Making Gender Comparisons More Meaningful: A Call for More Attention to Social Context

Psychology of Women Quarterly: Citation Network Analysis of its Landscape and Evolution

Psychology of Women Quarterly (PWQ) is a leading outlet for feminist psychology research. To elucidate the interrelations of PWQ publications over time, we conducted a citation network analysis of its 2,747 articles and 4,517 citation links. Of the 16 citation clusters that emerged, many echoed key elements of PWQ's scope. These included Cluster 1: feminist consciousness and sexism; Cluster 2: body image and objectification; Cluster 3: feminist psychology, epistemology, and methodology; Cluster 4: gender and educational and occupational experiences; Cluster 5: rape and sexual assault; Cluster 6: power and violence in close relationships; Cluster 7: sexual harassment and workplace discrimination; and Cluster 8: women and power with attention to race and nation. Areas of citation disconnection revealed avenues for resisting citation silos and advancing pantheoretical feminist frameworks on the continuum of patriarchal violence. Small and discontinued clusters were areas ripe for feminist revisiting (e.g., reproductive justice). PWQ articles were cited in an increasing number and breadth of journals over time. These findings can inform authors, reviewers, and editors to advance the next decades of scholarship in PWQ in ways that resist citation silos, revive research on critical domains of women's lives, and foster the feminist edge of our scholarship.

Intersectionality and Smoking Cessation: Exploring Various Approaches for Understanding Health Inequities

OBJECTIVE

Many marginalized groups smoke at higher rates and have greater difficulty quitting than less marginalized groups. Most research on smoking cessation inequities has focused on a single sociodemographic attribute (eg, race or socioeconomic status), yet individuals possess multiple attributes that may increase risk. The current study used an intersectionality framework to examine how the interplay between multiple marginalized attributes may impact smoking cessation outcomes.

METHODS

A diverse sample of 344 adults enrolled in a smoking cessation program and reported on sociodemographic attributes (eg, race/ethnicity, gender, income) and continuous smoking abstinence on their quit date and at 1, 2, and 4 weeks postquit date. A Cox proportional hazard regression model was used to estimate whether intersectional links among race/ethnicity, gender, and income were related to smoking cessation outcomes.

RESULTS

Lower household income may be related to higher risk of smoking cessation failure. There were no significant interactions among race/ethnicity, gender, and income in predicting relapse. Pairwise intersectional group differences suggested some groups may be at higher risk of relapse. Number of marginalized sociodemographic attributes did not predict relapse.

CONCLUSIONS

Intersectionality may be a promising framework for addressing health inequities, and may help elucidate how to best design and target intervention efforts for individuals characterized by sociodemographic intersections that concur particularly high risk for poor tobacco cessation outcomes.

IMPLICATIONS

Despite an overall decline in smoking rates, socioeconomic inequities in smoking prevalence and cancer mortality are widening. Efforts targeting tobacco cessation should incorporate new theory to capture the complex set of factors that may account for tobacco cessation inequities (eg, multiple aspects of identity that may influence access to tobacco cessation treatment and exposure to certain stressors that impede cessation efforts). Intersectionality may be a promising framework for addressing health inequities in tobacco use and cessation and may help elucidate how to best design and target intervention efforts for individuals that concur particularly high risk for poor tobacco cessation outcomes.

Orchestrated Sex: The Representation of Male and Female Musicians in World-Class Symphony Orchestras

This study examines the representation of male and female musicians in world-class symphony orchestras. Personnel of 40 orchestras of three regions, the UK, Europe, and the USA, and distributions of men and women across the four orchestral departments, strings, woodwind, brass, and percussion, are compared. Significant differences in representation between orchestras of the three regions are reported. Practices adopted by orchestras when appointing musicians to vacant positions are reviewed and numbers of males and females appointed to rank-and-file and Section Principals are compared. Career patterns of male and female musicians are also compared. Increases in numbers of women appointed to orchestral posts in the last three decades are compared with increases in the proportion of women in the general workforce. The data of orchestral membership are then compared with the numbers of young people receiving tuition on orchestral instruments retrieved from a large national database (n = 391,000 students). Implications for the future of male and female representation in orchestral personnel are then considered.

