biology and gender differences in personality

Andy Perrin responded on Scatterplot to a Twitter debate that happened yesterday and I couldn’t resist adding two cents. It started with a link posted by Nicholas Christakis to a review article on gender differences in personality across societies. The main claim of the article is that gender differences in personality are larger in more gender-egalitarian countries, providing support for evolutionary theories of gender differences and against social role theories, which would predict gender convergence in egalitarian countries.

Steve Vaisey commented, “I am genuinely interested to hear how sociologists who study gender would react to these findings.” Andy’s response, which is as usual worth reading, argued against the study’s interpretation from a social constructionist perspective.

This sent me down the rabbit hole of actually reading the article and a bit of the research it is based on. I am not impressed.

Let me qualify that I am not a gender scholar, nor am I deeply familiar with this literature. My priors are that gender differences in personality are both biological and social, but that the average person (obviously not everyone) is insufficiently skeptical of biological explanations because they fit our expectations and stereotypes. I am inclined to be doubtful about this kind of research, but open to evidence.

Here’s two reasons this article left me underwhelmed.

First, the lit review is sloppy in a way that makes me not trust the authors about other things — say, the quality of their data collection across relatively small samples in dozens of countries. It sets up social role theory as a straw man (“social role theories of gender development contend any and all ostensible differences between men and women are primarily the result of perceived gender roles” [p. 47], when the debate is really about relative importance, not “any and all ostensible differences”). It quotes from an article about social role theory (“men and women have inherited the same evolved psychological dispositions” [p. 47]), but the page is not part of the article, and the quote does not seem to appear in the article at all. Based on Googling, it appears to come from a misquote in an edited volume. This may seem trivial, but if you’re asking me to trust that you used good research methods on a study that involved data collection in 50+ countries, I’d like to know that I can count on you to represent the literature accurately.

Second, I dug into one of the more prominent empirical studies in the review, by the same lead author. The review describes the study like this:

More egalitarian gender roles, gender socialization and sociopolitical gender equity, however, were associated with larger gender differences. For example, the largest overall gender differences in personality were found in relatively high gender egalitarian cultures of France (d = −0.44) and the Netherlands (d = −0.36), whereas the smallest gender differences were found in the relatively low gender egalitarian cultures of Botswana (d = 0.00) and India (d = −0.01).

The examples here are somewhat cherry-picked. Yes, these are the top two and bottom two countries. But if you look at their whole chart (p. 173), there’s more to the story. The five countries with the biggest gender differences in personality (measured as mean gender difference in big-five traits) are France, Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Brazil, and Belgium. The five most gender-similar countries are Indonesia, Congo, Fiji, Botswana, and Finland.

If we look at the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap indicator, France is the only country on the top five that makes it into even the top 20 countries for gender equality. Brazil and the Czech Republic are both basically at the global median. Finland, which has among the most similar personality scores by gender, is the third most gender-equal country in the world. So while correlations may be there across all countries, this is hardly dispositive unless you can come up some explanation for why gender egalitarianism leads to personality difference across genders in France, but similarity in Finland.

And when they actually dig into the relationships, they appear to be flimsy and overstated. The study examines nine country-level measures of gender equality. After controlling for the country’s development level, only four measures show a significant relationship to the gender-personality gap at the p < 0.05 level (p. 177). So by most measures, the study finds no relationship. Notably, neither of the UN composite measures of gender equality, the Gender Empowerment Measure and Gender Development Index, are significantly related.

The four measures that appear to be related to mean country-level gender difference in personality are 1) traditional values, 2) cultural trust (“can most people be trusted”), 3) the gender gap in smoking, and 4) “when the respondents are more inclined to agree with a question irrespective its content” [sic — I don’t even know what that means]. Two of these seem very questionably related to gender, and I’m going to discount those.

That leaves us with the following: countries with more traditional values have less sex differentiation in personality traits, and countries where women smoke a lot have more sex differentiation in personality traits. Both relationships are significant at the p < 0.05 level — but note that we have already run through several possible measures that turned out not to be significant.

From this, the study winds back up to its dramatic conclusion: “in more prosperous and egalitarian societies the personality profiles of men and women become decidedly less similar” (p. 178). More prosperous, yes: development level, not gender equality, is the best explainer of gender-personality differences. But more egalitarian? Color me unconvinced.

And from that, the abstract jumps to: “It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations.” Wow. The word “naturally” is doing an awful lot of work there.

The review article covers a bunch of other studies, too, but based on what I’ve read it does not seem worth the time to dive in further. My priors — that personality differences are both biological and social, and that people are too credulous of biological explanations of gender differences — remain unchanged.

harassment, destroyed careers, and returns to human capital

One of the consequences of #metoo is the burst of media stories about victims of harassment and abuse. One such story is about the actress Anabelle Sciora, whose career was on the rise before she was allegedly assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. Friends describe her withdrawal and decline in Hollywood.

This story shares much in common with our reports of violence and abuse. One feature of the experience is that people often withdraw from their social or work world after assault. I am not an expert on violent crimes, but this seems to be a very understandable reaction.

This leads to the major question of this post. If harassment and violence are common occurrences in many workplaces and withdrawal is a common response, to what degree are women’s, and men’s to a lesser extent, careers destroyed by workplace harassment and violence? I have no idea what the answer would look like, but it could potentially be high. In a hypothetical situation, if, say, 10% of men in a workplace are constantly harassing people with impunity, it could very easily decimate the female workforce in that organization or profession. And considering that many institutions, like universities, have poor track records in limiting or responding to even very serious harassment, it is worth considering how workplace environments may lead to notable wage and attainment gaps.

