY ONE<o:p></o:p>

The first study was a simple lab experiment designed to test whether there is a gender difference in willingness to self-compete. Participants were asked to add up as many sets of five two-digit numbers as possible in a five-minute period. In the first round, participants were paid a piece rate of $1 for every correct problem. In the second round, participants were either randomly matched with another participant for a competition round or competed against their own first-round score. The winner of the round (either defeating their opponent or their first-round score) got $2 per correct problem. In the third round, participants got a choice between the piece rate and competition, and then were asked a few questions about their risk aversion and confidence. Half of the participants in round three could choose to opt into another other-competition round, while the other half competed against their own scores in round two. <o:p></o:p>

In the other-competition condition, women were less willing to compete than equally-able men, but the difference disappears when controlling for risk aversion and confidence. This finding replicates many past experiments. In the self-competition condition, we see much the same result; risk aversion, in particular, seems to moderate any observed gender difference in willingness to compete. However, this particular experiment had a smaller sample size (N = 200), and a larger sample may indicate that there is no gender difference in willingness to self-compete at all.<o:p></o:p>

STUDY TWO<o:p></o:p>

The second study recruited a larger sample on MTurk and replicated the first study with a few modifications. The task was changed to a captcha-style exercise rather than addition, and the rounds were shortened to 90 seconds to conform to other online experiments. In addition, the researchers added two additional treatments, manipulating whether other-competitors were matched with someone of the same or opposite sex, while holding constant that they were matched with someone who answered the same number of questions correctly in the first round. <o:p></o:p>

The results of this experiment demonstrated that, again, women were less willing to compete against others, but that the gender difference was moderated by differences in confidence and risk aversion. This experiment revealed a much more precise result for self-competition: there is no significant gender difference in willing to self-compete, though confidence and risk aversion still impact this result. It seems that confidence may play a larger role in decision to compete against others than onself.<o:p></o:p>

Interestingly, when matched with a competitor with the same gender and ability level, women are still less willing to compete than men. In other studies, researchers have found that female-only groups are more willing to compete, but this was not the case in this experiment.<o:p></o:p>

Further, when matched with a competitor of the opposite gender and same ability level, the researchers did not observe a significant gender difference in willingness to compete. It may be that this condition provided better information – competitors did not have to think about how good their competition was, which may have provided a confidence boost (or alleviated some of the risk of competition) and eliminated the gender difference. In both the self- and other-competition conditions, men were less risk-averse than women. However, men were more confident in the other-competition condition; in the self-competition condition, there was no gender difference in confidence. <o:p></o:p>

STUDY THREE <o:p></o:p>

The first two studies permitted participants to choose whether they wanted to compete; in the third study, participants were forced to compete, but were permitted to choose between self- and other-competition. <o:p></o:p>

In treatment one, participants got the piece rate, then either self-competition or other-competition in randomized order. Finally, participants were able to choose between each of the three options. In treatment two, the fourth round was set up so that participants had to compete, but could chose self- or other-competition. In treatment three, participants didn't experience self-competition at all: they did two piece rate rounds, and then could choose piece rate or other-competition. In treatment four, participants complete two piece rate rounds, then self-competition, and then in the final round could opt to compete against others. <o:p></o:p>

In treatment one, a large proportion of participants (of both genders!) chose the piece rate. The two competition types seem to be roughly equally popular. In treatment two, when forced to compete, self-competition was much more popular than other-competition. This finding supports the hypothesis that individuals are better able to assess their own capabilities and performance, and may be able to intuit that they can improve a great deal in another round of self-competition. <o:p></o:p>

Having experienced self-competition does not change women's propensity to choose other-competition. Interestingly, having experienced self-competition makes men less likely to choose other-competition. While this finding may have something to do with how men think about confidence, the researchers did not have an ex ante hypothesis that would explain this result, which is an interesting avenue for future research.<o:p></o:p>

The researchers also sought to decompose confidence by giving each participant a ratio of "how many tasks do you think you completed correctly" over "how many tasks do you think others completed correctly." In other-competition, men were significantly overconfident and women were significantly underconfident. However, in self-competition, there was no significant gender difference in confidence. Men are more sure that they will beat another person that they are sure that they will beat themselves, while women are more confident in their ability to improve over time rather than beat another person. Men and women are about equally good at assessing their own performance, but women tend to overestimate (and men to underestimate) how well others do. This finding may have relevance for giving feedback: to encourage women, it may be better to tell them "others are not as good as you think" than "you're better than you think."<o:p></o:p>

The researchers also examined causal attributions of performance, asking participants on a 1-10 scale whether their performance was "only due to factors I could control" to "only things I could not control." In self-competition, there was no gender difference in causal attribution – unsurprisingly, all participants attributed self-competition more to factors they could control. In the other-competition condition, women were slightly more likely to think that the result was due to uncontrollable factors. This effect was especially pronounced for participants who believed that they'd won the round: women who believe that they'd won thought that their victory was based on factors that they could not control, such as luck in who they were matched to compete against. <o:p></o:p>

In terms of future research directions, Professor Mollerstrom and her colleagues are interested in whether, if participants know they will be competing against themselves, they undercompete in round one. If so, this finding may limit the contexts in which self-competition would be appropriate. Alternatively, properly calibrated pre-set goals may be an effective middle ground between self- and other-competition. There is a great deal of room to think about how to use competitive institutions – not just other-competition—in more gender-neutral ways that nevertheless preserve the performance-boosting properties of competition.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/11/gender-differences-in-self-and-other.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-43858726739570475672017-11-15T13:55:00.000-05:002017-11-15T13:55:10.356-05:00New Ways of Thinking About Gender and Leadership Effectiveness with Aparna Joshi
The challenges that women face in entering and performing effectively in leadership roles have been widely documented: recent research indicates that the gender gap in pay and promotion is fourteen times greater than gaps in performance. The disconnect between rewards and performance is particularly large in high-prestige occupations. Aparna Joshi, Arnold Family Professor of Management at Penn State University, presented two studies on gender and leadership effectiveness, examining the issue from the perspective of both men and women in leadership roles.<o:p></o:p>

Professor Joshi's research focuses on gender as a social construction, rather than biological sex differences. Much of the work that has been done about sex effects in senior management roles focuses on women, but men have gender too! Focusing on sex also may obscure variability among women and men. Through this lens, Professor Joshi investigates whether women are rewarded when they are able to navigate through masculinized environments and whether men are punished when they cannot.<o:p></o:p>

Gender and Leadership in the U.S. Congress<o:p></o:p>

Politics in the United States is a highly masculine context; while women have been making gains in representation, women legislators make up approximately 20% of the U.S. Congress. Professor Joshi's first study focused on when female politicians have been successful in bringing about change: to what extent are women legislators able to get bills passed? What types of bills are they more or less successful at getting passed? Are women legislators more successful when they highlight their distinctiveness, or when they try to assimilate with the dominant group? <o:p></o:p>

To test these questions, Professor Joshi utilized a sixteen-year longitudinal data set of all Congressional bills introduced from 1993 to 2008, controlling for the president in office and the majority party in Congress. In general, men were more effective than women in getting bills passed (850 to 133) and introduced a larger number of bills overall (approximately 12,000 of 70,000 were introduced by women). Professor Joshi and her colleagues examined the content of these bills and coded them on a range from more female-identified (education, healthcare) to more male-identified (defense, fiscal policy).<o:p></o:p>

The results of this analysis reveal that women legislators are as good as men at getting neutral (neither male- nor female-identified) bills passed. Men legislators were also about as effective as women at getting female-identified bills; though many men don't think that they have the credibility to speak about "women's issues," they nevertheless demonstrated legislative success. The most significant finding from this sample was that women legislators were particularly successful in getting male-identified bills passed. This finding indicates that for women in male-dominated environments, distancing themselves from their distinctive identity group may correlate with greater success.<o:p></o:p>

There was also an interesting effect over the tenure of female legislators that seems to indicate both a novelty premium for new legislators and a credibility premium for more senior legislators in passing female-identified bills. This finding presents an exciting avenue for future research!<o:p></o:p>

Gender and Leadership among Fortune 500 CEOs<o:p></o:p>

Professor Joshi also presented a study to problematize the "think manager think male" paradigm that tends to treat men as a monolithic bloc rather than examining variability among men. This study focused on masculinity as a source of variability for men: do different levels of masculinity and femininity predict differential performance or pay among men? <o:p></o:p>

To test this question, Professor Joshi and her colleagues coded interview videos of male Fortune 500 CEOs for masculine and feminine traits and compared these findings to their pay in the first year of being CEO. Even within this highly select sample of male CEOs, there was a range of femininity and masculinity that further reinforces the idea that men are not all the same.<o:p></o:p>

Among this sample, femininity did not have significant effects on pay or performance. Controlling for the firm's prior performance, CEOs that were androgynous were the highest performing in the sample. However, CEOs that were masculine or androgynous were the highest paid in the sample. These findings indicate that while greater masculinity doesn't correlate with higher performance, it does relate to higher pay. <o:p></o:p>

This study demonstrates, first, that there is gender variability among men, even at the CEO level. Secondly, variations in masculinity can have costs for men. Rather than affecting only women, the "think manager/think male" paradigm also has implications for men navigating masculinized working environments. Further research on gender and leadership effectiveness should be sure to take into account gendered effects on both men and women. <o:p></o:p>

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/11/new-ways-of-thinking-about-gender-and.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-32112908813597321112017-11-07T00:34:00.000-05:002017-11-07T00:34:30.804-05:00Intimate Violence and Sexual Violence in Chinese Societies with Jia Xue
WAPPP Fellow Jia Xue, PhD Candidate in Social Welfare at the University of Pennsylvania, presented her work on domestic violence, social media, and mental health in the Chinese context.

To begin, she described two cases of domestic violence in China: in the first, a Chinese woman, married at 26, was severely beaten by her husband. She called the police at least eight times, but they refused to intervene on the grounds that domestic violence was a "family matter." The woman ultimately died in 2008 after ten months of marriage because of the abuse. In the other, an American woman married a Chinese man who was a famous English teacher. When her husband began abusing her, she also reported to the police who said that they could not assist her. She decided to post pictures of her injuries on Weibo, often described as China's Twitter. Within an hour, her post had been retweeted 10,000 times and had received 4,000 comments. With the help of activists on social media, she launched a landmark case against her husband and received compensation for the abuse.<o:p></o:p>

While these two cases differ on many grounds, the use of social media to speak out against abuse caught Jia's eye. Weibo was established in 2010 and grew quickly, so that by the time the American woman chose to speak out in 2011, there was an established social media community to bring public scrutiny to her case. Social media, according to Jia, has changed the public from consumers of information to producers of information, telling the government and the media what they think should be on the policy agenda. <o:p></o:p>

The growth of social media in China has been astronomical. More than half of all internet users are Chinese, and almost 90% of the Chinese population owns a mobile phone. Weibo is the leading Chinese social network and boasts more than 600 million users. <o:p></o:p>

While many terms are used to describe domestic violence in the United States – including intimate partner violence, violence against women, and gender-based violence – domestic violence is the sole term used in China, and refers specifically to physical harm perpetrated by current family members. Domestic violence in the Chinese context does not include violence by former partners or among same-sex couples. While there is no national representative survey of domestic violence in China, the All-China Women's Federation estimates that one-third of married women have experienced domestic violence in their lifetime.

<o:p></o:p>

Jia pointed out a twenty-year lag between the U.S. and China in terms of domestic violence legislation. The U.S. first passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994. The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 raised awareness about the issue of domestic violence, but the first provincial regulation against it was not released until 2000, in Hunan. In 2001, domestic violence was mentioned for the first time in a national-level law. Finally, after many years of advocacy, a national domestic violence law was passed in 2015, to be implemented in March 2016. <o:p></o:p>

Jia's research is at the intersection of violence and social media, using computational, big-data approaches to examine domestic violence. One of her current projects is to explore (re)tweeting behavior of domestic violence topics on Twitter. Using topic modeling to summarize and categorize tweets, it became clear that organizational Twitter accounts discuss domestic violence in the context of advocacy, while individual Twitter accounts are more likely to discuss high-profile individual cases, like those about sports or movie stars.