What If Psychology Took Intersectionality Seriously? Changing How Psychologists Think About Participants

Using intersectionality to change how psychologists think about the demographic profile of their participants is one readily available change that psychologists across the discipline can implement to improve psychological science. In this article, we aim to provide a guide for psychologists who are not already engaged with feminist practices and/or are unsure of how an intersectional approach to participants applies to their research. We argue that by engaging with four perspective shifts of intersectional thinking: multidimensionality, dynamic construction, structural power, and outcomes of systemic disadvantage and advantage, psychologists can more accurately represent the “person” that psychology, as a discipline, seeks to understand. We suggest changes at the researcher, journal, and grant-making agency levels to support an intersectional reconceptualization of participants. As psychology continues to change, in order to foster reproducible science practices and research with relevance to real-world problems, there is opportunity to promote discipline-level change that would take intersectionality seriously.

Are the Processes Underlying Discrimination the Same for Women and Men? A Critical Review of Congruity Models of Gender Discrimination

Although classic congruity models of gender discrimination (e.g., role congruity theory, lack of fit) predict negative outcomes for both women and men in gender-incongruent domains, the literature has focused almost exclusively on discrimination against women. A number of recent studies have begun to address the question of whether and under what circumstances men can also be the targets of gender discrimination. However, the results of these studies have so far been mixed. Therefore, the question of whether men, like women, also suffer discrimination when in gender incongruent roles and domains remains unclear. The goal of the present paper is to integrate and critically examine the burgeoning literature on gender discrimination against men in order to assess whether the symmetrical predictions of congruity models are supported. Through this close analysis and integration of the literature, I aim to identify remaining gaps in the research on gender discrimination. In particular, I propose that researchers of gender discrimination would benefit from expanding their scope beyond that of paid work.

Advances in the Treatment of Context in Organizational Research

Although scholars in the field of organizational behavior have raised concerns about a lack of contextual appreciation, there has been a recent embrace of contextual thinking in the organizational sciences. In this review, I discuss several recent theories and measures of context. The added value of a contextual approach is illustrated by how context can shape personality, how it affects the emergence of work designs, and how it benefits the study of organizational demography. Future research topics include context cue sensitivity, the way context is shaped, the mediators of context effects, and the breadth and limits of contextual impact. A recurrent theme is that although context enables a demarcation of what is distinctive about situations, it also permits integration across research areas and levels of analysis, identifying what they have in common as settings for organizational behavior.

The Messenger Matters: Invalidating Remarks From Men Provoke a More Negative Emotional Reaction Than Do Remarks From Women

Despite negative consequences of emotional invalidation, research has not examined the effect of gender on responses to validation or invalidation or how an invalidating comment from a male versus a female confederate may influence affective responses. We used a two-study quasi-experimental design to examine variables that influence the emotions of individuals validated or invalidated for their emotions. Male and female undergraduates received either validating or invalidating remarks from a gender-ambiguous confederate (Study 1) or invalidating remarks from either a male or female confederate (Study 2). Results showed that invalidation from a gender-ambiguous confederate produced more negative emotional reactions than validation regardless of participants' gender. Furthermore, being invalidated by a man rather than by a woman provoked a specifically more negative emotional response. Interpersonal interventions should explore ways to reduce invalidation and particularly strive to mitigate the effects of invalidation from men, whose criticisms may provoke heightened negative responses from others.

Gender Differences in Leader Emergence Persist Even for Dominant Women: An Updated Confirmation of Role Congruity Theory

Role congruity theory predicts that women will be less likely than men to emerge as leaders when expectations for the leader role are incongruent with gender stereotypes. A 2 × 2 × 3 design that crossed the sex of the dominant partner, mixed- and same-sex dyads, and masculine, feminine, and neutral tasks involved 120 dyads of unacquainted college students in which one partner scored higher in dominance. In same-sex partnerships, the dominant member consistently emerged as leader. In mixed-sex dyads, the gender typing of the task did not influence dominant male ascendance but it did affect women's. When the task was masculine-typed or neutral, less dominant men were more likely to emerge as the leader of the dyad, frequently being appointed by the dominant woman herself. Thus, even when women possess the agentic quality of dominance consistent with the leader role, the incongruence between masculinized task demands and gender stereotypes mitigate against women's leadership emergence.

Feminist Psychology in the Service of Women: Staying Engaged Without Getting Married

This article, based on the 2005 Society for the Psychology of Women Presidential Address, presents a definition of feminism and evaluates feminist psychology and its current challenges through that lens. The principal theme is the tension between feminist psychology's engagement with the discipline and its ability to critique and alter both the discipline and the world. The article includes an analysis of the original 52 demands presented by women activists to the APA's Council of Representatives in 1970. Those demands are evaluated both in terms of progress and lack of achievement, as well as in terms of the limitations of the professional women's movement reflected in those original demands. The lack of success in achieving demands associated with structural change is highlighted. A framework for future feminist work that might achieve transformational change is offered.