This is a tough question, and I welcome comments that can help address it.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street / Read Contexts Magazine– It’s Awesome!

after #metoo

It’s a bit disingenuous to be shocked. We may be surprised that a particular person abuses women, but we shouldn’t be shocked that it’s a common thing. Not after decades of complaint about sexual harassment. Not after a century of activism that tries to establish autonomy and safety for all genders.  It’s a sad truth that our culture tolerates violence against women. The only thing that shocks me is that someone is actually suffering the consequences of their actions.

But the real question is “what next?” Social conservatives will be quick to blame the culture of the sexual revolution and its view that sex can be enjoyable and diverse in form. Some have linked the voluntary expression of sexuality to violence perpetrated against women. Conservative critics are too willing to align the more general tendency to prey on people with a genuine reform of our sexual mores.

The waning stages of battle between social conservatives and their feminist foils are not important, but what #metoo means for everyday people is important. While politicians and entertainers have drawn the most attention at this moment, #metoo shows that harassment and violence are not limited to these rarefied spheres. This happens everyday.

No blog post can do justice to this issue, but we can start thinking about what does and does not work. Let’s start with what does not seem to work:

• Private settlements: While private settlements may bring some restitution to victims, it does little to prevent future harm. The main issue is that victims, understandably, want privacy. Another issue is that settlements can be passed off onto third parties, like insurers. These do nothing to discourage future violence.
• Institutional enforcement outside criminal justice: Many institutions – like universities – are called upon to police and monitor abuse. While institutions have an obligation to take reasonable measures to prevent employees from harming others, they are often ill suited to properly adjudicate claims. Another problem is that when abusers have status, it is people’s self-interest within the institution to not  push the issue.

What does work?

• The current #metoo movement is facilitated by information and technology. It is really hard to imagine this movement would have succeeded in the age before social media. Similarly, high profile revelations of abuse rely on having friendly allies in the media who can collaborate and help with the story. This is also a relatively recent development.
• Public push back: Another important thing that works is (justified) outrage. Not the faux rage of social media, but people’s genuine disgust with those who commit violence. Alas, this is a mechanism of control that is hard to trigger and it is rare.

What can we do to promote more safety and civility in everyday life? Here, I appeal to the work of my former colleague Elizabeth Armstrong, Laura Hamilton and Brian Sweeney as reported in their article “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Multilevel, Integrative Approach to Party Rape,” published in 2006 in Social Problems. The crux of the argument is that when men monopolize alcohol distribution on college campuses, they have more ability to assault women.

There may a similar dynamic at play in other situations. When men have a monopoly of resources (e.g., jobs in Hollywood or careers in academia), they feel they can prey on others. This suggests to me that sexual predation is facilitated by structures that allow a few to hoard opportunities and to do so in secrecy. If this analysis is correct, then it suggests that we can do much to prevent abuse by opening up opportunities to more people and doing so in public ways. Once the initial anger has past, I hope that we, as a culture, can develop social practices that allow men and women to work together while removing opportunities for abuse.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street / Read Contexts Magazine– It’s Awesome!

that gender studies hoax is dumb, but look at this business model

Today’s five-minute-hate is on gender studies, or people who dump on gender studies, depending on your POV. The short version for those of you not paying attention: A philosopher and a math PhD decided gender studies is dumb and ideological. They wrote up a jargon- and buzzword-filled article titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construction” and paid to get it published in a peer-reviewed journal no one’s ever heard of. Ha ha ha! Take that, gender studies!

This is a stupid prank that has already been taken down in about five different places. I’m not going to bother with that.

But in looking at the original journal, I noticed this crazy business model they have. The journal, Cogent Social Sciences, is an open-access outlet published by Cogent OA. It charges $1350 to publish an article, unless you don’t have $1350, in which case they’ll take some unspecified minimum.

Okay, so far it sounds like every other scammy “peer-reviewed” open access journal. But wait. Cogent OA, it turns out, is owned by Taylor & Francis, one of the largest academic publishers. Taylor & Francis owns Routledge, for instance, and publishes Economy and Society, Environmental Sociology, and Justice Quarterly, to pick a few I’ve heard of.

Cogent OA has a FAQ that conveniently asks, “What is the relationship between Cogent OA and Taylor & Francis?” Here’s the answer (bold is mine):

Cogent OA is part of the Taylor & Francis Group, benefitting from the resources and experiences of a major publisher, but operates independently from the Taylor & Francis and Routledge imprints.

Taylor & Francis and Routledge publish a number of fully open access journals, under the Taylor & Francis Open and Routledge Open imprints. Cogent OA publishes the Cogent Series of multidisciplinary, digital open access journals.

Together, we also provide authors with the option of transferring any sound manuscript to a journal in the Cogent Series if it is unsuitable for the original Taylor & Francis/Routledge journals, providing benefits to authors, reviewers, editors and readers.

So get this: If your article gets rejected from one of our regular journals, we’ll automatically forward it to one of our crappy interdisciplinary pay-to-play journals, where we’ll gladly take your (or your funder’s or institution’s) money to publish it after a cursory “peer review”. That is a new one to me.

There’s a hoax going on here all right. But I don’t think it’s gender studies that’s being fooled.

rhacel parrenas discusses global labor

Former guest and all around cool person Rhacel Parrenas gave a lecture summarizes her extensive work on global flows of migrant domestic labor. Self recommending!

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($5 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist/From Black Power/Party in the Street

putting limits on the academic workday

Today, among the various administrative tasks of scheduling meetings with students and other responsibilities, I decided to RSVP yes for an upcoming evening talk.  I didn’t make this decision lightly, as it involved coordinating schedules with another party (i.e., fellow dual career parent).

With the use of technology such as email, increasing job precarity, and belief in facetime as signalling productivity and commitment, the workday in the US has elongated, blurring boundaries to the point that work can crowd out other responsibilities to family, community, hobbies, and self-care.  However, one Ivy  institution is exhorting its members to rethink making evening events and meetings the norm.