In a separate study, she examined the correlation between use of traditional or contemporary media and prevalence rates of domestic violence. Survey respondents who were more likely to read books experienced fewer incidents of violence, while those who had higher levels of internet use reported more domestic violence. Jia hypothesized that more time spent online reduces communication between couples, which leads to marital tension, though the reverse could be true: in relationships with a higher incidence of violence, individuals may spend more time on the internet to be away from their spouse. The seminar audience also pointed out that there could be a generational effect: older survey respondents may be less likely to use the internet and less likely to categorize certain behaviors as domestic violence. Alternatively, there could be salience bias in this sample: survey respondents who spend more time online and consume more international news may have learned more about the issue of domestic violence and have a different view of the issue than those who consume more traditional media sources. <o:p></o:p>

Jia described one final study on using social media to explore the impact of domestic violence on mental health in China. One limitation of existing studies is that domestic violence is unpredictable; it is difficult to measure mental health before and after an incident of domestic violence. With Weibo, researchers have a corpus of posts from individuals over a long period of time and can isolate messages before and after a given incident to examine the impacts of domestic violence on depression, suicidal ideation, and life satisfaction. Jia and her colleagues amassed data from 1.6 million users, a total of 5 billion posts. The researchers selected posts based on nine types of domestic violence keywords and then manually screened posts to ensure that the poster was describing a personal incident. Ultimately, 644 posts were identified as real domestic violence cases. The next step was for the researchers to identify whether the post described the poster's first experience of domestic violence, including if the post clearly stated that this was the first experience (approximately 70% of posts) or that the poster had never experienced domestic violence before (15%). Ultimately, the researchers ended up with 232 unique Weibo posts. Finally, the researchers selected a group of 232 Weibo users with no domestic violence experience and matched them to the existing pool based on gender and location. <o:p></o:p>

For the four weeks prior to and after the first-time incident of domestic violence, the researchers used natural language processing and behavioral features to create a prediction model of users' levels of depression, suicidal ideation, and life satisfaction. The two matched groups did not show any significant differences in mental health before the domestic violence incidents, and the non-victim group did not show any significant changes in mental health over the eight-week period. For Weibo users who experience intimate partner violence, 40% were more depressed after the incident, but there were no significant impacts on suicidal ideation or life satisfaction. Posters who experienced abuse from their parents demonstrated lower life satisfaction after the first-time event. Those who were exposed to domestic violence but were not themselves the victim had a higher rate of suicidal ideation and lower life satisfaction. <o:p></o:p>

There are certain limitations of this study: researchers have to rely on profile information, and there may be a selection bias for posters who are willing to describe their experience on social media. However, this study was able to show short-term mental health impacts after incidents of domestic violence using innovative methods. These research findings may spur additional research or policy interventions for prevention. <o:p></o:p>

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/11/intimate-violence-and-sexual-violence.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-63047226705791915302017-10-31T10:20:00.000-04:002017-10-31T10:20:06.736-04:00Gender and Security Seminar Series: Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams with Dr. Andreas KotsadamThe inaugural session of the Gender and Security Seminar series featured Dr. Andreas Kotsadam, Senior Researcher at the Frisch Centre in Oslo, Norway, as he presented the results of a recent study on gender attitudes and integration in the Norwegian military.

Though women make up almost half of the paid labor force in most developed countries, occupational segregation persists. With only observational data, it is difficult to understand the causal link. It may be that workers in male-dominated field are more susceptible to gender stereotypes; alternatively, those who choose to work in male-dominated professions may subscribe to those stereotypes to begin with. Dr. Kotsadam's paper helps to explicate this mechanism.

Dr. Kotsadam and his colleagues joined forces with the Norwegian army, which remains very sex-segregated: women make up approximately 14% of the Norwegian military. While all men and women in Norway must register to be conscripted, only about 1/6 of a given cohort is selected for military service. New conscripts spend eight weeks in boot camp followed by ten months of service. Military officials have made it a priority to increase gender integration, including having mixed-gender squads living together and sharing rooms.

In this study, new conscripts completed a survey on their first day of training before leaving for boot camp. Each person was randomly assigned to a squad: some squads included female soldiers, while others were entirely male. Squads live together, work closely together, and cannot leave the base during boot camp, creating an intense, cooperative setting in which to study gender attitudes. After eight weeks of boot camp, each person completed the survey again.

The survey included three gender-related measures:

1. Participants registered their level of agreement with the idea that same-gender teams perform better than mixed-gender teams. At baseline, 61% of men and 90% of women though that mixed-gender teams performed as well or better than same-gender teams.

2. Participants registered their level of agreement with the idea that it is important that men and women share household work equally. At baseline, 67% of men and 87% of women agreed.

3. As part of the military's evaluation, participants were asked how well the phrase "I am feminine" described them. The researchers considered anything other than a complete disavowal of the feminine to be a measure of more egalitarian gender attitudes. All of the women and 56% of men agreed at least somewhat with the phrase "I am feminine."

In comparing the final survey to the baseline, soldiers who had at least one woman in their squad demonstrated a 14 percentage point increase in agreement that mixed-gender teams perform as well or better than single-gender teams. There was an 8 percentage point increase in the number of men who agreed that it is important to share household work. Finally, there was a statistically significant reduction in the number of men who completely disavowed being feminine.

These results demonstrate a clear, large effect on gender attitudes from working together with women in close settings. According to Dr. Kotsadam, the effect is quite general and seems to affect more or less everyone. These results also confirm the central hypothesis of contact theory, which states that if people are placed into close, cooperative settings with equal status and an enforcing authority, "good things happen." However, the reverse effect also holds in this data: for men who were assigned to single-sex squads, their survey responses became less egalitarian over the course of boot camp.

What impact do these gender attitudes have on perceptions of leadership? When asked which sex makes the best leaders at various levels of command, all soldiers uniformly answered men, perhaps because of an exposure effect: all of the leaders that they had come into contact with were men. However, in an experimental setting involving a fictional candidate for squad leader, soldiers in mixed-gender squads did not discriminate at all between male and female candidates.

Many of the objections to military integration revolve around what happens to men when female soldiers are introduced: to they want to quit the military? Do they demonstrate lower morale, worse performance, or less satisfaction? Does unit cohesion or preparation suffer? In these results, the researchers did not find any differential attrition between same-gender and mixed-gender squads, and all soldiers were equally satisfied with their time in boot camp, whether or not they worked with female soldiers.

The results of this study indicate that gender attitudes are not fixed – it is possible to change them. Dr. Kotsadam cautioned that while this study has a great deal of internal validity, its external validity may be weaker, as the military is a very particular setting made up of very particular individuals. However, this study is a clear confirmation of contact theory and sets the stage for additional work in changing gender attitudes.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/10/gender-and-security-seminar-series-does.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-44861117025130195252017-09-20T00:07:00.002-04:002017-09-20T00:07:07.321-04:00Discussing Diversity: How Emphasizing and Minimizing Intergroup Differences Affect Bias and Empowerment with Ashley MartinOver the last several years, there has been an increased push to talk about diversity, under the assumption that being blind to difference is counterproductive and that to leverage the benefits of diversity, we have to emphasize it. But is it really a good idea to talk about difference? This week's WAPPP seminar featured Ashley Martin, PhD Candidate at Columbia Business School, as she presented a series of studies about awareness of difference and effects on inclusion and empowerment.

There is a great deal of literature about awareness of difference with respect to race: talking about difference reduces bias and increases engagement. However, there is almost no research on this awareness strategy for gender. The single study that had been published showed that being aware of or emphasizing gender differences was related to benevolent sexism. As a field, researchers have not systematically explored the types of differences attention to diversity emphasizes, whether they are similar for race and gender, and how this strategy affects outcomes for each group.

Effects of awareness on attributions of difference

In the first study, the researchers asked 143 participants to list ten differences either between men and women or between black and white people. When asked to categorize these differences, it became clear that the listed racial differences were far more in the realm of opportunity and culture, and the gender differences were more related to personality and biology. The results of this initial study demonstrate that the types of differences that people generate when asked to consider race and gender are difference – for race, people focus on external differences related to opportunity, but for gender, people focus on internal differences.

The second study served to measure individuals' beliefs about how one should approach difference. Study participants were rated on an awareness scale (how often they agreed with statements like "there are differences between groups that should be acknowledged" versus "there is no reason to categorize people based on their membership in a certain group") and how often they attributed difference to external versus internal factors (opportunity/culture or personality/biology). Study participants who said that we should celebrate racial differences were more likely to attribute difference to opportunity; by contrast, those who said we should celebrate gender differences were more likely to attribute difference to biology. Recognizing external differences with respect to race is a positive development, as recognizing inequality is the first step in disrupting it. However, attributing gender differences to personality and biology has consequences for women.

In particular, the third study revealed that "personality differences" really boil down to stereotypes about gender and leadership; that men are agentic and assertive, whereas women are communal and warm. By telling people to recognize and embrace differences, we may be inadvertently telling them to embrace stereotypes that limit women's opportunities. In this experiment, subjects were divided into three groups: the first read an article on why it is good to be aware of differences, the second an article on why it is good to be blind to differences, and the third were simply asked to think about diversity.

In the second stage of the study, participants were asked to rate whether differences between groups were due to opportunity or biology, to what extent a list of character traits regarding assertiveness versus communality were associated with each group, and a measure of "denial of inequality" – whether participants thought that discrimination was not a problem, and that on average all groups were treated equally.

On the race side, participants were more likely to attribute difference to opportunity rather than biology. However, those who reflected on the importance of acknowledging difference in the first stage were more likely to attribute differences to opportunity, while those who read the article deemphasizing difference made fewer opportunity attributions. On the gender side, participants endorsed biological reasons for difference in both the control and the "aware" condition. Only the group who read the article about being blind to difference attributed gender differences more to opportunity than to biology. Further analysis of these findings indicated that there was little connection between race and stereotyping. By contrast, all participants associated men with agency much more than women, though in the blind condition, this assessment decreased somewhat.
Overall, this study reveals that being blind to difference is the baseline for racial differences, and that awareness pushes people to consider the antecedents of difference more closely. For gender, awareness of difference doesn't change results from the status quo, but being blind to difference can improve assessments of women.

Effects on bias

The next study was designed to test the effects of awareness ideology on bias. Two groups of male study participants were asked to read either the "aware of difference" article or the "blind to difference" article, and then were given a woman's resume and asked to rate her leadership potential and assess whether they would hire her. In the awareness condition, participants rated the applicant lower on leadership potential than in the blindness condition, and were less likely to hire her. The decision to hire is mediated by the individual's leadership evaluation, which is itself affected by stereotypes regarding agency and what makes a good leader that are emphasized through awareness of gender difference.

Effects on women's confidence

How do these assessments affect women at work? In the next study, 163 women were asked to make lists of differences or similarities between genders, and were then asked to what extent these qualities undermined their ability to be seen as a leader. When women listed differences, they perceived these differences as having a major negative effect on their leadership potential and listed more words related to agency and assertiveness than when they listed similarities.
In the next phase of the study, 115 women read either the article about the benefits of being aware of difference, the benefits of being blind to difference, or a control article that was completely devoid of any gendered content. Next, the participants took a workplace confidence scale: in the control condition and in the awareness condition, women rated their workplace confidence above the midpoint. However, in the blindness condition, women rated themselves as significantly more competent.

Awareness of difference not only affects confidence, but also action-taking. The next study featured 126 female managers, who read either the aware or blind to differences article, then completed a self-assessment of their agency, the workplace confidence scale, and then participated in several risky decision tasks. In the awareness condition, the participants identified less with agency, rated themselves lower on workplace confidence, and took less action than in the blindness condition.

Dyadic effects

In the final study, the researchers examined how men's awareness beliefs affected male-female interactions. Study participants were divided into male-female pairs. In the first part of the study, the men read either the awareness or blindness article. Next, the pairs were asked to complete the bushfire survival task, requiring them to discuss and rank a list of survival items in order of importance. Independent raters were asked to evaluate the amount of time men versus women spent talking, the level of openness in the conversation, and the overall quality of the interaction. In the awareness condition, men spoke more than women and were less open. In the blindness condition, women spoke significantly more than men, men and women were equally open, and the interactions were overall higher in quality. Indeed, it seemed that men were "leaning out" so that women could lean in.

The results of these studies indicate that awareness of difference can be beneficial in attributing race to external differences, but that deemphasizing gender difference leads to better outcomes for women. This research demonstrates that diversity strategies shouldn't be monolithic, as they may not work for all groups. Perhaps instead of discussing differences between men and women, discussing similarities may be an effective intervention to promote gender equality.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/09/discussing-diversity-how-emphasizing.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-4090242179943063312017-09-13T21:05:00.000-04:002017-09-13T21:05:56.425-04:00Should She Lead? Why Colleagues of Women, and Women Themselves, Often Think the Answer is No with Alison Wood BrooksShould women lead? We here at WAPPP strongly believe yes, but many people, including women themselves, often think the answer is no. This year's first WAPPP seminar featured Alison Wood Brooks, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Professor Brooks presented results from two published papers regarding perceptions of women in leadership roles and women's experiences of those roles, as well as two earlier-stage projects.

We know women are underrepresented in leadership positions: less than 15% of executive officers are women, less than 11% of US firms with venture capital backing have been founded or led by women, and less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. To understand why, Professor Brooks examines both demand-side factors (how people perceive and react to women in the workplace) and supply-side factors (how women themselves think and behave in the workplace, including individual differences in personality and preferences).

The Demand Side: How Gender and Attractiveness Affect Entrepreneurial Pitch Success

On the demand side, Professor Brooks presented a study demonstrating that investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men. An analysis of the pitches given at the three largest entrepreneurial pitch competitions across the US over three years revealed that male entrepreneurs were 60% more likely than female entrepreneurs to win the competition and earn investor funding. In their study, Professor Brooks and her colleagues asked 521 people to watch two entrepreneurial pitch videos and choose one to invest in, switching whether the video was narrated by a male or a female voice. Sixty-eight percent of participants chose a venture pitched by a male voice, at a very high level of statistical significance, controlling for the pitch itself, the order the pitches were presented, participant gender, and participant age.