The indirect link between perceived parenting and adolescent future orientation: A multiple-step model

The indirect links between perceived mothers’ and fathers’ autonomous-accepting parenting and future orientation were examined in a mediational model consisting of five steps: perceived mothers’ and fathers’ autonomous-accepting parenting, self-evaluation, and the motivational, cognitive representation, and behavioural components of future orientation. Empirical estimates were carried out by LISREL on data collected from 458 (224 girls) Israeli Jewish adolescents (11th graders) regarding two prospective life domains: career and family. These estimates showed a good fit between the theoretical model and four domain-by-gender estimates (girls’ and boys’ career, and girls’ and boys’ family). Similar to recent findings, only few gender differences were found; particularly, girls scored higher on the motivational component applied to career (counter-hypothesis) and on all three components applied to prospective family. Discussion highlighted the pivotal functions of self-evaluation in linking between perceived parenting and the motivational component, and of the motivational component in linking between self-evaluation and the cognitive and behavioural components.

The Role of Status in Producing Depressed Entitlement in Women's and Men's Pay Allocations

Extensive empirical evidence confirms a depressed entitlement effect wherein women pay themselves less than men for comparable work and believe the allocation fair. The present study tests the hypothesis that status subordination linked to being female underlies at least some of this effect. A 2 × 3 design crossed 180 undergraduates' gender with a control condition, which successfully established the depressed entitlement effect, and two experimental conditions. In one, women's status was enhanced through legitimation of women's task abilities; in the other, both women's and men's status was enhanced by adding educational credentials relevant to task ability. Follow-up analyses of the significant interaction revealed that the gap in self-pay demonstrated in the control condition disappeared when women's status was enhanced such that higher-status women's self-pay equaled that of men and exceeded that of control women. Although these findings confirm that status plays a role in producing depressed entitlement in self-pay, ancillary analyses of participants' perceptions point to the persistence of shifting standards and men's resistance to status threats.

Changes in Students’ Explanations for Gender Differences after Taking a Psychology of Women Class: More Constructionist and Less Essentialist

We explored how students’ endorsements of essential (biological and personality) and constructed (socialization and contextual) explanations for gender differences changed from the start to the end of Psychology of Women (POW) classes along with their feminist attitudes. Results from surveys of 120 POW students from three universities indicated that these students began class with more feminist awareness, immersion, and constructionist thinking than 228 general students, and that constructionist thinking was associated with perceptions that gender differences can be eliminated. Students’ essentialism declined across their POW class, whereas their constructionist thinking increased and their feminist attitudes strengthened. End-of-semester feminist identification was associated with stronger endorsement of contextual explanations for gender differences above and beyond initial identification. We discuss implications for researchers, instructors, and activists.

Choosing between two semi-finalists: On academic performance gap, sex category, and decision question

We use an application-files experimental design to investigate a new topic in the assessment of candidates for junior-engineering jobs. Our focus is on two semi-finalists, a man and a woman, who show clearly different but still good levels of academic record. We keep the gap between those levels constant, but vary the sex category of the better performer. We also include control conditions in which the two have similar records. Each assessor's task was to choose either one applicant or neither, and to rate both in competence and suitability. The control-group competence ratings indicate no gender bias by either men or women; the experimental-conditions competence data are consistent with the candidates' records as predicted, but also show women minimizing the record of the better-performing male candidate. Choice and suitability, on the other hand, reveal a preference for the female applicant across respondents and conditions, as anticipated given the more open nature of those two questions, while still reflecting the academic records. Findings and their interpretation are presented in detail.

Women’s Land Ownership and Relationship Power

Violence against women is a widespread societal problem substantiated and perpetuated through inequities that operate within numerous levels of the society. Challenging and ending gender-based violence therefore requires addressing social structures that perpetuate gendered hierarchies and maintain women’s susceptibility to experiencing violence worldwide. The present study examines novel approaches taken by women in two different countries in the Global South, one in Nicaragua and another in Tanzania, to examine macro-level processes involved in land ownership in regions where owning land is a marker of dominance. Using data from 492 women, results from structural equation models and qualitative thematic analyses demonstrate significant links among women’s ownership of land, relationship power, and receipt of physical and psychological violence in both the countries. Collectively, the findings suggest that when women own land, they gain power within their relationships and are less likely to experience violence. Implications for theoretical conceptualizations of eradicating violence against women and practical interventions are discussed.