In this nuanced statement issued to department chairs, Brown University’s provost outlines the stakes and consequences of an elongated workday:

This burden [of juggling work and family commitments] may disproportionately affect female faculty members. Although data on Brown’s faculty is not available, national statistics indicate that male faculty members (of every rank) are more likely than female faculty members (of every rank) to have a spouse or partner whose comparably flexible work schedule allows that spouse or partner to handle the bulk of evening-time household responsibilities. Put differently, male faculty members are more likely than female faculty members to have the household support to attend campus events after 5:30. We must be attuned to issues of gender equity when we think about program scheduling. We must also take into consideration the particular challenges faced by single parents on the faculty when required to attend events outside the regular hours of childcare.

forum on data analytics and inclusivity, part 1

Data analytics is a buzzword in the business world these days. One of the industries in which data analytics has made the biggest impact is sports. The publication of Moneyball in 2003 signaled a sea change in how baseball teams used data and statistics to make personnel changes. Basketball wasn’t far behind in implementing advanced statistics in the front office. The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference has become a hub of industry activity, attracting academics, journalists, and sports insiders.

In general, data analytics has been celebrated as a more enlightened way to approach sports management. But it was only a matter of time before sports analytics got some backlash. The most recent criticism comes from the respected sports journalist, Michael Wilbon, who wrote a piece for The Undefeated about how data analytics has fallen on deaf ears in the African American community.

Log onto any mainstream website or media outlet (certainly any program within the ESPN empire) and 30 seconds cannot pass without extreme statistical analysis, which didn’t exist 20 years ago, hijacking the conversation. But not in “BlackWorld,” where never is heard an advanced analytical word. Not in urban barbershops. Not in text chains during three-hour games. Not around office water coolers. Not even in pressrooms or locker rooms where black folks who make a living in the industry spend all day and half the night talking about the most intimate details of sports.

Wilbon makes the point that in sports data analytics have become just one more way for the Old Boy Network to reassert their status. Of course, I’ve heard other people make the case that analytics levels the playing field, given that it doesn’t require any sort of credentials to participate and is potentially race- and gender-blind. Other journalists have already criticized Wilbon’s claims and methodology (including this response by Dave Schilling), but it’s undoubtedly true that Wilbon’s point of view is shared by others in sports.

We’re using Wilbon’s essay as an opportunity to have a discussion about data analytics and inclusivity. This is an issue that doesn’t just affect sports. As analytics become more integral to the business world, organizations will use analytics to sort talent in many of the most lucrative jobs. Academia, especially in STEM fields, continually wrestles with questions about inclusivity as well.

I’ve invited a handful of scholars and practitioners in the field of data analytics, many of whom work in the world of sports analytics, to comment on this issue. I’ll post their responses in two parts:  half today and the other set tomorrow. Today’s essays are written by three contributors who all have different takes on how analytics can be used to overcome the problems Wilbon identified in his essay. Brian Mills is a sports economist at the University of Florida. His research applies “economic lessons and quantitative analysis to problems that sport managers face in their everyday decision making.”  Sekou Bermiss is an organizational theorist at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business. He studies the relationships between human capital, reputation, and firm performance. Laura Nelson is currently a postdoc at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. She uses computational methods to analyze organizational histories and changes in the feminist movement. She’s also, like me, a San Francisco Giants fan.

Thanks to all of the contributors. Come back for more commentary later, and please feel free to leave comments below.

sociology and postcolonialism

There’s an increasing amount of great sociological work about places and people that are not European or North American.  That’s important not just because they provide empirical sites and theoretical resources that European and North American scholars have previously ignored* but because looking at the world from the south helps deprovincialize North American sociology, and given the power of the ASA, AJS, ASR et al, global sociology as well.

Here, for example, is a really wonderful interview with three very important figures in discussions of postcolonialism, feminism, and social science. It’s an interview by the student editors of Political Power and Social Theory (which Julian Go edits) and part of a special issue edited by those same figures, Evren Savci, Ann Orloff, and Raka Ray.  (Full disclosure: I was part of another PPST volume on postcolonialism). Evren Savci

I’m pasting a chunk of the interview below, though I’d encourage you to read the whole thing:

SE [Student Editors]: This volume complicates a simple understanding of feminism. How would you define something as feminist, especially if it is “a set of political projects” rather than a “unified movement”? (a) What do you think/how do you feel about the term “feminism”? Must we replace or reshape it?

ES [Evren Savci]: During one of our meetings, I remember mentioning that I would much more willingly give up “woman” as a category before I give up feminism, and I believe that this is also at the heart of our volume. Inspired by many feminist scholars, the authors in this issue are putting pressure on the effectiveness of “woman,” and still are committed to feminist theory and politics to think about social justice. Feminist thought and movements themselves are always changing, yet generation after generation, many people find feminism’s political vision inspiring and appealing. They challenge the parts they find unfit, modify certain things, add others, but they do not feel that they need to discard feminism altogether. One of the outcomes of this interrogation is that there is no “we” who is in charge, and who could or should replace or reshape feminism.

Raka Ray (RR): There was a time when the term feminism was so synonymous with its dominant liberal expression that I had to distance myself from it. The feminism I embrace today is capacious. It is the opposite of Mackinnon’s Feminism Unmodified. It understands the fundamental inequalities inherent in the gendered ordering of the world, but understands also that while the gendered ordering of the social world is foundational, it does not stand alone.  It is co-constructed at the very least with race, class, and nation.  This feminism therefore understands why all women do not wish to vote for Hillary Clinton! It is a democratic stance towards the world that must include but does not end with gender.