However, field data reveals that this effect is not just about gender: attractive male entrepreneurs were statistically significantly more likely to win pitch competitions than less-attractive male entrepreneurs. Interestingly, in the field data, there was no statistically significant impact of attractiveness on female entrepreneurial success. In the next stage of the study, to understand whether attractive people might just be better at pitching, the researchers asked 194 people to watch one pitch video and rate it. The researchers varied whether participants heard a male or female voice, and whether the photo of the narrator they were shown was more or less attractive. Participants were asked how likely they were to invest in the venture and to what extent the pitch was persuasive, fact-based, and logical. Again, attractive male entrepreneurs were significantly more likely to secure investment than less-attractive men, while there was no statistically significant difference for women. However, male-narrated pitches were rated as more persuasive, fact-based, and logical. These findings indicate that male entrepreneurs – especially attractive ones—are more likely to receive investor funding than are female entrepreneurs based on their gender and physical attractiveness rather than the content of their ideas.

Extending the Analysis: Data from Kickstarter

Professor Brooks embarked on a new project to replicate and extend this study using big data from Kickstarter.com, a large crowdfunding platform. Professor Brooks and her colleagues took a sample of 1,249 projects from Kickstarter that included a picture of a single entrepreneur whose gender could easily be identified. Ten independent judges rated the age and attractiveness of the entrepreneurs in every photo. The researchers used the number of investors as a measure of pitch success and included other available information (including number of days left in the campaign) as control variables. Analysis of the Kickstarter data replicates Professor Brooks' earlier findings. Male entrepreneurs had about twice as many investors compared to female investors, and for male investors (but not female investors) attractiveness garnered more investors.

Professor Brooks also included two follow-up experiments. The first was designed to test the relationship between entrepreneur gender, entrepreneur attractiveness, and investor gender. The results reveal that male investors are more likely to fund good-looking male and female entrepreneurs, but that female investors are more likely to fund attractive male entrepreneurs and less likely to fund attractive female entrepreneurs. The second experiment was to test to what extend these results are about threat. Are women threatened by attractive women? Are men threatened by successful men? The data bears out this initial hypothesis: women are less likely than men to invest in ventures run by attractive women, but are more likely than men to invest in ventures run by successful men.

The Supply Side: How Do Women Themselves View Professional Advancement?

On the supply side, Professor Brooks presented a study indicating that compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable. When asked to list their core goals in life, female participants listed more goals than men overall, but a smaller proportion of women's goals were related to achieving power at work. These findings hold when people make their own lists of goals, when they select goals from a pre-determined list, and when they reject goals from a pre-determined list. When asked to what extent they expect certain positive or negative outcomes resulting from a promotion to a higher-power position at work, men and women report equivalent levels of positive reactions to the promotion, but women report stronger negative reactions to the promotion. Men and women rate the promotion as equally attainable, but women rate the promotion as less desirable and, compared to men, are less likely to accept the position. These results are consistent across high-level executives, mid-level managers, recent MBA alumni, and undergraduate students.

Importantly, these findings are descriptive, not prescriptive. It may be that men and women are correctly predicting the unique experiences they will each face in high-power positions; alternatively, women may be overestimating the negative consequences associated with power, men may be underestimating the negative consequences associated with power, or both.

New Areas for Research: Gender, Power, Laughter, and Happiness

In a new project, Professor Brooks is working to investigate the relationships between gender, power, laughter, and happiness. Two sources of data provide converging evidence that men and women might use laughter differently: the U.S. Gallup Poll 2013 and speed-dating conversations. In the Gallup poll, women report laughing and smiling more than men in their daily lives, but also report experiencing more negative emotions (worry, sadness, anger, stress). In the speed dating context, women are more likely to laugh during their dates, regardless of how funny they find their partner. However, female laughter is a worse indicator of interest in a second date compared to male laughter. Said differently, women laugh more often, irrespective of humor, but not in a way that is necessarily connected to interest. As there has been little research done on the supply-side dimension of women's unique experiences, particularly in leadership roles, this is an area ripe for exploration.

For more on Professor Brooks' research, check out our Gender Action Portal:

http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/investors-prefer-entrepreneurial-ventures-pitched-attractive-men

http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/compared-men-women-view-professional-advancement-equally-attainable-less-desirable

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/09/should-she-lead-why-colleagues-of-women.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-76475125496005067422017-05-04T13:50:00.001-04:002017-05-04T13:50:28.912-04:00Self-Affirmation as Strategy for Reducing Gender Effects on Negotiation with Chiara TrombiniWomen face serious obstacles on the road to success. Despite reporting the same career aspirations and ambitions, women are underrepresented at the top and tend to be less satisfied with their careers than men. Women make up 44% of S&P 500 companies, but only 25% of corporate boards and only 6% of CEOs. Gender discrimination accounts for a large part of this discrepancy: certain attributes that are considered essential for career advancement are stereotypically male, and professional women face backlash when they display these traits.

How do men react to the prospect of working with agentic women in male-dominated environments, and how can we make men more willing to work with agentic women? The final WAPPP seminar of the year figured Chiara Trombini, AY'17 WAPPP Fellow, as she presented three studies on this line of research.

Why focus on men evaluating agentic women in male-dominated environments? Gender differences are more likely to emerge in male-dominated environments, and women are evaluated more harshly when they occupy male-dominated roles, exhibit stereotypically male attributes, or are evaluated by men. In particular, women face a competence-likability double bind: either they are well-liked but considered incompetent, or are competent but socially unattractive and therefore less worthy of hiring or promotion.

Is there a way to overcome the "threat" posed by agentic women? Chiara argues that self-affirmation is one way to reduce backlash and promote gender equality. Self-affirmation is when individuals reflect on values that are personally relevant to them. Self-affirming individuals are less likely to experience distress, less likely to react defensively, and are more likely to be objective in their decisions and less likely to rely on stereotypes. From a cognitive perspective, self-affirmation is effective at reducing the effects of prejudice and stereotypes, makes individuals more likely to accept threatening information and modify their behavior in response to threat, and increases concession-making and openness to compromise in negotiations.

How can self-affirmation reduce backlash? The mechanism lies in men's emotional response to agentic women. Men dominate the current gender system and are sensitive and responsive to threats to their masculinity. When gender status is uncertain or challenged, men experience anxiety and react aggressively. There is some evidence that self-affirmation reduces cortisol levels and may be able to reduce stress and anxiety responses in these situations.

Chiara hypothesized that self-affirmation would make individuals less likely to rely on stereotypes and prejudices, so men who practiced self-affirmation would be more willing to work with agentic women and would feel less anxious at the prospect of doing so. She presented three studies testing these hypotheses on self-affirmation and gendered backlash.

Study 1

In the first study, evaluators were asked to rank 11 values (sense of humor, politics, religion, creativity, etc.) in order of personal importance. In the self-affirmation condition, evaluators were asked to write why their most important value was important to them. In the control condition, evaluators were asked to write why their least important value could be important to someone else. Then, evaluators watched a job interview and evaluated an internal candidate for job placement. The measured variable was willingness to work with the candidate. As hypothesized, self-affirmation increased male evaluators' willingness to work with agentic women.

Study 2

Study 2 followed the same design as Study 1, but included measures for negative trait perception (whether the evaluator found the candidate to be arrogant, greedy, etc.), level of anxiety, and neutral feelings. The findings from Study 2 replicated Study 1: evaluators were less willing to work with women than men overall, but self-affirmation increased general willingness to work with candidates and particularly increased men's willingness to work with women. In addition, men in the self-affirmation condition had lower rates of negative trait perception and lower anxiety.

Study 3

Study 3 set out to evaluate whether anxiety decreases willingness to work with a job candidate. Participants were asked to evaluate a job candidate based on their behavior in a job interview after being exposed to a music clip designed to induce feelings of anxiety or feelings of calm – in this case, either the theme from Psycho or "Weightless" by Maroni Union. Evaluators then rated their current mood in terms of anxiety or calmness. In general, male evaluators were more willing to work with male candidates, and female evaluators were more willing to work with female candidates. Participants in the high anxiety condition were less willing to work with candidate across the board. In addition, male evaluators in the high anxiety condition were less willing to work with agentic women.

These studies lend a cognitive and affective perspective to examining the roots of gender discrimination in hiring. It appears that perception of negative traits and feelings of anxiety are wrapped up in hiring discrimination. Self-affirmation is a low-cost, powerful affirmation that can increase men's willingness to work with women in male-dominated environments, which could ultimately reduce gender gaps in professional settings. Organizations could institute self-affirmation practices before hiring, promotion, and performance review decisions in order to alleviate gender discrimination and ensure that they are benefitting from the entirety of the hiring pool.

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/05/self-affirmation-as-strategy-for.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-44138607540152417622017-04-25T00:12:00.000-04:002017-04-25T00:12:02.446-04:00Fathers and Work Family Balance: Mix Methods for Understanding Fatherhood Involvement and Enrichment Experiences with Marc Grau-GrauFatherhood is in transition: the traditional "distant breadwinner" model of fatherhood has eroded to a more nurturing role for fathers. Fathers are doing more care work, and work-family balance is increasingly a priority for men. At the same time, work-life conflict is increasing, leading to high levels of stress, absenteeism, and burnout, along with a lower fertility rate. In Europe, 21% of workers report that they "always" or "almost always" feel too tired when they get home from work to spend time with their families. However, few studies focus on understanding men and work-family balance.

Much of the research on work-family conflict has focused on mothers. We know that involved fathers are good for kids and for gender equality, but less about how these dual roles affect fathers and their work and family lives. This week's WAPPP seminar featured Marc Grau-Grau, WAPPP Fellow 2016-2017. Marc presented three studies from his thesis on Catalonian fathers to better understand how patterns of paternal involvement may give some clues on how to promote gender equality in parenting.

Study 1: Understanding the predictors of fatherhood involvement

Fatherhood involvement is positive for children and gender equality, but also for fathers and their jobs. The aim of the first study was to explore the care work contributions of Catalan working fathers with children under 10 to understand how patterns of fatherhood involvement differ based on metrics like education level, income, age, number of paid working hours, occupation, and partner's occupation. The motivating research question is: Why are some working fathers more involved than others?

Marc hypothesized that well-educated fathers are more likely to devote more time to their children, especially in "developmental care." As the number of paid working hours increase, fatherhood involvement is expected to decrease. Finally, men in managerial occupations are more likely to devote less time to their children.

A sample of 471 fathers and their partners were asked to complete time-use diaries recording what primary and secondary activities they were engaged in throughout the day in ten-minute intervals. Childcare was operationalized into basic care (feeding, dressing, bathing), developmental care (teaching, helping, playing, reading), and secondary childcare. On average, fathers did 59 minutes of basic care, compared to 126 for mothers. Fathers also completed 33 minutes of developmental care, compared to 37 minutes for mothers.

As predicted, fathers with higher levels of education spend more time with their children. There is no clear trend between fathers' income and childcare. Fathers in elementary occupations and in high-management occupations spend the highest proportion of quality time with their children. Younger fathers spend most time with children, but this effect could be because their children are younger or because these fathers might be unemployed. As expected, more hours spent at paid work means less time spent on care work. Finally, having an adult dependent is associated with a significant decrease in fatherhood involvement – by 29 minutes – all else being equal.

Study 2: Understanding the positive side (work-family enrichment)

Most research on work and family is based on a conflict perspective, under the assumption that time, energy, and attention are finite and that work-family conflict is a zero-sum game. However, an expansion approach may be more appropriate: high performance skills in one role may spill over into one's other roles. This expansion of skills into other roles is known as work-family enrichment. Do the rewards and benefits perceived by working fathers in one role spill into the other role

In this study, Marc interviewed father and their partners. Seven of 20 fathers chose to do their interviews in the workplace, including 5 of 6 managers. The fathers described skills that they perceived that they learn at work that help them at home, including organization and time management, technical skills, people management, new perspectives, and cultural capital. In the opposite direction, fathers described skills that they perceived that they learn at home that help them at work, including sensitivity, patience, responsibility, people management, support, values, and long-term project management.

Fathers in high-level occupations described their work-family enrichment in terms of people management and cultural capital; fathers in lower-level occupations reported enrichment in organization and technical skills. This study reveals that enrichment is not the opposite of conflict and that soft skills are mainly developed at home.

Study 3: Understanding potential barriers to fatherhood involvement

What happens with these involved fathers? Having a child has an impact on fathers' professional careers, but not the same effect as for women: previous research has established a motherhood penalty as compared to a fatherhood premium for having children. That said, fathers can receive backlash in terms of being a "poor worker" (that is, not committed 24/7 to their jobs) or a femininity stigma.

This study employed qualitative interviews on a different sample of fathers to examine barriers to fatherhood involvement. Marc identified five key barriers in particular:

Barrier 1: Poor organizational support. Though organizational policies for fathers exist, there is little institutional support for them, and fathers are rarely explicitly informed of potential options like flextime.

Barrier 2: Anticipation of negative career consequences due to transgressing the "ideal worker" norm.