Gender and Emotion

I draw on research on emotion and gender to illustrate how an essentialized view of gender as difference persists through the circulation of beliefs about gender from popular culture to scientific writing and back again. I begin by describing the paradoxical nature of beliefs about emotion and then show that emotion’s representations in beliefs and stereotypes have a powerful effect on how we interpret our own and others’ emotional behavior. I consider how the differences paradigm, the study of gender in terms of identification of difference(s) between girls/women and boys/men, aids the circulation of essentialized beliefs about gender from popular culture to psychological science. Specifically, essentializing discourses from popular culture are absorbed into scientific discourse and gain scientific authorization via research undertaken within a differences paradigm. These results circulate back again to popular culture and the cycle continues. I conclude with a discussion of how the differences paradigm can be disrupted by a research approach informed by contextual factors that moderate gender effects, the intersectionality of social identities, and attentiveness to gender fault lines, giving examples from our work on the “negotiability” of emotion’s meaning and emotion’s representation in language. My article has implications for counselors and therapists whose clients struggle with the expression of emotions, instructors who want to encourage their students to explore how they think about gender as essentialized, and researchers concerned with interpersonal interactions, especially workplace interactions where understanding of others’ emotions often has a gendered cast.

Who gets blamed for intimate partner violence? The relative contributions of perpetrator sex category, victim confrontation, and observer attitudes

The present study examined the effects of perpetrator sex category, victim confrontation, observer sex category, and observer attitudes on attributions of blame and behavioral stability for partner violence. Data were collected from 728 college-aged students enrolled at 2 universities in the United States. Results demonstrated that males and females attributed less blame and behavioral stability to female perpetrators than male perpetrators, especially if the perpetrator was provoked. Moreover, attitudes toward women and violence were important for predicting attributions, and some of the evidence for observer effects was reduced to nonsignificance once these variables were added to the model.

Where Is Social Structure in Personality Research?

For decades, feminist scholars have argued that to understand a person’s behavior, one must understand not only that individual but also the social structure in which she or he is embedded. Has psychology heeded these calls? The authors investigated this question using the subfield of personality as an exemplar. Based on a systematic analysis of publication trends in nine prominent journals, the authors found that social-structural analyses rarely appear in highly cited journals specifically devoted to personality research. Instead, these analyses appear in journals that focus on certain social structures (gender and race/ethnicity), while still neglecting others (social class and sexual orientation). To illustrate how greater attention to social structure can advance the scientific understanding of individuals, the authors then identified specific research programs that look closely at both personality and structure. The article concludes with specific recommendations for research and teaching in personality psychology, gender and race psychology, and beyond.

The Political Is Personal

Consistent with the dictum, “the personal is political,” feminist scholars have maintained that gender equity in security, access to education, economic opportunity, and property ownership are central to women’s well-being. Empirical research evaluating this thesis can include nation-level indicators of gender equity, such as the United Nation Development Program’s Gender Empowerment Measure. Yet, despite the growing popularity of such measures, there has been little discussion of the adequate measurement of gender equity or the appropriate application of such tools in theory-grounded empirical research within psychology. Moreover, the bulk of psychological research that has integrated such indicators has not employed a feminist or emancipatory framework. The authors summarize and evaluate nation-level gender equity indicators in order to familiarize researchers with the available tools, and the authors review the limited psychological literature that has used these indicators. The authors also discuss how psychological research can better use gender equity indicators in empirical models to examine political processes linked to women’s well-being.

Exploring Body Comparison Tendencies

This study examined similarities and differences in women’s and men’s comparison tendencies and perfection beliefs when evaluating their face, body shape, and physical abilities, as well as how these tendencies and beliefs relate to their body esteem. College students (90 women and 88 men) completed the Body Esteem Scale and answered questions concerning their social comparison and temporal comparison tendencies related to face, body shape, and physical abilities evaluations as well as personal perfection body beliefs. As predicted, women were more likely than men to compare their face and bodies to other same-sex persons whom they perceived as having either similar or better physical qualities than themselves in those body domains, with their most likely comparison tendency being upward social comparison. More men than women held body perfection beliefs for all three body domains, and men were most likely to rely on future temporal comparison when evaluating their body shape. Comparison tendencies and perfection beliefs also were differentially related to women’s and men’s body esteem: Whereas women relied on self-critical social comparison strategies associated with negative body esteem, men’s comparison strategies and perfection beliefs were more self-hopeful. Implications for practitioners treating body image issues are discussed.