AO [Ann Orloff]: Speaking as a social scientist as well as political actor, I am in favor of “remaking,” historicizing and contextualizing our foundational terms, including “feminism.” The feminisms emerging in different times and places may have a certain commonality in challenging gendered hierarchies, but the specific elements of the hierarchies to be targeted, and the particular political strategies and tactics to be deployed are sure to vary. I would appeal to a notion of multiplicity – varieties of feminisms, rather than a single feminism, however modified (or not).  Feminist analysts should understand that different women will respond differently to particular political hailings (e.g., the Clinton campaign, or MacKinnon’s anti-sex-trafficking projects). Different groups of people embrace different visions of how to challenge very diverse gendered hierarchies.  The unity of such projects has to be seen as a contingent political achievement, and we should be prepared for debate and dissent, and the possibility that different groups of feminists will not see eye to eye.  Demands for perfect unity and perfect inclusiveness are, I think, harmful. Unity and inclusion cannot be guaranteed prior to politics; a democratic feminist politics consists in (imperfect) claims being made and challenged, and remade. My own feminism is linked with my commitments to social-democratic and anti-imperialist politics, but I can see that other varieties of feminism are also thriving.  Each of us as feminist political actors does our best to convince others of the rightness of our calls, but we need to be prepared to debate! I’d like to note also that, in studies of change, multiplicity (or multiple schema, such as might be present in different feminisms) is associated with innovation!  

There are a lot of important networkers in this deprovincializing project (not least the three editors described above, or the student editors who interviewed them).  Among those people who push sociology to be more global, Julian Go has been an important voice for some time, not least as editor of PPST.  Here he is on a “southern solution” in an essay excerpted from his book,  Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016):

To propose a Southern standpoint sociology is not to reinsert cultural essentialism. Feminist standpoint theory was correct to point out that the “woman” standpoint does not summon an essential identity but a gendered social position: a social location based upon experiences rather than biology or culture. “Groups who share common placement in hierarchical power relations,” Hill Collins (1997: 377) avers, “also share common experiences in such power relations.” A Southern standpoint is thus not an essence but a relational social position that lies at the lower runs of a global social hierarchy. To assume that the Southern solution requires essentialism is to overlook its fundamental sociology – and (mis)read it for a traditional anthropology.

If the charge of essentialism can be dispatched, so can the charges of epistemic relativism. A sociology based upon a southern standpoint does not impede scientific truth, it facilitates it because all truths are perspectival. Enter perspectival realism. This is the notion that there is indeed a “world” out there that is knowable, but (a) knowledge is always socially-situated, and hence perspectival, and (b) no single perspective (or theory, concept, or discipline) can represent everything we might want to know about the world. “Objective” truth can indeed be had. But those truths must always be recognized as partial– precisely because all knowledge is perspectival (Go 2016).

At UCLA, we’re getting an increasing amount of students interested in studying majority Muslim countries and looking at parts of the world sociology has traditionally ignored or left to the anthropologists. From what I understand, that’s the case across the discipline, which is a great sign.

On a much more pedestrian note, I’d say one of the biggest hindrances we still face is that there’s no value-added for language study and cultural immersion, and, in fact you get just as much reward for studying the United States or Europe, in a language you already know.  Why learn Arabic or Thai or what have you when you could get better at stats, or do a few more years of ethnography down the street? The opportunity costs are too great. That means that global sociology is much harder for people who don’t enter graduate school with the language and cultural tools already ready to go.

 

*an earlier version of this said “previously unexplored” and while I meant this in reference to North American and European scholars actually learning about parts of the world that aren’t them, it did sort of sound like columbusing.

inequality perpetuated via organizations – a view from cultural sociology

Sociologists are increasingly recognizing how  organizations facilitate and perpetuate inequality.  Check out the recently published Socio-Economic Review paper, “What is Missing? Cultural Processes and Causal Pathways to Inequality” by Michèle Lamont, Stefan Beljean, and Matthew Clair.

Building on Weber’s concept of rationalization, the authors argue that organizations’ propensity for standardization and evaluation (along with other processes) contribute to inequalities.  Standardization flattens inputs and outputs, subjecting these to comparisons along narrow dimensions.  In addition, those that conform to standards can receive needed resources, leaving outliers to scrap for the remainders:

Standardization is the process by which individuals, groups and institutions construct ‘uniformities across time and space’ through ‘the generation of agreed-upon rules’ (Timmermans and Epstein, 2010, p. 71). While the process implies intention (‘agreed-upon rules’) on the part of social actors, standardization as a process in everyday life frequently has unintended consequences.  The construction of uniformities becomes habitual and taken for granted once the agreed-upon rules are set in place and codified into institutional and inter-subjective scripts (often formal, albeit sometimes also informal). In its industrial and post-industrial manifestations, the process of standardization is part and parcel of the rationalization and bureaucratization of society (Carruthers and Espeland, 1991; Olshan, 1993; Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000; Timmermans and Epstein, 2010).

….Moreover, the effects of standardization on inequality are often unintended or indeterminate. Indeed, standards are often implemented with the intent of developing a common benchmark of success or competence and are frequently motivated by positive purposes (e.g. in the case of the adoption of pollution standards or teaching standards). Yet, once institutionalized, standards are often mobilized in the distribution of resources. In this process, in some cases, those who started out with standard relevant resources may be advantaged (Buchmann et al., 2010). In this sense, the consequences of standardization for inequality can be unintentional, indirect and open-ended, as it can exacerbate or abate inequality.Whether they are is an empirical issue to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

One example of this interaction between standardization and social inequality is the use of standards in education as documented by Neckerman (2007). Among other things, her work analyses the rise of standardized and IQ testing in the 1920s in American education and local Chicago education policy. It shows how standardized test scores came to be used to determine admission to Chicago’s best vocational schools, with the goal of imposing more universalist practices. Yet, in reality, the reform resulted in diminished access to the best schooling for the city’s low-income African-American population…. (591-592).