Barrier 3: Personal obstacles to fatherhood involvement based on gender norms and self-image; many fathers reported barriers to fatherhood involvement linked to their masculine identity.

Barrier 4: Many fathers perceive that being a working father is not a legitimate reason to ask for more flexibility; they may ask for accommodations when completing an MBA or starting a new business, but not for spending time with their children.

Barrier 5: Money – Fathers perceive that using flex options is associated with wage reductions in a sort of "fatherhood penalty."

Future potential work

There are a great number of possible research projects within fatherhood involvement. There is certainly more to do on the "sociology of thriving" and how fatherhood involvement can benefit organizations. On the flipside, more evidence on stigmas, barriers, and costs of fatherhood involvement could illuminate obstacles to gender equality in parenting. We look forward to hearing more!

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/04/fathers-and-work-family-balance-mix.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-71168571552389878872017-04-17T20:51:00.001-04:002017-04-17T20:51:18.356-04:00Intersectionality and Women's Health: Sexual Orientation, Race/Ethnicity, and Cervical Cancer Screening with Madina AgénorOver the last few years, there has been a significant increase in public health literature that employs an intersectional approach. Intersectionality is an analytical tool that allows us to more accurately describe how human experience is shaped by multiple forms of social inequality that act in diverse and mutually reinforcing ways. This week's WAPPP seminar featured Madina Agénor, Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Professor Agénor presented her research on how sexual orientation and race/ethnicity simultaneously affect disparities in cervical cancer screening among U.S. women.

Professor Agénor presented the results of three studies to demonstrate how intersectionality matters for population health and health equity. The first study examines how sexual orientation affects cervical cancer screenings without using an intersectional approach, and the second does the same for race/ethnicity. The third study employs an intersectional approach to illuminate how sexual orientation and race/ethnicity interact to produce discrepancies in cervical cancer screening.

Sexual orientation and cervical cancer screenings
Lesbian and bisexual women (collectively referred to here as "sexual minority women") are less likely to receive cervical cancer screenings and routine gynecological care than heterosexual women. Women with female sexual partners may also be more susceptible to cervical cancer because of higher rates of smoking and HPV. In addition, sexual minority women face a number of barriers to healthcare, including lower average income, lack of access to regular care and health insurance, and discrimination in society and in the healthcare system.

However, sexual minority women's health is an understudied area, and there are significant gaps in research, including overreliance on convenience samples of mostly white, college-educated women; problems with measurement of sexual orientation (some studies conflate sexual orientation identity with sexual behavior); lack of appropriate comparison groups; and limited attention to potential drivers of sexual orientation disparities in pap testing.

Professor Agénor's research uses a national probability sample of U.S. women, operationalizes sexual attraction, sexual orientation identity, and sexual behavior as different components of sexual orientation, uses appropriate comparison groups for each component of sexual orientation, and assesses whether healthcare factors (including access to insurance, receiving contraception, and STI services use) contribute to sexual orientation disparities in pap testing.

Lesbian-identified women exhibited significantly lower pap test use compared to heterosexual women (43% versus 69%), as did women with only female sexual partners compared to women with only male sexual partners (46% versus 71%). These disparities persisted even after controlling for age, household income, and other similar factors. Interestingly, differences in healthcare factors – access to health insurance, contraception, and STI services use – completely attenuated this disparity. According to the results of this study, focusing on only sexual orientation without an intersectional lens, healthcare factors may explain the discrepancy in cervical cancer screening among sexual minority women.

Race/Ethnicity and cervical cancer
In 2012, incidence of cervical cancer was highest among black and Latinx women, and cervical cancer mortality was three times higher among black women than white women. However, there has only been one subnational population-based study on sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, and pap test use, and this study also lacked appropriate comparison groups and didn't seek out the drivers of disparities. Again using a national probability sample, Professor Agénor examined sexuality, race/ethnicity, and healthcare factors across racial and ethnic groups within sexual minority groups.

Professor Agénor found a lower prevalence of pap test use among women with only female sexual partners for black and white women, with the greatest disparity in pap test use between white women with only female partners and white women with only male partners. There was no difference in pap test use among Latinx women, regardless of whether they had male or female sexual partners. Importantly, the results of this study indicate that healthcare factors completely attenuated the disparity between women with female sexual partners and women with male sexual partners for white women only.

The magnitude and mechanisms of sexual orientation disparities in pap testing vary by race, which we wouldn't have known without employing an intersectional approach. The crucial implications of this study are that addressing healthcare access barriers may mitigate disparities for some but not all women, and that we should be wary of "one-size-fits-all" interventions.

Qualitative Intersectional Study
In order to better understand the mechanism of these effects on black sexual minority women, Professor Agénor held focus group discussions that centered around four key themes: healthcare provider communication style, heteronormative healthcare provider assumptions, heterosexism, racism, and classism, and healthcare provider background.

Participants preferred healthcare providers who took time to build relationships, were knowledgeable about sexual minority women's health, and provided them with relevant sexual health information.

Many participants reported that their healthcare providers assumed heterosexuality, and therefore provided patients with limited relevant sexual health information. Similarly, many participants reported both a fear of disclosing their sexual orientation to healthcare providers and negative experiences when they did so.

Many participants reported that their healthcare providers made social class assumptions based on their race/ethnicity. Some healthcare providers made further assumptions based on perceived social class about their patients' ability to understand health information, which affected both how they communicated with them and how they involved them in decision making.

Participants reported negative experiences with OB/GYNs and expressed a preference for nurses and physician assistants, who provided more individualized attention. Finally, respondents reported a preference for healthcare providers with similar lived experiences, particularly for black sexual minority women healthcare providers.

The results of this study indicate that patient-provider communication may be an important contributor to sexual orientation disparities in pap test use among black women. Sexual orientation and race influence black sexual minority women's pap testing experiences and outcomes by shaping their exposure to multiple forms of discrimination and their access to and rapport with healthcare providers. Interventions designed for black sexual minority women should address multiple forms of discrimination and will have to look different than interventions designed for white sexual minority women.

Whether or not we employ an intersectional approach can be critical for designing appropriate interventions to promote health. Intersectionality matters for population health and health equity.

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/04/intersectionality-and-womens-health.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-28409715943816618532017-04-11T01:53:00.000-04:002017-04-11T01:53:46.347-04:00Quotas Matter: The Effect of Gender Quota Laws on Work-Family Policies with Ana Catalano Weeks Gender quota systems, though controversial in the US, have proliferated in over 50 countries. In parliamentary elections, quota laws require a certain number of women to be on the party lists for all political parties. Quotas can have a significant effect on female political representation – in one election cycle in Portugal, female representation increased from 21% to 27%. But are these increases indicative of real change, or just "window dressing"? What effect do quota laws have on policy, and under what conditions? This week's WAPPP seminar featured Ana Catalano Weeks, WAPPP Fellow and College Fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University, as she discussed her research on the effects of gender quota laws on work-family policies.

In order to assess these questions, Ana examined data from Italy, Belgium, France, Spain, and Portugal. She limited her research to advanced democracies, as her theory is dependent on men and women having different policy preferences – i.e., women prefer spending more on social policy programs compared to men – which is less true in developing countries. She found that quotas are especially likely to lead to policy changes in areas in which there is a gender gap in preferences, and particularly in areas that don't align with the main left-right dimension in politics (that is, issues that aren't well-described by economic or class-based cleavages in politics).

Previous literature indicates that quotas are effective at increasing the share of women in office. While there is a great deal of work on the preliminary stage of quotas, getting women elected, there is less data on how gender matters for legislative behavior. Evidence that greater female representation translates into specific policy outcomes is rare. One notable exception is a study of political reservations in India, which found that female leaders were more likely to invest in resources that women favor, such as water and roads. However, it is not clear that the same outcomes will translate to advanced democracies, particularly because of the party system, and the mechanism between female political representation and policy outcomes remains unclear.

The key argument in this case is that after implementation of a quota law, policies are likely to shift in the direction of women's preferences, especially for issues that are orthogonal to left-right dimensions in politics. Women face high barriers to entry into politics, be it because of discrimination or an "ambition gap." Quota laws that increase the number of women in office should also increase the representation of their political priorities. Ana argues that absent women's presence, political parties have little incentive to address orthogonal issues: such issues are cross-cutting, which may split the party's traditional constituencies and cause conflict, detract from the party's signature issues, and are not recognized by primarily male party elites to offer electrical opportunity. Quotas solve this problem by requiring parties to include women, who are more likely to care about these issues and be able to point out the electoral opportunities they present.

Ana posits two possible mechanisms for this effect. It may be that as quotas increase the number of women in parliament, these women act like any faction within the party. More people within the faction means more leverage, which leads to policy change. However, it may also be that the quota law and the debate around it raises the salience of these issues in public discourse, and this increased attention alone can lead to policy change.

The data confirm what we already know about gender gaps in preferences (women tend to prefer more social spending and government intervention than men). The biggest gender gap in social policy has to do with working mothers. When asked whether "preschool children are likely to suffer when the mother works," across countries and over time 30% of men disagreed, compared to 39% of women. This gender gap is increasing over time: greater proportions of both men and women are disagreeing, but women are disagreeing "faster." These gender gaps increase with education and persist across political parties. An exploratory factor analysis confirmed that work-family policies are actually orthogonal to the main left-right political dimension. While the latent underlying ideas around redistribution and work-family policies were correlated, they were not a result of the same underlying factor.

This preliminary work generated three key hypotheses. First, that quota laws will lead to an increase in spending on child care and parental leave. Second, quota laws will lead to a decrease in spending on family allowances, sometimes called child benefits, that are typically motivated by concern for fertility rates and that are designed to make it easier for women to stay at home. Finally, we should expect to see a larger change in spending in areas that exhibit a large gender gap in policy preferences.

Ana examined OECD social expenditures data, which allowed her to operationalize spending on child care, parental leave, and family allowances. She included controls for the number of women already in parliament, women in the labor force, GDP, party quotas, union density, fertility rate, EU membership, and overall social spending. Her methodology included two-way fixed effects models comparing changes within quota countries, along with a series of placebo regressions that set the date of the quota law's implementation back to see if another factor in the law's effective date was responsible for the result.

The results of the study confirm the first two hypotheses: gender quota laws were associated with increased spending on child care and decreased spending on family allowances. Given that overall spending remains about the same, there is a major shift in funding from family allowances to child care. These changes in spending are sizable: data from France showed a $500 increase in spending per child on child care, compared with $300 less per child on family allowances. In a smaller state like Portugal, there was a small increase per child in child care, around $40, and also small decrease in allowances per child, approximately $125. These effects are conditioned by the gender gap in each country. A larger gender gap in preferences leads to a bigger change in the amount of money spent on child care versus family allowances.

Robustness checks demonstrated that the results are actually an effect of the quota law rather than an artifact of the model or due to some other contemporaneous factor. Quotas did not affect issues not characterized by a gender gap, nor was there an effect between quotas and spending on issues well situated on the main left-right dimension.

Qualitatively, Ana compared the case of Portugal, which had a quota law at the time, with Italy, which had a quota law up for debate and chose not to pass it. Though both countries were in a period of major economic depression and austerity, they handled family policy budgeting very differently. Italy increased family allowances and new birth grants while decreasing funding for child care. By contrast, Portugal started a program to build 400 daycare centers, passed a law creating a right to preschool for children over the age of four, and eliminated family allowances for the top two income groups.

What was the mechanism at work in these changes? Interviews with policymakers in each country indicated that while there was little evidence that women acted differently in parliament, quotas did give women more leverage to push party leaders on their different priorities. However, there was also support for the second hypothesized mechanism. Party leaders began to champion gender-related issues, partially as a way of credit-claiming and partially because many leaders feared looking outdated or backwards. Interestingly, these changes persisted even when right-wing parties took over the government. While there is evidence for both mechanisms, it appears that they are not as distinct as initially theorized – when there are more women in office who have greater leverage, the salience of their policy priorities is also greater.

In conclusion, the results of quotas are not just window dressing: quotas increase the substantive representation of women's interest. Quotas shift legislative priorities toward policies that help parents combine work and family. Importantly, this indicates that identity matters even in parliamentary democracies. However, there are many more questions left to answer, including how budgetary changes affect real people's lives. We look forward to hearing more from this exciting line of research!

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/04/quotas-matter-effect-of-gender-quota.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-60371760038159270512017-04-02T23:56:00.001-04:002017-04-02T23:56:11.430-04:00Inclusive Talent Management: How Business Can Thrive in an Age of Diversity with Stephen FrostMany organizations believe that they are truly meritocratic. This belief can make C-suite executives react defensively when faced with evidence of bias. How can diversity and inclusion advocates best communicate to such an audience in ways that leverage existing research and, most importantly, in ways that will be accepted and incorporated by those in leadership roles? This week's WAPPP seminar featured Stephen Frost, Founder and Principal at Frost Included and WAPPP AY14 Fellow, whose latest book, Inclusive Talent Management: How Business Can Thrive in the Age of Diversity, demonstrates how to align talent management and diversity and inclusion agendas.

Steve began with a video that encapsulates the notion that "it's easy to miss something you're not looking for."