A Social Role Theory Perspective on Gender Gaps in Political Attitudes

Men and women tend to espouse different political attitudes, as widely noted by both journalists and social scientists. A deeper understanding of why and when gender gaps exist is necessary because at least some gender differences in the political realm are both pervasive and impactful. In this article, we apply a social role theory framework to understanding gender gaps in political attitudes. The core principles are that men's and women's political attitudes diverge because of diffuse gender roles (e.g., broad expectations based on sex) as well as differential specific roles (e.g., family and occupational roles). We delineate several mechanisms by which diffuse and specific roles would produce differences and similarities in political attitudes. In particular, our analysis examines (a) the influence of gender-stereotypic expectations, (b) internalized traits and goals, and (c) variations in status and resources. A range of evidence shows that the general shape of gender differences in political attitudes aligns with the social roles of men and women, particularly with regard to elements that associate agency and higher status with men and communion and lower status with women. Additionally, we consider intersections among diffuse gender roles and specific roles, following the general principle that gender gaps in political attitudes emerge especially when both diffuse gender roles and specific roles emphasize agency for men and communion for women. The consideration of a social role perspective offers opportunities not only to integrate existing data about gender gaps in political attitudes but also to highlight directions for new research.

Explaining Underrepresentation: A Theory of Precluded Interest

What processes best explain women’s underrepresentation in science, math, and engineering fields in the U.S.? Do they also explain men’s underrepresentation in the humanities? Two survey studies across two U.S. West Coast universities (N = 62; N = 614) addressed these questions in the context of two fields: one male-dominated (computer science) and the other female-dominated (English). Among a set of social predictors—including perceived similarity to the people in the field, social identity threats, and expectations of success—the best mediator of women’s lower interest in computer science and men’s lower interest in English was perceived similarity. Thus, changing students’ social perceptions of how they relate to those in the field may help to diversify academic fields.

Are Television Commercials Still Achievement Scripts for Women?

Content analyses of television advertising document the ubiquity of traditional images of women, yet few studies have explored their impact. One noteworthy exception is the experiment by Geis, Brown, Jennings, and Porter (1984) . These researchers found that the achievement aspirations of controls and women exposed to traditional images were lower than those of both women who viewed nontraditional replicas and men, leading to the conclusion that women's aspirations were muted by sexist advertising. An updated extension and modification of their study with 185 college women and 96 men did not find an interaction between gender and ad exposure, suggesting some changes over time in women's aspirations, as well as in the content and impact of commercials. Although women's achievement scripts now appear more similar to men's, as well as more resistant to sexist exposure, there are signs in the present data and related research that women's aspirations are not fully impervious to sexism in the media.

SITUATED EMPATHY: VARIATIONS ASSOCIATED WITH TARGET GENDER ACROSS SITUATIONS

The aim of this study is to present a situated measure of empathy where person features such as gender of target and respondent vary within particular social contexts. The Empathy Situation Reaction Scale (ESRS; Manulik, Kelley, White, & Staats, 2004) has good psychometric properties for three different types of situations. Situations were associated with a much larger empathy effect size than gender of respondent. Gender differences on the ESRS were situation dependent, with women reporting more empathy in the social or threat situations than did men but not in situations where the target accidentally caused property damage or loss. The ESRS may be used to assess empathy in complex interactions of situation, target and respondent and provides a model for studying complex social situations.

Gender, mood state, and justice preference: do mood states moderate gender-based norms of justice?

The present study extends research on distributive justice by investigating whether a person's mood state moderates the robust effects of gender norms on allocation decisions. One hundred and eighty undergraduates (90 men: 90 women) were asked to undergo a mood induction procedure in which they were randomly assigned to a positive, negative, or neutral mood condition, and to work on a task with either a male or female co-worker (confederate). This resulted in a 2 (gender of participant) x 2 (gender of confederate) x 3 (positive vs. neutral vs. negative mood) between-subjects factorial design. Following completion of the task, participants were informed that they did 60% of the work and their co-worker did 40%. They were then asked to divide money between themselves and their co-worker in a way that they considered fair. The analysis revealed a three-way interaction in participants self-payment whereby men in a negative mood, working with other men took more pay for themselves than did participants in all other conditions. Specifically, 60% of the participants in this condition, allocated the payment either equitably or in a manner suggesting even greater self-interest. These results support the view that gender effects are strongly influenced by the presence of other relevant contextual cues.