Similarly, evaluation facilitates and legitimates differential treatment of individual persons:

Evaluation is a cultural process that—broadly defined—concerns the negotiation, definition and stabilization of value in social life (Beckert and Musselin, 2013). According to Lamont (2012, p. 206), this process involves several important sub-processes, most importantly categorization (‘determining in which group the entity [. . .] under consideration belongs’) and legitimation (‘recognition by oneself and others of the value of an entity’).

In the empirical literature, we find several examples of how evaluation as a cultural process can contribute to inequality, many of which are drawn from sociological research on hiring, recruiting and promotion in labour markets. The bulk of these studies concern how evaluation practices of organizations favour or discriminate against certain groups of employees (see, e.g. Castilla and Benard, 2010) or applicants (see, e.g. Rivera, 2012). Yet, some scholars also examine evaluation processes in labour markets from a broader perspective, locating evaluation not only in hiring or promotion but also in entire occupational fields.

For instance, Beljean (2013b) studied standards of evaluation in the cultural industry
of stand-up comedy. Drawing on interviews with comedians and their employers as well as ethnographic fieldwork, he finds that even though the work of stand-up comedians is highly uniform in that they all try to make people laugh, there is considerable variation in how comedians are evaluated across different levels of stratification of the comedy industry. Thus, for example, newcomer comedians and star performers are judged against different standards: while the former must be highly adaptable to the taste of different audiences and owners of comedy clubs, the latter are primarily judged by their ability to nurture their fan-base and to sell out shows. Even though this difference does not necessarily translate into more inequality among comedians, it tends to have negative effects on the career prospects of newcomer comedians. Due to mechanisms of cumulative advantage, and because both audiences and bookers tend to be conservative in their judgement, it is easier for more established comedians to maintain their status than for newcomers to build up a reputation. As a result, a few star comedians get to enjoy a disproportionally large share of fame and monetary rewards, while a large majority of comedians remain anonymous and marginalized. (593)

Those looking for ways to curb inequality will not find immediate answers in this article.  The authors do not offer remedies for how organizations can combat such unintended consequences, or even, have its members become more self-aware of these tendencies.   Yet, we know from other research that organizations have attempted different measures to minimize bias.  For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras turned to “blind” auditions to reduce gender bias when considering musicians for hire.  Some have even muffled the floor to prevent judges from hearing the click of heels that might give away the gender of those auditioning.

An example of a blind audition, courtesy of Colorado Springs Philharmonic.

In any case, have a look at the article’s accompanying discussion forum, where fellow scholars Douglas S. Massey, Leslie McCall, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Dustin Avent-Holt, Philippe Monin, Bernard Forgues, and Tao Wang weigh in with their own essays.

 

 

credit where credit is due: gender and authorship conventions in economics and sociology

[Ha — I wrote this last night and set it to post for this morning — when I woke up saw that Fabio had beat me to it. Posting anyway for the limited additional thoughts it contains.]

Last week Fabio launched a heated discussion about whether economics is less “racially balanced” than other social sciences. Then on Friday Justin Wolfers (who has been a vocal advocate for women in economics) published an Upshot piece arguing that female economists get less credit when they collaborate with men.

The Wolfers piece covers research by Harvard economics PhD candidate Heather Sarsons, who used data on tenure decisions at top-30 economics programs in the last forty years to estimate the effects of collaboration (with men or women) on whether women get tenure, controlling for publication quantity and quality and so on. (Full paper here.) Only 52% of the women in this population received tenure, compared to 77% of the men.

The takeaway is that women got no marginal benefit (in terms of tenure decision) from coauthoring with men, while they received some benefit (but less than men did) if they coauthored with at least one other women. Their tenure chances did, however, benefit as much as men’s from solo-authored papers. Sarsons’ interpretation (after ruling out several alternative possibilities) is that while women are given full credit when there is no question about their role in a study, their contributions are discounted when they coauthor with men.

Interesting from a sociologist’s perspective is that Sarsons uses a more limited data set from sociology as a comparison. Looking at a sample of 250 sociology faculty at top-20 programs, she finds no difference in tenure rates by gender, and no similar disadvantage from coauthorship.

While it would be nice to interpret this as evidence of the great enlightenment of sociology around gender issues, that is probably premature. Nevertheless, Sarsons points to one key difference between sociology and economics (other than differing assumptions about women’s contributions) that could potentially explain the divergence.

Sociology, as most of you probably know, has a convention of putting the author who made the largest contribution first in the authorship list. Economics uses alphabetical order. Other disciplines have their own conventions — lab sciences, for example, put the senior author last. This means that sociologists can infer a little bit more than economists about who played the biggest role in a paper from authorship order — information Sarsons suggests might contribute to women receiving more credit for their collaborative work.

This sounds plausible to me, although I also wouldn’t be surprised if the two disciplines made different assumptions, ceteris paribus, about women’s contributions. It might be worth looking at sociology articles with the relatively common footnote “Authors contributed equally; names are listed in alphabetical order” (or reverse alphabetical order, or by coin toss, or whatever). Of course such a note still provides information about relative contribution — 50-50, at least in theory — so it’s not an ideal comparison. But I would bet that readers mentally give one author more credit than the other for these papers.

That may just be the first author, due to the disciplinary convention. But one could imagine that a male contributor (or a senior contributor) would reap greater rewards for these kinds of collaborations. It wouldn’t say much about the hypothesis if that were not the case, but if men received more advantage from papers with explicitly equal coauthors, that would certainly be consistent with the hypothesis that first-author naming conventions help women get credit.