When viewers are concentrating on counting the number of passes one team makes, it's easy to miss the moonwalking bear! A similar logic applies to talent management concerns – when managers protest that they "can't find qualified women" for a leadership role, it behooves us to ask how we can restructure talent management processes with an eye toward diversity and inclusion to make sure that such qualified candidates – who certainly exist! – are properly identified and given due consideration.

One reason it's so easy to "not look for" diverse candidates is because we anchor on our in-groups. Think of your five closest friends, your five closest colleagues, your partner(s), and where you live. How diverse is this group? Often, our in-groups are very similar to ourselves. Our in-groups also serve as our anchors for perceiving traits like intelligence and trustworthiness in others. Without a diverse in-group that would counteract this implicit bias, we create schema of what a "leader" looks like, for example, based on the people we know who are similar to us. This bias can also manifest in corporate decisions, so that we tend to hire, retain, and promote people like ourselves.

The challenge, Steve says, is that in an age of diversity, we are still addicted to likeness. The resolution is how to change the system and our own behaviors. The key to creating change is to employ both unconscious nudges – changing the way we structure our environment to incentivize less-biased decisions – as well as conscious leadership efforts.

Steve and his colleagues interviewed 66 organizations, asking whether they believed themselves to be meritocracies and asking about their talent management in terms of recruitment, retention, and promotion. The current state is homogenous talent management, infused with large amounts of bias at each stage. However, Steve also found three models of diversity and inclusion programs. Diversity 101 is "diversity for diversity's sake," characterized by a compliance-based approach – "we do it because we have to." Diversity 2.0 is "diversity for social responsibility," which makes a marketing approach to diversity designed to draw out the benefits of difference. Diversity 3.0, by contrast, treats diversity as a boardroom-level issue and employs a bottom-up, integrated approach to systems designed to embed the benefits of difference.

One such example, as Steve described, was a decision to interview candidates in groups of ten in order to save time and money. In these larger settings, interviewers tended to see skill sets as more salient, rather than identity, and were primed to think about team dynamics rather than the individual. In these group interview settings, recruiters hired more diverse candidates. This change was to save resources, not because of the research on nudges toward diversity and inclusion, but had the effect of creating a more diverse work environment.

Steve also discussed an intervention in talent management specifically related to gender at KPMG. The organization's talent management approach involved all of the (predominantly straight white male) partners gathering in one room, talking about who they want to promote to the partnership, putting candidates on table, and agreeing on 10-20. Unsurprisingly, given what we know about in-groups and unconscious bias, the candidates up for promotion tended to look like the existing partners. The question is how to make this group less biased and more meritocratic without making them defensive.

The simple intervention that Steve proposed was to whiteboard the pipeline of potential incoming partners, separating the pool that were considered ready for partnership from those who were one to two years out, but to write the names of male candidates in red and female candidates in green. As soon as the names were written out, the discrepancy was clear – women were considered one to two years out for consideration for partnership, while men were disproportionately considered ready for promotion. On top of this, Steve attached a quantitative measure of performance for each name. Then, it became clear that several names in the "ready for partnership" group, predominantly men, were less well-performing than women in the "one to two years out" group. This intervention employs simple strategies to engender a rational, rigorous, calm, and systematic approach to checking in-group bias in talent management.

One practical challenge with diversity and inclusion interventions is that everyone is stressed and has little time and attention, to say nothing of resources, to put toward this critical work. Fortunately, even simple interventions can decrease unconscious bias, and when paired with conscious leadership efforts, these interventions can be very powerful. The simplest approach is simply to ask people to remember to ask "WADI": What About Diversity and Inclusion.

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/04/inclusive-talent-management-how.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-12595607932776965012017-03-28T22:29:00.001-04:002017-03-28T22:29:23.679-04:00The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations with Francine BlauThe gender wage gap declined substantially from 1980 to 2010. What factors contributed to this decline, and how do we account for the gap that remains? This week's WAPPP seminar featured Francine Blau, Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. Professor Blau presented new empirical evidence on the extent, trends, and sources of the gender wage gap and used this new evidence as a springboard to review the existing literature on the gender wage gap.

In 1980, women on average earned 62.1% of what men earned, a wage gap of roughly 38%. By 1989, the ratio of women's to men's earning had increased to 74%, to 77.2% in 1998, and to 79.3% in 2010. This stark change is impressive, but it's also important to not how much of the increase occurred in the 1980s. Since then, progress in decreasing the gender wage gap has been slower and less consistent.

Professor Blau incorporated two major specifications into her regression analyses. The first, a human capital specification, controls for education and experience. The other controls for variables like occupation, industry, and unionism. The first category includes differences most often affected by choices individuals make about their own lives, whereas the second category can be heavily influenced by the employer.

Using these two specifications, we can examine the gender wage gap to see how much these factors explain the variation in earnings between men and women. For example, in 1980 the unadjusted ratio of women's earning to men's was 62.1%, but controlling for the human capital specification, the ratio was 71.1%. This tells us that experience and education accounted for a great deal of the gap. Adding in the second specification, the ratio climbs to 79.4%. While this analysis demonstrates that all of these control variables play an important role in the gender wage gap, there is still a large portion that remains unexplained. In the data from 1980, women with the same characteristics as men nevertheless earned 20% less.

In 2010, the unadjusted gender wage ratio of 79.4% rises to 82.1% controlling for human capital variables and to 91.6% with the full specification. Experience still accounts for a large portion of the gender wage gap in the 2010 data, but interestingly education now detracts from the explanation. Women are now better educated than men, on average, but education appears to be doing less "work" for them in terms of reducing the gender wage gap. Women's more frequent workforce interruptions and subsequent fewer years of work experience are now contributing more to the continuation of the wage gap.

Interestingly, it appears that the gender wage gap is closing more slowly at the top of the wage distribution. Professor Blau compared women to men in the 10th percentile, 50th percentile, and the 90th percentile of the wage distribution. In 1980, the ratio of women's wages to men's was roughly the same across each of these percentile groups – approximately 60%. In 2010, the wage ratio of women to men in the 10th percentile was 82%, 81% in the 50th percentile, and yet only 73.8% for the 90th percentile. Can this discrepancy be explained by differences in characteristics between women and men in the 90th percentile? Examining the descriptive statistics, there aren't any significant differences that would account for a gap of this size. Understanding why women at the top are faring particularly poorly, and why this development is occurring now, is an important area for future research.

What accounts for the overall decrease in the gender wage gap? One particularly important answer is that women worked hard for what they got! Women improved their skills, both in terms of their educational attainment – women now receive 57% of Bachelor's degrees – and their labor force attachment and years of experience. The gender gap in full-time experience fell from 6.8 years to 1.4 years between 1980 and 2010. The change in this gap mostly reflects female gains, but has also been impacted by worse outcomes for men, particularly an increase in unemployment during the recession. Women also moved out of traditionally female clerical and service jobs into higher-paying and traditionally male managerial and professional occupations.

Traditional explanations for the gender wage gap tend to focus on discrimination and differences in human capital. While human capital factors account for less than they did in the past, they remain very important. According to Professor Blau, the economics literature is now incorporating newer explanations for the gender wage gap, such as non-cognitive skills and psychological attributes. For example, women tend to be less comfortable negotiating and tend to shy away from competitively-based compensation schemes, which can negatively affect their wages. In addition, gender norms may play a significant role in the remaining gender wage gap. One paper investigated the norm that a wife should not earn more than her husband and found that if a wife is predicted to earn more than her husband, she is less likely to participate in the labor market or, if she does, her income is lower than would be predicted based on her other attributes. These newer insights about gender differences in non-cognitive skills and the relevance of social norms pertaining to gender may help to illuminate still-unexplained aspects of the gender wage gap, but are not a silver bullet.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-gender-wage-gap-extent-trends-and.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-29624703028748825012017-03-22T10:29:00.004-04:002017-03-22T10:29:48.214-04:00Can Financial Incentives Reduce the Baby Gap? Evidence from a Reform in Maternity Leave Benefits with Anna RauteAs women's educational attainment and labor market participation have increased, so too have concerns about decreasing birth rates and below-replacement fertility levels. All OECD countries other than the US provide paid parental leave in order to reduce the cost of childbearing. However, the structure of parental benefits may affect different groups in different ways. This week's WAPPP seminar featured Anna Raute, WAPPP Fellow and Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Mannheim, as she presented her research on the effects of the 2007 German parental leave reform.

Highly educated and high-earning women tend to have fewer children than lower-educated and lower-earning women, leading to what researchers have called a "baby gap" between these two groups. For highly-paid women, having children is associated with a greater opportunity cost than for women who are less well paid. In Germany, this manifests in a stark difference in number of children born to highly-educated versus lesser-educated women, as well as a large gap in the percentage of childless women. Close to one-third of highly educated women in Germany never have a child, compared to 18% of lower-educated women (here meaning women who have completed a high school degree but no vocational training or tertiary education). However, in other countries with family policies, such as Sweden, this gap in childlessness or number of children is not quite so stark. The structure of family policies may affect these figures.

Prior to the 2007 reform, parents received a fixed sum of 7,200 euros per child. However, after the reform, parental benefits were linked to the mother's pre-birth earnings. Rather than the flat payment, mothers could receive between 67-100% of their pre-birth earnings, up to 21,000 euros per child. Prior to the reform, lower-earning mothers were getting a much greater relative benefit from parental benefits than their higher-earning peers. By contrast, with the new reform, higher-earning women stood to benefit much more from wage replacement than from the flat payment, which may have decreased their perceived opportunity cost of having a child.

The key question, Professor Raute asks, is whether fertility post-reform exhibited differential changes across the income and education distribution. Much of the prior literature on parental benefits focuses on cash transfers and welfare programs that provide greater incentives for lower-income mothers than higher-income mothers. This study provides a critical window to examine whether high-earning and highly-educated women are less elastic, or whether they too react to financial incentives in terms of their fertility.

Nine months after the implementation of the law, there was a statistically significant increase in the average monthly birth rate per thousand mothers, as well as a small drop in the number of abortions. In addition, the rate of IVF between 2006 and 2011 increased by 33%. The increase in fertility nine months after the law's implementation translates to an additional 2,300 children born per year.

Using German pension data, Professor Raute examined this increase in terms of income and education level. This birth data reveals that medium- and high-earners benefitted substantially from the new reform. While benefits for lower-earning mothers did not change substantially pre- and post-reform, medium-earning mothers received an additional 4,000 euros, on average, and high-earning mothers received an additional 8,000 euros. If the difference in these benefits affects fertility, we should expect to see a relative increase in fertility for women who are benefitting greatly from the reform versus those who are not benefitting as much.

For women who are below the median income, there is not a statistically significant change in the probability of having a child. By contrast, for women who earn above the median income, fertility increases for each income bracket. Overall, each additional 5,000 euros in expected benefits raises the probability of having a child in a given year by 6%.

Professor Raute observes the same effect when examining education. Post-reform, the average probability of having a child increases by 6% for medium-educated women and by 13% for highly-educated women.

Given the recency of the reform and the lag in available data, these are only short-term effects. Professor Raute examined women at the end of their fertility cycle in an effort to understand whether we might see a permanent effect on fertility and for which groups. Indeed, for women at the end of their fertility cycle, each additional thousand euros in benefits increases mean fertility level from pre-reform levels by 5.1%. This strong effect indicates that we might expect to see a permanent effect of the reform on completed fertility.

In addition, there is a significant increase in fertility for women ages 40-45. This effect seems to be driven by women who already have one child and decide that – now that it's cheaper – they will have a second, as opposed to childless women deciding to have their first child due to the effects of the reform. Highly-educated women are also having their first children 4.8 months earlier, on average, which is correlated with a greater number of children overall.

Overall, these findings provide strong support for a discontinuous increase in overall fertility as a result of the reform, resulting in strong effects on fertility for women with higher earnings and educational attainment. The observed baby gap between highly-educated and lesser-educated women therefore seems to be narrowing.

Interestingly, the 2007 reform also increased paternity acknowledgement, in which unmarried fathers can opt to legally register as the child's father, with all of the attached rights and obligations. In Germany, paternity acknowledgement is strongly associated with better outcomes for children.

Professor Raute hypothesizes two possible explanations for why the 2007 reform increased parental acknowledgement. It could be that as benefits to mothers increase, fathers have to contribute less to support the household, and therefore paternal acknowledgement is cheaper (the "cost channel"). Alternatively, the reform reserved two months of paid leave for fathers, which may have encouraged paternity acknowledgement (the "paternity leave channel").

Looking at children born in the first few months of the reform, whose parents couldn't have known about the new reform when they were conceived, paternity acknowledgement increased by 1.5 percentage points. However, this effect was driven primarily by women who were working prior to giving birth, who were entitled to a larger share of benefits under the reform. This effect implies that the cost channel, rather than the paternity leave channel, is responsible for the increase in paternity acknowledgement post-reform.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/03/can-financial-incentives-reduce-baby.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-91374982621752842422017-03-13T00:14:00.002-04:002017-03-13T00:14:37.378-04:00Barriers to Female Leadership: Does Race Matter? with Laurie RudmanDespite making major strides toward gender equality, gender stereotype violations are still taboo. Women who display traits inconsistent with feminine gender role prescriptions are at risk for social and economic backlash, "penalties" for behaving out of social bounds. This week's WAPPP seminar featured Laurie Rudman, Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University, as she presented studies on backlash to women's leadership, how race affects backlash, and how the psychology of backlash affected the 2016 presidential election.