Okay, maybe that’s a stretch. Sarsons closes by noting that she plans to expand the sociology sample and add disciplines with different authorship conventions. It will be challenging to tease out whether authorship conventions really help women get due credit for their work, and I’m skeptical that that’s 100% of the story. But even if it could fix part of the problem, what a simple solution to ensure credit where credit is due.

traveling with task segregation

Now that Thanksgiving is right around the corner, Americans are girding themselves to visit family and friends. For some, this will mean getting screened by the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). Just in time for this, check out Curtis K. Chan and Michel Anteby‘s forthcoming ASQ article “Task Segregation as a Mechanism for Within-Job Inequality: Women and Men of the Transportation Security Administration.” (Bonus: ungated/free PDF!)

Here’s the abstract:

Abstract

In this article, we examine a case of task segregation—when a group of workers is disproportionately allocated, relative to other groups, to spend more time on specific tasks in a given job—and argue that such segregation is a potential mechanism for generating within-job inequality in the quality of a job. When performing those tasks is undesirable, this allocation has unfavorable implications for that group’s experienced job quality. We articulate the processes by which task segregation can lead to workplace inequality in job quality through an inductive, interview-based case study of airport security-screening workers in a unit of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at a large urban airport. Female workers were disproportionately allocated to the pat-down task, the manual screening of travelers for prohibited items. Our findings suggest that this segregation led to overall poorer job quality outcomes for women. Task segregation overexposed female workers to processes of physical exertion, emotional labor, and relational strain, giving rise to work intensity, emotional exhaustion, and lack of coping resources. Task segregation also seemed to disproportionately expose female workers to managerial sanctions for taking recuperative time off and a narrowing of their skill set that may have contributed to worse promotion chances, pay, satisfaction, and turnover rates for women. We conclude with a theoretical model of how task segregation can act as a mechanism for generating within-job inequality in job quality.

Chan and Anteby reveal how because of understaffing, female TSA officers are more frequently assigned to the physically and emotionally-intensive tasks of physically patting down female passengers, whereas male TSA officiers are more evenly assigned to a mixture of tasks (i.e., x-ray screening and exit monitoring) that are less physically and emotionally-demanding.

Here’s a snippet of TSA officers’ (TSOs) thoughts on undertaking work that some airline passengers view as illegitimate and invasive:

Because female TSOs spent a disproportionate amount of time doing patdowns, women were disproportionately exposed to the emotional labor of this task. One female TSO said, ‘‘I think a lot of people take their anger out on us directly because we’re the person they see. We’re in the uniform. . . . So we get a lot of that confrontation for [doing pat-downs] probably’’ (108_TSO-F). Likewise, a male TSO recognized the difficulty that female TSOs face due to the emotional challenges of the pat-down task: ‘‘Females are in very short supply because the work they do is very difficult, embarrassing, demeaning . . . ‘Okay, now you’re going to go up to the lady and feel every private part of her body, and then, you know, smile’’’ (226_TSO-M).

A source of potential support, fellow co-workers, erodes under the strain of understaffing:

Female TSOs reported that being segregated to the pat-down task made them resent male coworkers who appeared to be doing comparatively less work. One woman captured this frequent relational strain: ‘‘At a small checkpoint with twelve people to run it, and there’s only one female. What are you [female TSOs] doing all day? You’re patting down females. . . . We [female TSOs] feel it a lot more, because there’s twelve of them [male TSOs]. They’re not doing
anything . . . so we’re doing everything. That’s how it feels (109_TSO-F). A quote from another female TSO supports this notion. After describing her physical exhaustion of ‘‘running around’’ doing pat-downs, she said, ‘‘And the guys are just standing there, like twiddling their fingers, making jokes, doing nothing’’ (310_TSO-F).

Those of us who are in the academy will recognize how these workers’ experiences mirror concerns over the quality of life and advancement of women and underrepresented minorities. Chan and Anteby explain how their concept translates to such settings, but they do not mention how fellow faculty could (1) help push back on particularistic service demands or (2) help with other forms of service that run the department/program/university:

Task segregation also has the potential for naturalistic generalization, in which readers might see affinities between the concept and their own or others’ experiences (Stake, 1995: 85). Evidence suggests, for example, that female faculty advance more slowly, are paid less, and are tenured at lower rates than men, across a variety of fields (Valian, 1999). One mechanism that could explain some of these differences would be task segregation of female academics to committee service (Menges and Exum, 1983). Such an example illustrates how a theory of task segregation might be useful and how our modeled processes and conditions may be used as ‘‘sensitizing concepts’’ (Blumer, 1969) to elucidate what may be happening in other cases.

Applying our theorized conditions of task segregation as sensitizing concepts, we see committee service as discrete from other tasks like conducting research or teaching. The urgings of administrators may disproportionately allocate female faculty to, say, diversity committees. Administrators might draw on a rationalized justification for such a disproportionate allocation. They might argue that female faculty are uniquely qualified to serve on diversity committees and should be matched to them. Administrators might also further point to the insufficient number of women in the department and thus the need for a given female faculty member to be allocated to the task of committee service.

If female faculty are indeed task-segregated in this regard, our theory might also provide sensitizing concepts for processes through which they are disadvantaged. Serving on diversity committees may not be physically exhausting in the same way that pat-downs are, but knowledge work can be surprisingly draining (Michel, 2011). Also, emotional labor may result from feeling torn between personally held principles and pragmatic needs to concede over potentially sensitive issues of diversity. Cohesion with coworkers could become strained if committee members experience resentment of other faculty unburdened by this duty. Furthermore, task-segregated faculty members might find their skill set narrowed, as their time spent on committees gives them less time to hone research skills. Ultimately, task segregation might then help explain adverse distal outcomes of promotion, pay, satisfaction, and turnover for women. Although these hypotheses ought to be empirically tested, our model provides sensitizing concepts for future inquiry of contexts like academia, and we encourage scholars to consider other settings in which our model might have naturalistic generality.

To be more specific – certain committees, especially hiring committees, may require diversity to be documented by completing a form that includes information about which racial/ethnic groups and genders are represented among themselves. If a hiring committee is not deemed diverse enough by administrators, the committee may be “recalled” and a job search suspended until the committee can be reconstituted and approved. While having a diverse committee may tamp down the tendency towards what Kanter calls homophily (when people hire or support those who are like themselves), this may also mean that an individual faculty member, particularly in smaller or more homogeneous departments, will be called to serve on such committees more often than others.

Happy and safe travels, folks!

Bonus tip for traveling families: Recommended reading for flying with babies.

gendered occupation puzzle

Can you name a emotional caring occupation dominated by  men?

gender inequality and simple rules: the case of ellen pao and reddit

One of my arguments about inequality is that we should focus on simple rules that have an immediate positive effect. Granted, these are hard to find. When we do find them, they should command our attention. For example, many scholars of gender and work have found that women often lose out when negotiating. The solution? Ban salary negotiations. In other words, people should compete for jobs, but the jobs are relatively stable in terms of compensation. We shouldn’t allow our possibly unconscious (or even conscious!) views towards others to allow some people to get more for doing the same work.

Turns out that one CEO is following the “simple rules against inequality” philosophy – Ellen Pao of Reddit. From a recent Yahoo article:

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Monday, Pao says she decided to rewrite the rules of hiring at Reddit. In addition to hiring workplace diversity consultant Freada Kapor Klein, the company no longer allows new hires to negotiate their salaries. Pao defended her move based on studies that have shown that when women negotiate, they don’t fare as well as their male counterparts.

“We’ve got a lot of diversity on our team,” she told Yahoo’s Katie Couric in a separate interview. “We could use more, but we’re very excited to make sure we have different perspectives that represent the people we have using the site.” 

Although Pao doesn’t name specific research, there have been plenty of studies to back up her claims. One 2006 study led by Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock revealed that when women negotiate, both men and women are less likely to want to work with them. Men, on the other hand, are much more respected for their negotiation skills. For women, it’s generally a lose-lose situation. In another study published in 2014, researchers found that female negotiators are perceived as more easily misled than male negotiators and are more likely than men to be lied to in negotiations.

One can easily imagine similar rules implemented in other workplaces. For example, if universities are worried that female scientists aren’t being promoted at similar rates, they could require automatic review instead of allowing promotion reviews to be optional or initiated by faculty.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street

gender and race inequality in the anthropology profession

The blog Savage Minds discussed a survey of anthropologists. The focus was race and gender. Predictably, there is the complaint that racial issues are ignored or downplayed. The more surprising finding is that the field appears to have internal gender and racial stratification of practitioners. From Karen Brodkin:

White anthropology faculty are clustered in anthropology and departments with anthropology as part of their title, while racialized minority faculty are more likely to be in ethnic or gender studies departments and in departments without anthropology in their title.

As a discipline that has had an obsession with race and cultural diversity, I am a little surprised at these findings. This suggests to me that there might be a broader social process where major letters and science disciplines out source topics and people that the mainstream doesn’t like. Discrimination is one hypothesis. Another hypothesis is selection effects. Do minority or women faculty in anthropology use the same methodological tools as others? One observation is that it is very easy for an intellectual group to be marginalized because it openly attacks the mainstream on methods. For example, pragmatist philosophers are relegated to margins, while analytics rule the major departments. In economics, neo-classicals have effectively banished heterodox economists.

In addition to the survey cited above, it would be important to look at publication patterns and co-authorship. One of my hypotheses about inequality in academia is that much of it is driven by co-authorship networks in elite graduate programs. How often are women and minority doctoral candidates writing papers with the senior faculty? This would lead to differences in output, which leads to differences in placement. Of course, that issue is related to the overall point that anthropologists under value research on race and gender. Anthropologists, please use the comments.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($2!!!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street!!

non-punishment for sexual assault at virginia?

There is a serious crisis at the University of Virginia after Rolling Stone published an article that, unsurprisingly, argued that the administration failed to punish sexual offenders on campus. Soon, the University president, Teresa Sullivan, announced a suspension of fraternity activities until Jan. 9 but otherwise defended the school.

This is very disappointing. It has become increasingly common knowledge that universities are unable to handle rape allegations, they have almost no control over fraternities, and national fraternity organizations have set themselves up so that they are not liable for student violence. President Sullivan’s punishment is especially disappointing because the suspension only applies, essentially, when VA is out of session. Literally, the suspension applies now (Thanksgiving break), final exams, and the winter break. UVA is out of session until Jan. 12. Some “punishment.”

Here is the difficult discussion that universities have to have if this horrid situation is ever to end:

• Rape is a felony. It’s something you go to prison for. Thus, colleges are not in a position to investigate or handle these claims. Student/faculty juries for felonies are a joke. All rape allegations should be immediately transferred to the police.
• Develop new procedures for victims. Instead of going to the dean (who should be supportive in any case), all victims should go to the health clinic or local hospital *immediately* for medical attention and collection of physical evidence. This is especially important as research shows that violence is committed mainly by a small group of serial offenders who exploit the party scene. Even charges are never filed, physical evidence and documentation is needed to expel people suspected of violence.
• Universities should divest themselves from fraternities because they are extremely dangerous and unaccountable. How bad? Essentially, insurance companies in America won’t ever cover claims related to fraternities any more. It’s that bad.