The risk of backlash creates a double bind for women leaders. In order to prove their competence, aspiring leaders can show agency, ambition, or assertiveness, all traits associated with stereotypical leaders who have historically been men. This strategy is effective for demonstrating fitness for a leadership role, but when women do it they face social disapproval for transgressing feminine gender roles: women therefore have to jump over two key hurdles to get to leadership positions.

Much of the psychological research on backlash uses the example of job applicants: study participants are exposed to male and female job applicants who are either agentic (self-promoting, confident, assertive) or communal (modest, oriented toward others). Only the gender of the applicant is varied: all communal applicants and all agentic applicants use the same script. Respondents are asked to rate these applicants on their competence, likability, and hireability. Professor Rudman presented a mini-meta analysis of eight of her backlash studies that follow this same paradigm.

When comparing male and female communal applicants, respondents rate them as equally likeable. However, they tend to rate male communal applicants as more competent and therefore more hirable than women. Interestingly, agentic women tend to be rated slightly more competent than agentic men. However, agentic women are rated as far less likeable than agentic men, and therefore are not hired. This paradigm, according to Professor Rudman, perfectly illustrates the double bind: when women exhibit stereotypically "female" traits, they are viewed as incompetent; take on traditionally "male" traits that are associated with leadership, and they are unlikable and unhirable.

This paradigm of backlash and double-bind may help us understand the result of the 2016 presidential election. According to Professor Rudman, ambitious and competent women provoke backlash because they threaten the legitimacy of patriarchy. As more women are seen performing at the highest levels, it becomes less tenable for society to grant men preferential access to power and privilege. Backlash, therefore, functions to keep women out of the highest levels of leadership, render them invisible, and support patriarchy. The vitriol leveled toward Hillary Clinton throughout her career perfectly encapsulates the backlash effect.

What motivates this level of animosity? Men and women who defend traditional gender roles and power differentials are more likely to engage in backlash against agentic female leaders. However, this leaves a vital question: What is it about patriarchy that people deem worthy of defense? Professor Rudman suggested a few possible sources of support. Defenders of patriarchy may exhibit social dominance orientation (SDO), a sense that hierarchies are a good thing and that some groups deserve to be at the top, and others at the bottom. Alternatively, it could be gender essentialism, the belief that biological differences between men and women imply hierarchy. Finally, Professor Rudman suggested social Darwinism. Adherents of social Darwinism believe that humans are governed by survival of the fittest and that social hierarchies justify ruthlessness to achieve success. Social Darwinism has been used to support white supremacy, colonialism, and eugenics, and anthropologists have been quick to note that humans are driven far more by culture than by genes. Still, social Darwinism lives on in the collective consciousness, particularly in the literature on business ethics, but has rarely been studied in psychology.

With these possibilities in mind, Professor Rudman conducted a study of 433 American adults, asking whether they had preferred Trump or Clinton in the 2016 election. The results showed 60% favoring Clinton to 40% Trump, driven mostly by women's votes. After adjusting for demographic factors, political identification and support for patriarchy were the only variables that predicted favoring Trump over Clinton. This confirms what we already know – people who support patriarchy reject female leaders – but it doesn't explain why. Professor Rudman separately regressed defending patriarchy on SDO, gender essentialism, and social Darwinism and found that support for social Darwinism contributes about twice as much variance to defending patriarchy (16%) as SDO (8%) and gender essentialism (7%). This result replicated directly in a study of 387 Rutgers undergraduates: social Darwinism predicts defending patriarchy, which predicts favoring Trump over Clinton.

Professor Rudman and her colleagues delved further into gender essentialism, working with a scenario that centers reproductive biology in a study on backlash. Study participants received a paragraph about Susan and her husband, both high-powered business leaders who love their jobs. The end of the paragraph either read "Susan has never wanted to be a mother, and the couple has decided to be child-free by choice. Susan wants her husband to get a vasectomy, and he has agreed" or "Susan has always wanted to be a mother, so the couple has decided to start a family. Susan has asked her husband to reverse his vasectomy, and he has agreed." Participants were asked how much they support Susan's lifestyle, trust her decision making, and how morally justified they believe her lifestyle to be. Participants who scored higher on defending patriarchy demonstrated low support for Susan in the first condition, but not in the second condition. Just as in the last study, support for social Darwinism was the greatest contributor to this effect, above SDO and gender essentialism. These studies emphasize that social Darwinism – the belief that some are destined to dominate and others to be dominated – is a critical force in understanding defense of patriarchy and backlash against agentic women. The study of Susan demonstrates that this effect even holds outside of the political context.

What role does race have on backlash against agentic women? Black women are often stereotyped as more androgynous or masculine than white women, and therefore may have less difficulty asserting their competence by demonstrating "male" traits. Alternatively, they may face double jeopardy of having to combat both racial and gender stereotypes, placing even more hurdles on the path to leadership. Psychological studies of race can prove challenging, Professor Rudman said, because white respondents have an intense fear of being perceived as bigoted, and therefore overcompensate in their answers to reveal a pro-black bias. In the job applicant example, black women get top marks on competence, likability, and hirability, whether they are depicted as agentic or communal.

Professor Rudman and her colleagues turned to a new paradigm in which respondents were told that they were choosing actors for a role as lab managers, thereby allowing all actors to use the same agentic script. In one condition, respondents saw a white man and a white woman, and in the other respondents saw a white man and a black woman. Again, participants were asked to rate the actors based on competence, likability, and hirability. In the first condition, respondents rated the white man and white woman as equally competent, but found the man much more likable than the woman and were more likely to hire him. In the second condition, respondents rated the black woman more likable than the white man, but found the white man far more competent and were more likely to hire him. While all women were at a disadvantage for hiring, for white women this result was based on likability, while for black women it was based on competence. This result is consistent with double jeopardy, that black women face a higher first hurdle than white women to prove their fitness for leadership positions. What it takes to surmount this obstacle is a pressing concern for future intersectional research.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/03/barriers-to-female-leadership-does-race.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-61320132629337805122017-02-27T12:52:00.002-05:002017-02-27T12:52:36.927-05:00Why Are Women Underrepresented as Leaders? Two Ideas from Recent Psychological Research with Francesca GinoGender inequality in top leadership positions persists across a range of fields. At a high level, research projects in economics, psychology, and management that have tried to explain persistent gender inequality have fallen into two buckets. The first emphasizes "demand-side factors," such as how gender stereotypes about men and women comport or conflict with our perceptions of leaders. The second emphasizes "supply-side factors," examining differences in men and women's behavior when it comes to reaching high-power positions. According to this line of research, men may demonstrate more behaviors associated with professional advancement, including dominance, confidence, and competitiveness, than women. This week's WAPPP seminar features Francesca Gino, Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Professor Gino and her colleagues study an additional strand of explanation closer to supply-side factors, namely gender differences in preferences. It may be that men and women have different preferences when it comes to achieving high-level positions.

The types of goals that we set out for ourselves have a big impact on our lives and our work. Professor Gino and her colleagues hypothesize that there may be a difference in the way men and women think about life goals more generally. While it's very likely that our environment and sociocultural factors influence the types of goals that men and women have, these studies bracket those considerations and engage only with life goals as expressed by men and women. Professor Gino hypothesizes that women will have a larger number of life goals than men, likely across a wider range of roles in their lives. The second hypothesis is that in examining these goals, a smaller percentage of women's goals will be associated with power as compared to men. These hypotheses are built on and consistent with literature that indicates that women are more motivated by relationships and men are more oriented toward achievement and power. Professor Gino noted at the outset that other audiences have responded angrily to portions of this talk, but urged us to look at the data and to remember that these findings are descriptive rather than normative.

If these hypotheses are correct, what are the implications for women and men's desire to reach high-level positions? If women do have more life goals, and a smaller percentage are related to power, this may have implications for how women view professional advancement. Professor Gino and her colleagues expected that both men and women would be able to see the positive aspects associated with high-power positions, but that women would be more aware of and focused on the negative aspects associated with high-power positions than men. If women have more life goals that they care about, the logic goes, they will be more likely to see conflicts between their various goals and roles, and will likely see the need to make tradeoffs. Men and women, therefore, would see high-power positions as equally attainable, but women would see them as less desirable.

The first study of these hypotheses sampled 781 working adults and asked them to list their core life goals, up to 25 goals, within two minutes. Once each participant had listed their goals, they were asked to sort them into different categories based on existing research, such as power, affiliation, and personal growth. Research assistants looked over these categorizations to ensure that each goal was coded accurately. While the difference is not major, there is a gender difference in terms of listing goals, with men listing fewer compared to women. Similarly, this study produced the expected difference in terms of goals related to power, with a greater percentage of men's goals related to power than women's.

To control for concerns that women may have an advantage in thinking of and articulating their life goals under time pressure, the researchers conducted a second study that capped the number of life goals at 20 and asked participants to write down all of their favorite foods, up to 20, as a comparison task. The second study replicated the results of the first, with women listing a greater number of goals than men, but a smaller percentage of those goals were associated with power. These results obtain whether respondents list their own goals, pick their goals from a pre-written list, or are given a list and asked to reject goals that aren't important to them. These findings therefore appear to be pretty robust.

Professor Gino then turned to the second question, whether men and women have different views of the positive and negative consequences of career advancement. In particular, this research asks whether women focus on conflict with other life goals in a way that makes them less interested in achieving high-level positions. Professor Gino and her colleagues sampled 635 Harvard Business School graduates and showed them a picture of a ladder representing professional advancement in their industry. Respondents were asked to indicate their current position on the ladder, what their ideal position would be, and their highest attainable position using the rungs on the ladder. The researchers found no difference in current position between men and women, but found the expected difference in ideal position. For men, their ideal position was higher on the ladder than women's ideal position. However, when it comes to the highest attainable position, again there is no gender difference. Professor Gino describes this result as women saying "we can get there, it's just not ideal for us."

Why might we see this difference? Professor Gino and her colleagues anticipate that women see more negative aspects of professional advancement compared to men, despite seeing all the same positive aspects. In a companion study, respondents were asked to imagine that they had the opportunity for a promotion at work and to indicate on a scale from 1-7 their expectations of experiencing certain negative consequences, such as anxiety, stress, time pressure, and conflict, as well as certain positive consequences, such as happiness, job satisfaction, opportunity, money, and influence. The results tend in the expected direction – there is no statistically significant difference between men and women in terms of expected positive outcomes, but women report a greater likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes, especially conflict with other life goals. In this study, the researchers also asked whether respondents thought position was attainable and to what extent it was desirable. Again, women saw promotion to a higher-level position as attainable, but not necessarily desirable, and reported that they were less likely to accept the promotion.

These same results replicated across HBS alumni, executive education participants, undergraduate students, and working adults. While the data is descriptive and not prescriptive, there are all sorts of additional aspects to study. In terms of positive and negative expectations, women may be correct about the potential conflict and tradeoffs while men underestimate potential downsides of advancement. Alternatively, women may overestimate these costs. (It may also be that women accurately estimate the downsides of career advancement, knowing that they will have to shoulder much of the burden of conflict with other life goals!) Further, the study of undergraduate students implicates societal expectations in terms of life goals and institutional timelines for career advancement that may conflict with other roles and goals. One related study notes that there are significant gender differences in thinking about the future and that women have a much longer time horizon—whereas "long-term" is a period of years, for men "long-term" is measured in months. We look forward to more research to explore these complications further.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/02/why-are-women-underrepresented-as.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-3209406668647709562017-02-21T00:29:00.000-05:002017-02-21T00:29:06.864-05:00Climbing the Ladder: Gender and Careers in Public Service with Amy E. SmithMuch of the research on gender inequality in senior management positions focuses on the private sector and why women don't ascend to these positions. What are we missing by not considering the public sector or the characteristics of women who do reach the upper echelons? This week's WAPPP seminar feature Amy E. Smith, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston. Professor Smith presented findings from her research collaboration's work on Climbing the Ladder: Gender and Careers in Public Service.

Background and Motivation

Social equality and representation are important values in the public sector. We believe both that public sector jobs should be equally accessible to everyone and that those who work in the public sector should look like the people they serve across a variety of demographic characteristics. If bureaucrats reflect the diversity of the populations they serve, the logic goes, a variety of interests will be represented in the decision-making process. Representation also has symbolic power – citizens are more likely to feel that they have been heard, are more likely to cooperate with government, and are more likely to feel that the government is accessible if government officials look like them.

However, there is still a significant lack of gender diversity in leadership positions. There have been a number of reasons posited for this discrepancy, including male advantages in accessing, accumulating, and invoking human and social capital, divergences between our gender stereotypes and conceptions of what leaders should be, and familial expectations and work-life conflict. However, as noted, these mechanisms explain why women don't make it to senior leadership roles, rather than illuminating what helps women achieve these positions. We have limited information about career paths into public sector leadership for both men and women. Once we have this information, we may be better able to design workplace policies to promote gender equality.

Research Findings

Professor Smith's research focuses on two key questions: what do career paths look like for those who have achieved high-level leadership positions in public sector organizations? And how do men and women who are in these positions express their qualifications?

This research focuses on U.S. federal regulatory organizations, like the FDA and SEC, partially because these organizations have broad power and because there are a significant proportion of women in high-ranking positions. At the time of this study, 36% of senior leadership roles in these organizations were filled by women, compared to 18% of Congressional seats, and 15% of corporate boards. Professor Smith and her collaborators selected the 12 major federal regulatory agencies and identified all top-level leaders for the period from 1983 to 2013, a sample of 89 individuals. Of these 89, they were able to collect career path data for 83 individuals, 61 men and 22 women. The researchers established complete career histories for each person from the time they graduated from college to 2013. For each year, the researchers coded whether the individual worked for a federal agency, a private sector organization, and law firm, or "other," including nonprofit organizations or other levels of government.

Descriptively, the women in the sample tended to spend less time in each organization, worked at fewer organizations overall, had fewer children, tended to work in newer and larger regulatory organizations, and tended to work for organizations that were responsible for implementing more legislation and engaging in more rulemaking.

Professor Smith and her colleagues looked at career patterns using a sequence analysis of the career histories to generate clusters with similar characteristics. Women in the sample clustered into three career patterns. The first group, which Professor Smith calls "public servants," was characterized by work in federal agencies and the "other" category of nonprofit and government work. The second group was the "sector hoppers," characterized by movement back and forth between private sector organizations and federal regulatory agencies. The third group, the attorneys, all worked in law firms at some point in their careers.

For men in the sample, Professor Smith identified four career paths. The "movers," the largest group, showed a pattern of moving between organizational types. The "sector hoppers," by contrast, moved only between private sector and federal regulatory organizations. The third group, the "public sector attorneys," worked predominantly in federal agencies, as compared to the "private sector attorneys" who tended to practice in law firms. The key takeaway from the career pattern analysis is that men, more so than women, seem to develop their career paths by moving across sectors and organizations.

The second key research question asks: how do men and women establish and express legitimacy for leadership positions? Many of the characteristics we associate with leaders are incompatible with our stereotypes about women – where leaders are decisive and aggressive, we expect women to be kind and collaborative. As such, women may engage in extra efforts to signal an appropriate leadership identity. Professor Smith and her collaborators collected the Senate confirmation hearing transcripts for 67 of the 83 individuals in the sample and examined both their self-narratives – the stories each individual told about themselves and their qualifications – as well as their interactions with committee members. While coding the transcripts is still a work in progress, Professor Smith has identified three key mechanisms for claiming legitimacy: proving, selling, and challenging.

When nominees read their personal statements in front of the committee, they are engaging in proving: by narrating their experiences and talking about their personal histories, nominees create a unique identity and position themselves as leaders. Female nominees in the examined transcripts tended to be backward-looking in their proving, discussing their past experiences and establishing themselves as public servants. By contrast, male nominees tend to be a bit more forward-looking in their proving. It may be that male nominees were already considered qualified, and therefore felt more comfortable discussing their future plans for the organization rather than discussing their past experiences.

Selling is characterized by a third party talking about the nominee, largely through introductions and endorsements. Selling behaviors directed toward female nominees tended to list and repeat the nominee's past experience to lend her credibility and gain approval from the committee. Interestingly, for male nominees there was very little selling. Male nominees' prior qualifications appear to be almost assumed, whereas female nominees' qualifications must be reiterated to truly sink in.

Finally, challenging provides the greatest opportunity to observe nominees' interactions with committee members. Questions directed at female nominees focused repeatedly on technical expertise and management challenges associated with leading the agency. Male nominees generally did not get these sorts of questions, as if, Professor Smith emphasized, these competencies appear to be assumed. Instead, male nominees were often asked forward-looking questions about how to handle emerging issues, and many were asked non-questions.

Considering the two research questions together, we see that both men and women are accumulating social and human capital, but that women tend to accumulate social capital through strong ties and dense networks and human capital that is narrow and specialized, as evidenced by the "public servant" career pattern. Men tended to show more weak ties, sparse networks, and more varied human capital. While both men and women engage in narrative identity work to express their qualifications, women face a gendered twist. Their senior leadership roles and the experiences that got them there violate gendered expectations of what a leader looks like. However, these women's expression of their qualifications seems to fall back in line with female stereotypes, as they look backwards and repeat their relevant experiences to prove their legitimacy.

Directions for Future Research

These early results are an exciting starting point for more research in this area. Now that we know something about career patterns and claiming legitimacy, qualitative follow-up work may illuminate why career patterns differ based on gender and what other factors have influenced pivotal career choices.

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/02/climbing-ladder-gender-and-careers-in.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-61181908714227715142017-02-05T23:16:00.000-05:002017-02-06T09:36:11.596-05:00Estimating Income Inequality from Binned Incomes with Paul von HippelStarting this year, many employers will be required to report to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) their employees' pay by sex, race, and ethnicity within 12 specified pay bins. This reporting will help the EEOC improve enforcement of pay discrimination laws and may provide some insight into the persistence of wage gaps. This week's WAPPP seminar featured Paul von Hippel, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin. While many methods have been used to analyze binned incomes, little work has been done to evaluate these methods. Professor von Hippel described three statistical methods for analyzing binned data and their relative accuracy in estimating underlying income differences.

According to Professor von Hippel, there are some misunderstandings about the limitations of binned date. The general impression is that because pay bins can be $10,000-$15,000 wide, it is impossible to estimate pay differences that are smaller than the bin width. While it is difficult to accurately measure the difference in individual pay within one pay band, it is possible to discern average or median pay differences with much greater precision. Even with a bin width of $10,000, it is possible to estimate pay differences within $1,500. Despite the assumption to the contrary, bin width is actually not an obstacle to this sort of analysis.

Depending upon the desired estimate, be it average income, median income, or an index of inequality like the Gini coefficient, certain types of statistical analysis will be more precise than others. Using Census data of binned incomes and statistics on underlying non-binned income, Professor von Hippel described three statistical methods to see how close each method comes, using the binned data, to estimating the underlying non-binned data.

Robust Pareto Midpoint Estimator (RPME): This method, the simplest, sets each household income to the midpoint of its bin. While it is not the most sophisticated method, it works about as well as more complex analyses, particularly if the bins aren't too wide. As the number of bins increases, the estimates get better and better. The only "trouble spot" with this type of analysis is the top income bin, which doesn't have an upper bound. To solve this issue, this method estimates a Pareto distribution that fits the top two income bins and plugs in the mean of that distribution for households within those bins. There are some issues with the traditional formula when there are a large number of high-income households, but using a harmonic mean tends to resolve this difficulty. This method is very quick and can run on thousands of employers within a minute or so. The downside of this method is that it's unrealistic to assume that every household within a given pay bin has the same pay value, and the analysis may lose something by treating each household the same.

Multi-Model Generalized Beta Estimator (MGBE): This method involves fitting continuous distributions to the given income distribution. In looking at county-level Census data, Professor von Hippel set each of 10 different continuous distributions to the income distribution for a county, took the distribution that best fit that county's data, and then used those distributions to estimate average income, median income, and the Gini coefficient. One positive aspect of this approach is that it treats incomes as continuous, not discrete. However, on the negative side, even the best-fitting distribution may not fit that well. This is particularly true if income is bimodal.

Spline CDF Estimator: This method uses nonparametric bin smoothing to spread incomes evenly across bins. A simple step function works nicely, but the method works even better if the bins are divided recursively or a cubic spline is fit to smooth over the step function to model the distribution of incomes. Professor von Hippel credits David Hunter and McKalie Drown for their work on this method, which combines the best aspects of the other two methods: the Spline CDF Estimator models income as continuous and perfectly reproduces bin counts.

Of these three techniques, the Spline CDF Estimator is the most accurate. Between the other two, RPME works about as well as MGBE for some estimates and is much faster, particularly when estimating average income. However, it is not as accurate for median income, and estimating inequality indices is even more difficult. There are still some inaccuracies with these methods, particularly when trying to estimate trends in inequality over time, but this analysis is good news for researchers studying wage gaps. With the binned data soon to be available from the EEOC, it will be possible to estimate income differences much more precisely than the bins would seem to indicate – and with good data comes good policy! RPME and MGBE are available in both Stata and in R's inequality package, and the Spline CDF Estimator is available in R's binsmooth package.

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/02/estimating-income-inequality-from.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-78947575768230898502017-01-29T19:18:00.000-05:002017-01-29T19:18:27.012-05:00Linking Non-Cognitive Skills and Educational Achievement to Girls in Developing Societies: The Case of Ghana with Sally NuamahSixty-two million girls are school-aged but not in school. We know that girls' education has positive impacts, not just for girls themselves but for their communities: educating girls is associated with decreased mortality and incidence HIV/AIDS and with increased economic growth. Non-cognitive skills – attitudes, attributes, and personal skills apart from aptitude that individuals can draw on to achieve success – can have important impacts on improving educational outcomes. "Grit" is the paradigm example: perseverance towards one's goals may be just as important to academic achievement as aptitude. While there is evidence that non-cognitive skills shape academic achievement, it is less clear how these skills are transmitted, and in particular what role schools play in transmitting these skills. Further, much of the research on non-cognitive skills has been done on elite male students in a U.S. context, which may not be entirely generalizable to other settings.

Our first WAPPP seminar of the spring semester featured Sally Nuamah, WAPPP Fellow and Joint Postdoctoral Fellow, University Center for Human Values and Center for Study of Democratic Politics, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Dr. Nuamah presented the results of a study on non-cognitive skills and educational achievement focusing on 37 girls in Ghana striving to be the first in their families to go to college. Dr. Nuamah's research focused on three key questions: What challenges do girls face? What does it take for them to achieve? And how do schools contribute to their achievement?

The girls in the study faced three levels of obstacles to educational achievement: their low socioeconomic status, under-resourced school, and particular gendered challenges, including risk of pregnancy that led many students to drop out of school. Schools have an important role to play in mediating the negative effects of this sociocultural environment. Dr. Nuamah found that the school in her study facilitated "achievement-oriented identities," positive beliefs about students' own abilities to succeed and to translate those beliefs into realizable actions. The school emphasized both self-efficacy – impressing upon students that they have the ability to overcome challenges – and strategy – helping students to create, implement, and monitor plans to overcome challenges. This achievement-oriented identity was particularly affirmed at the school leadership level, in after-school programs, and in the religion and morality curriculum.

School leadership: At the time of the study, the school had its first female headmistress. She initially perceived the female students to be timid and took policy steps to change that. Every year, the school held a speech competition at which only male students had delivered the keynote. This year, the headmistress required that a female student give the keynote. This small change had a big impact – the girl chosen to deliver the speech said that it increased her confidence, and "I feel like there's nothing I can't do."

After-school: There is a great deal of research on the benefits of after-school groups: in particular, these groups create social support systems among peer groups. In Dr. Nuamah's descriptive survey, girls reported an additional 2-5 more hours of housework per day than their male peers, with schedules that allowed for only 4-5 hours of sleep per night. Discipline and time management are critical for these girls, and these values are reinforced in their peer groups.

Curriculum: Dr. Nuamah emphasized the importance of religious and moral education in the Ghanaian context. Formal education in Ghana was historically closely tied to Christian missionaries, and schools' practices reflect this history, including morning worship and daily prayer. In particular, rhetoric about achievement remains entwined with religion. Students are told to believe in themselves and their God-given gifts. This appeal to faith, even for students who aren't particularly religious, engenders greater confidence in their ability to overcome challenges like the cost of education.

In conversations with students who had graduated, those seeking to go to college perfectly encapsulated the achievement-oriented identity—having faith and taking positive steps to achieve their goals. One student who had been accepted to university but couldn't afford the fees voiced her anxiety, but said worrying wouldn't solve her problem. She just had to pray to God… and she had applied for several scholarships.

Dr. Nuamah's work highlights how school context can contribute to female students' achievement, and particularly how schools can help girls grapple with gender-specific challenges, rather than assuming that the sole impediment to achievement is poverty. We look forward to learning more about this exciting area of research!

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2017/01/linking-non-cognitive-skills-and.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-62818983741669565152016-12-05T14:52:00.001-05:002016-12-05T14:52:45.618-05:00On Her Account: Can Strengthening Women's Financial Control Boost Female Labor Supply? With Simone SchanerAs financial inclusion and FinTech have taken on greater prominence, governments must grapple with how to best enable women's economic empowerment. This week's WAPPP seminar featured Simone Schaner, Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth, as she presented the results of a randomized controlled trial to assess how financial inclusion coupled with targeted benefit payments impact women's labor force participation and economic welfare in India.

Professor Schaner began with a central question: Why aren't women in emerging economies participating in the labor force? Female labor force participation has been basically stagnant despite sustained economic growth in India. However, 34% of rural non-working women say that they would like to work, and employing these women would increase female labor force participation by 80%. What is keeping them out of the formal labor force?

When we think about labor force participation, we often think about demand-side constraints – are there jobs available for those who want them? However, in this case supply-side constraints may be especially important. Women face strong gender norms and limited household bargaining power that curtails their ability to participate in the labor force. Economists think of these social constraints within a utility model: individuals may experience a utility loss if they violate a gendered behavioral norm that is upheld by the community. In the Indian context, if a woman works, it may signal that her husband has failed as a breadwinner. Even if women want to participate in the labor force, this threat of utility loss may keep them out. Data from the World Values Survey demonstrates that female labor force participation correlates with men's and women's attitudes toward female work. Where both men and women are supportive of working women, we see greater female labor force participation; as the gap between male and female attitude increases, female labor force participation decreases.

This particular research project focuses on poor, married couples in India who are potential beneficiaries of the public workfare program NREGS. The community exhibits strong norms against female work and mobility—only 38% of women report having gone to village market by themselves in last year. NREGS guarantees every rural Indian household 100 days of paid work at a fixed minimum wage facilitated by the local government. When these women participate in the NREGS workfare program, their wages are paid into their husbands via bank transfers. This study investigates whether strengthening women's control of NREGS wages can increase female participation in the NREGS program and in the labor force more broadly.

STUDY DESIGN

Women in the field experiment were divided into five groups with two "flavors" of financial inclusion. In the "Accounts Basic" group, the study team opened low-cost, no-frills bank accounts at community banking kiosks. After their paperwork was processed, the women in this group were taken back to the kiosks to demonstrate deposits and withdrawals. In the "Accounts Plus" group, the women also received a group-based training session that emphasized what a bank account is and what can be done with it (receiving benefits transfers like NREGS, the importance of saving, and how money kept in a bank account is safe). In two additional groups "Accounts Basic Linking" and "Accounts Plus Linking," the women received the same services described above, but their accounts were configured such that their NREGS wages were paid directly into their accounts, rather than their husbands'. The fifth group, a control, received no financial inclusion services or training. This design allowed the research team to examine how control over NREGS wages impacts female labor force participation while holding financial inclusion (including access to banking services) constant.

MAIN RESULTS

Initial survey data revealed that women in the study had opened accounts, but rarely used them. In the Accounts Basic group, 17% of women had been to the bank in the last six months, compared to 10% in the control group. While this figure was somewhat higher in the Accounts Plus and the Accounts Plus Linking groups, these accounts were only used occasionally. However, this intervention had a major impact on women's bank balances. For women who received NREGS payments, they received an average of $61 – 26% of a woman's non-NREGS average annual income. While it's not clear that this additional income is sufficient to change household bargaining power, the intervention certainly increased women's control of assets. Women in the Accounts Plus Linking group also increased their labor force participation – they did more work in the NREGS program and also did more work in the private market.

MECHANISMS

One possible mechanism for this shift is that the intervention increased a woman's effective NREGS wages – while the official wage didn't change, their increased control over their wages may have made NREGS work more attractive. However, if this were the case, we wouldn't expect to see an increase in private sector work as well; NREGS work would have been more attractive at the expense of private sector work paid in cash. Similarly, when women's bargaining power increases, economic models say that they will consume in terms of consumption and leisure, so we wouldn't see the increase in both NREGS work and private labor. However, this standard model completely ignores the importance of norms – specifically here, the male preference that their wives don't work. If men hold these preferences and yet women's bargaining power increases, then we would expect to see this across-the-board increase in female labor force participation. Indeed, these effects are stronger for women who were constrained (not working) before the study began.

CONCLUSIONS

Strengthening women's control over government workfare benefits increases participation in workfare and increases work on the private market. There is some evidence of increased female mobility and no evidence of male backlash in terms of reduced decision-making power, gender-based violence, or negatively impacted mental health. The broader implication of this study is that the impacts of female empowerment on female labor force participation may vary depending upon the extent to which men and women internalize gender norms and social constraints. The study team is planning a richer data collection to come, and we look forward to hearing additional results!

Cici Coquillettehttps://email@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2016/12/on-her-account-can-strengthening-womens.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-83312612639849673292016-11-15T00:01:00.000-05:002016-11-15T00:01:11.328-05:00The History of the "Mommy Track" with Elizabeth Singer MoreIn the age of Lean In, we continually interrogate the differences between men and women's experiences at work. Do these differences arise from gender discrimination, or do working women simply have different work/family preferences than their male colleagues? These questions have a long history, and the debate over sameness and difference can help to illuminate the relationship between feminism, women, and work. This week's WAPPP seminar feature Elizabeth Singer More, WAPPP Fellow and Associate Director of Open Circle Jewish Learning at Hebrew College. A historian of women, work, and the family, Professor More discussed the history of the "mommy track," tracing in particular the controversy over Felice Schwartz's 1989 Harvard Business Review article "Management Women and the New Facts of Life."

The issue of sameness versus difference was a significant dispute for feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, and was thrown into sharp relief in the case of EEOC v. Sears Roebuck & Co. The case was brought on behalf of women who were denied commission sales jobs based on management's assumptions about women's preferences, personalities, and skills. Both sides in the case called experts, who alternately described the disparity between male and female employees as the result of discrimination or of women's voluntary cultural patterns. Some women, one side argued, were "like" management men; that is, they were willing to work long hours, travel, and sacrifice time with their families in order to advance. Other women were different than their male colleagues. They wanted to work but also wanted to have children and were willing to sacrifice advancement at work to take time off and raise their families. The case went on in this vein, with one side presenting "natural" dichotomies between men and women, such as women being more concerned with nurturing and men with work, while the other maintained that women's historical labor market behavior was established just as much by lack of opportunity as by a different set of preferences. These arguments emphasized the economic consequences of the sameness/difference question for working women.

Against this backdrop, Schwartz published her article, "Management Women and the New Facts of Life." Schwartz was the founder of the nonprofit Catalyst Institute, which in the 1970s had worked to help housewives enter the workforce. By the 1980s, the Institute regularly advised corporations on attracting, retaining, and advancing female professionals. Schwartz saw this article as part of the same project. Addressed to executives, the article laid out a business case for hiring women, but encouraged executives to identify female employees early on as "career-primary" or "career-and-family." "Career-primary" women should be given the same opportunities as any male employee, but these women would have to remain "single or at least childless." If they did choose to have children, they would have to be "satisfied to have others raise them." These women, Schwartz said, would cost corporations more to employ.

"Career-and-family" women would be relegated to the derisively-labeled "mommy track." Corporations, Schwartz's argument went, could better retain women in whom they had invested training if these women could be permitted to balance work and family. Women who took long maternity leaves should be encouraged to return to work; corporations should provide flex time, part-time, and job-sharing options; and companies should assist with day care. In exchange for these supports, women on the mommy track would have to accept that their ascension up the corporate ladder had halted, or at least paused. Schwartz argued that this arrangement would help women and employers – women would be able to maintain professional and family lives, and employers would accrue talented middle managers who were grateful to be where they were.

Schwartz argued that not all women have the same desires. Some want to put their careers first, and so the automatic association of women with babies is unjustified. However, by drawing on the language of sameness and of difference, Schwartz angered both sides. Painting women as ambitious non-caregivers or as complacent nurturers – combined with the assertion that management women are more costly to employ than men – caused an uproar. The Harvard Business Review printed 22 pages of letters in response to her 14 page article, most of them critical. Schwartz's critics argued that she was incorrect in the facts or that the facts she cited were entirely unsubstantiated and that her article reinforced stereotypes that hindered women in their professional lives and men in their family lives. In trying to reconcile opposing feminist philosophies, she pleased only male executives, who loved the article.

Professor More points to an article by legal theorist Joan Williams, published the same month as Schwartz's article, to further underscore the difficulty of reconciling feminism and market-based policymaking. Williams took issue with both sameness and difference feminism. She argued that sameness feminists don't deal with how differences work to women's disadvantage in a "gender-blind" system that is based on male life patterns. On the other hand, while difference feminism values women's caregiving labor, in doing so it may perpetuate women's economic marginalization. Williams called for the existing structures of work and family life to be totally rethought. The idea that women choose to become marginalized on the "mommy track" clouds the reality that all workers are stuck choosing between two unacceptable life patterns that we term stereotypically male or female. Where Schwartz was optimistic about negotiating on employers' terms, Williams thought it was a feminist imperative to change the terms of work and family life.

Schwartz, for her part, was shocked and hurt by the critical reaction. Her article was dedicated to persuading corporations that it was in their own best interests to fight discrimination and institute family-friendly policies. However, her method for advocating these approaches was to argue that it was in business's competitive advantage to be responsive to women's needs. Whereas she had previously been forced to make an equality and justice argument – "Be fair and good to women and support us!" – she could now use a big-business logic in saying that if companies couldn't attract, retain, and promote female talent, they would lose their competitive advantage and the bottom line would suffer. Where Schwartz saw a reasonable tradeoff for women – getting family-friendly working policies in exchange for pausing advancement – others saw institutionalized discrimination and a penalty for female workers for failing to conform to a male standard. Leaning heavily on a profit motive as an incentive to respond to women's needs could also disadvantage women – in times of economic scarcity, female employees would lose their leverage and employers would have ready justification for firing women or favoring men.

In closing, Professor More emphasized that we cannot relinquish the justice and equality argument. We have to protect gains in equality even in times of economic weakness. As a WAPPP Fellow, Professor More will be completing her manuscript on the intellectual and political history of maternal employment in America from World War II through the mid-1990s. We look forward to hearing more from her and continuing these conversations!

Cici Coquillettehttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-history-of-mommy-track-with.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4781883626284108757.post-75078966096624810352016-11-07T13:31:00.000-05:002016-11-07T13:31:34.618-05:00Let's go for human rights: VAMOS
By Margarita (Maggie) Salas
I am a lesbian feminist, a proud latina, a social activist, a university professor and, more recently, a Harvard graduate. I am a lot of things, but a politician was not one of them. I care deeply about inequality, I've dreamed about achieving equal rights for all in my country, I have fought for it with every bit of energy my soul could muster. I came to Harvard because I felt we were moving too slow on issues that were just too urgent to wait that long. I felt we needed to fight smarter, not harder, to achieve our rights. I needed a bigger lever, and as a social movement advocate, I would have never thought that a political party was the lever I was looking for.

Maggie Salas, HKS M/C MPA '16 and WAPPP Oval Office '16

The idea of starting a new political party in Costa Rica was born at WAPPP, at the Oval Office Program, during our friday sessions sitting around that breakfast table, listening to the stories of brave women who had taken a leap of faith in themselves and had run for office, learning the skills and insights needed, talking about our future. G.Reid once said: "A dream written down with a date becomes a goal, a goal broken down into steps becomes a plan and a plan backed by actions makes your dream come true". Sure enough, as each friday session passed that idea went from being a whisper in the back of my head to a roaring urgency that ran through my veins. I started reaching out to my partners in crime back home. Was this unthinkable? Was I crazy? Nobody seemed to think so, and every phone call was met with excitement, energy and willingness. A spring break visit in March 2016 was our first meeting, a dozen determined individuals decided that we would run for congress in 2018.

We were eager, hopeful and over all committed to do the work needed to build a political party from scratch. Many of us came from social movements and brought with us a horizontal decision-making culture, where ideas are discussed first and potential candidates much, much later. We each started inviting other trustworthy people interested in the issues, and before we knew it our numbers doubled and tripled. The following months we met every weekend to discuss our agenda. We became best friends with google docs and wrote many pages together, detailing our proposals, working in break-out groups, coming together for long sessions, reviewing obsessively every proposal to make sure we knew where we agreed and where we didn't. We learned a lot from each other those days, and agreed on a broad agenda that included compact sustainable cities, access to ALL human rights, modernization of our criminal and drug policies, better labour opportunities and secularization of the State, as well as a transition towards a parliamentary regime.

We held our constitutive assembly on September 25th, bringing together 100 enthusiasts that stamped their signatures and elected me as the party president. We planned our official press release for October but our secret was in the wind and we started receiving refugees from several political parties, young people who were disappointed by other initiatives who would always sideline the human rights agenda and felt thrilled that a new political party was in town and willing to call things by their names and open up participation.

October 19th will remain in my memory as one of the most exciting days of my life. We spent many days preparing our spokespeople and inviting the media. A week before, the story was leaked to one of the major radio newscasters, who woke me at 6:30 am to confirm whether the news were true. The cat was out of the bag and far from deterring media, this just stirred-up even more interest and we had a full house on October 19th. We were covered by several newspapers, radio and television channels during the whole week. Our facebook page exploded and garnered our first one thousand followers in roughly over 24 hours and 100 people signed up as volunteers on our web page.

We decided to call the party VAMOS, because it's a call to action and our country needs to move. VAMOS means let's go, and we want Costa Rica to go for full human rights, to go for sustainable cities, to go for a modernized State. Spanish is a beautiful language in which the verb contains the subject that it calls to action. VAMOS is conjugated in plural, because we don't want to go alone, we want us, all of us to go together, towards the country we dream and deserve. VAMOS!

Lindsey Shepardsonhttps://firstname.lastname@example.com://wapppwire.blogspot.com/2016/11/lets-go-for-human-rights-vamos.html