Sadly, we will always be faced with the challenge of sexual violence. However, universities have allowed a hot house environment for violence to grow on their campuses. Allowing large groups of unsupervised young men to throw alcohol drenched parties with no liability is a recipe for disaster. This has to end.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz/From Black Power 

abortion secrets in sociological science

Sociological Science has a new paper by Sara Cowan discusses when people share information using data on abortion:

Though abortion is a more common event in the United States than miscarriage, this article shows that more Americans hear of women who have had miscarriages than they hear of women who have had abortions. This is a result of both the patterns of secret telling and keeping: more Americans tell miscarriage secrets to more people than abortion secrets, and more Americans keep abortion secrets from more people than  miscarriage secrets.

In the introduction, I described two scenarios: one in which people tend to hear secrets they previously approved, and this pattern would contribute to a stasis in public opinion and a second scenario in which people hear secrets they previously condemned and this scenario would inspire social influence and facilitate social change. The data analyzed here illustrate the first scenario. They show a strong trend whereby individuals who hold restrictive views toward abortion are less likely than their liberal peers to report knowing someone who has had one. People tend to hear those secrets about which they already approve and are less likely to hear secrets about which they disapprove. Secret keeping and selective disclosure intensify this experience of homophily above and beyond any objective network segregation.

Check it out.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz/From Black Power 

gender bias in b-schools

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management issued an internal report that found that the school is “inhospitable to women faculty.” The report contains both comparative data and anecdotal evidence suggesting that women faculty have experienced impediments to advancement.

Women made up 20% of tenure-track faculty at Anderson and 14.3% of those with tenure in the 2012-2013 academic year, including Dr. Olian, according to school figures.  By comparison, an analysis of 16 peer institutions—including the business schools at the University of Virginia, Stanford University and University of Michigan—found that, on average, about 30% of tenure-track and 19.5% of tenured faculty were women in the 2012-2013 year…
The internal report states that women have high rates of job satisfaction when beginning careers at the school, but face a “lack of respect” regarding their work and “unevenly applied” standards on decisions about pay and promotions.
Twice in the past three years, the university’s governing academic body took the relatively rare step of overruling Dr. Olian, who had recommended against the promotion of one woman and against giving tenure to another, according to four Anderson professors.
In one case, the university found that policies allowing faculty to take parental leave without falling behind on the tenure track had been incorrectly applied to the candidate. In that same period, they said, a male candidate for promotion passed through the Anderson review, but didn’t get clearance from the university.

Even though UCLA’s business school stands out, the numbers reported in the article show that gender inequity plagues most top business schools. In 2010 45% of tenure-line faculty in psychology departments were women. In sociology, more than 50% of assistant professors are women, and roughly half of associate professors are women.  Women in psychology and sociology are doing much better in attaining tenured positions than are women in business schools.
So why are women not more represented on business school faculty? One possible reason is that business schools are still dominated and/or highly influenced by economics, in which the gender composition is heavily slanted toward men. According to a Wall Street Journal article from last year, women only get 32% of PhDs in economics (compared to 58% in the other social sciences).

In 2012, women accounted for 28.3% of untenured assistant professors, 40% of untenured associate professors, 21.6% of tenured associate professors and just 11.6% of full tenured professors.

In other words, women in economics are more likely to end up in untenured adjunct positions than they are in tenured faculty positions. This gender inequity in economics seeps into business schools since this is the discipline that most influences our research and teaching.

confidence, gender, and the social psychology of inequality

The Atlantic has a new article called “The Confidence Gap.” Katty Kay and Claire Shipman review the academic literature to discuss one source of gender inequality – the systematic differences in confidence. Roughly speaking, Kay and Shipman suggest that one reason that men are more likely to rise faster through careers is that men are simply overconfident. The fortune cookie version of the argument is that women will apply for a job only if they are sure that they 100%  qualified, while men will take a shot if they are half qualified.

A few comments: While I believe that sexism exists, the article is consistent with a “sexism without sexists” style argument as well. In other words, if A and B compose half the population but A applies for raises 66% of the time and B applies 33% of the time, you will very quickly get inequality even when bosses do not consider gender.

A policy observation from some of the experimental work. Kay and Shipman describe an experiment where men and women subjects try to solve a puzzle and initially men do better because they answer almost all questions. Women will try only when they are sure of the answer. When women are required to do the puzzles, the scores equalize. The policy implication is that raises and promotions should be routine. People are automatically considered for raises and promotions, or everyone will be considered if the situation arises.

The article has a lot to think about for folks interested in gender and inequality.

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

gender quotas and boards of directors

Siri Ann Terjesen is an assistant professor of management and international business at Indiana University. She is an entreprenuership researcher and she also does work on supply chains and related issues. This guest post addresses gender and management.

I am hoping that orgtheory readers can offer some new theoretical angles for a relatively new phenomenon: national legislation to set gender quotas (usually of 33%-40%) for boards of directors, usually with a short time horizon (3-5 years) and targeted to publicly-traded but also state-owned enterprises. The first country to adopt a gender board quota was Norway, in December 2003- setting a 40% quota for state-owned firms by 2006 and for publicly-traded firms by 2008. Since then, ten countries have implemented quotas (Spain, Finland, Quebec in Canada for SOEs, Israel, Iceland, Kenya for SOEs, France, Italy for SOEs, and Belgium) and another 16 have softer ‘comply or explain’ legislation. The mandatory quotas have potentially tremendous impact at multiple levels: from individuals’ careers and ambitions to creating new boardroom composition and dynamics, to challenging targeted firms to establish greater levels of female leadership at the board level, and providing an example for other countries. I recently surveyed the fast-growing academic literature on gender board quotas (about 80 articles, book chapters, working papers, and conference papers, all in the last 7 years, most in the last 2 years) and it is generally a-theoretical with the exception of some work on institutional theory and path dependency (as antecedents and inputs to the process of legislation) and a little bit on tokenism (back to Kanter’s 15% in 1977). Dear readers, any thoughts for promising theoretical perspectives?

50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz