"Moralism" and the Gender Gap: Judgments of Political Ethics in Japan

This article investigates whether women are, as many claim, "moralists"—that is, moral and ethical standard-setters who seek clean politics and have strict standards for public officials. An analysis of data from the 1996 Japanese Elections and Democracy Study survey and from 18 focus groups conducted in 1996 indicates that women in Japan are not moralists. As elsewhere, there is a gender gap in Japan on "issue preference sets," with women favoring a "care" agenda, but women assign political ethics less importance than do men, even though women are more likely to see adverse effects from political corruption. Studying people's judgments of four ethics scenarios reveals minimal gender gaps; controlling for education and age, women's judgments overall are less, not more, strict than men's. Among women, age is a better predictor of moralism than education; older women are stricter than younger women on political ethics. This is attributed to gender-based differences in moral reasoning: Japanese women and men both rely heavily on a "relation-based" frame (which is situation-specific and requires extensive social information), but gender stratification patterns create information inequalities. Younger women lack social information necessary for judging political misconduct, whereas older women overcome the information deficit through life experience.     

Rethinking Compassion: Toward a Political Account of the Partisan Gender Gap in the United States

Scholarship on the political gender gap in the United States has attributed women's political views to their greater compassion, yet individual‐level measures of compassion have almost never been used to directly examine such claims. We address this issue using the only nationally representative survey to include psychometrically validated measures of compassion alongside appropriate political variables. We show that even though women are more compassionate in the aggregate than men in some respects, this added compassion does not explain the gender gap in partisanship. Female respondents report having more tender feelings towards the less fortunate, but these empathetic feelings are not associated with partisan identity. Women also show a slightly greater commitment to a principle of care, but this principle accounts for little of the partisan gap between men and women and has no significant relationship with partisanship after accounting for gender differences in egalitarian political values.     

The Work of Feminists is Not Yet Done: The Gender Pay Gap—a Stubborn Anachronism

Lips (2012) critiques the literature, predominantly from the United States, to assess how well human capital theory explains the gender pay gap. Her analysis shows that human capital inputs are an imperfect explanation for the gap and that social psychological influences also provide key explanations. I comment on Lips’s paper using literature from the United States and other English-speaking highly developed countries and, to a lesser extent, from European countries. I elaborate and extend her position, promoting the argument for the effect of social influences and for their interactive and incremental effects. I place the phenomenon of the gender pay gap into a societal context. I borrow from the literature for the effect of gender discrimination on women’s advancement in management to discuss explanatory influences. I extend the inference that the gender pay gap supports and maintains the lesser status of women in society and that it helps to preserve the status quo with respect to gender roles. To explain the gender pay gap, I propose that the development of an integrated theoretical framework is needed. The framework would combine the direct and interactive influences of human capital and social psychological inputs, in the context of a cumulative, incremental pattern that occurs over a person’s working life.     

Links between family gender socialization experiences in childhood and gendered occupational attainment in young adulthood

Gendered occupational segregation remains prevalent across the world. Although research has examined factors contributing to the low number of women in male-typed occupations – namely science, technology, engineering, and math – little longitudinal research has examined the role of childhood experiences in both young women's and men's later gendered occupational attainment. This study addressed this gap in the literature by examining family gender socialization experiences in middle childhood – namely parents' attitudes and work and family life – as contributors to the gender typicality of occupational attainment in young adulthood. Using data collected from mothers, fathers, and children over approximately 15 years, the results revealed that the associations between childhood socialization experiences (~ 10 years old) and occupational attainment (~ 26 years old) depended on the sex of the child. For sons but not daughters, mothers' more traditional attitudes toward women's roles predicted attaining more gender-typed occupations. In addition, spending more time with fathers in childhood predicted daughters attaining less and sons acquiring more gender-typed occupations in young adulthood. Overall, evidence supports the idea that childhood socialization experiences help to shape individuals' career attainment and thus contribute to gender segregation in the labor market.     

Changes in body image and dieting among 16–19-year-old Icelandic students from 2000 to 2010

The aim of the study was to evaluate trends in body image and dieting among 16–19-year-old students in Iceland from 2000 to 2010. Data from four cross-sectional surveys conducted among Icelandic students in 26 junior colleges using four time points were compared to examine changes in body image and dieting. In total, 33,801 students with the mean age of 17.3 years participated. Body image became significantly more positive over the 10-year period for both genders. At all time points, females reported more negative body image than males and a higher proportion of dieters were females than males. There was a decrease in the frequency of dieting among females over time but an increase among males, resulting in a narrower gender gap in dieting. Further examination of these trends in body image and dieting may reveal differences in causal mechanisms behind negative body image and dieting between the genders.     

Examining the Gender Gap in Children’s Attitudes Toward Politics

In the 2004 presidential election, a majority of men (54%) voted to reelect George W. Bush, but a minority of women (48%) supported Bush at the polls. The gender gap was also evident in races for the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate in 2004. In addition, there is a persistent and significant difference in policy preferences and political priorities among men and women. Taken together, the evidence clearly indicates that men and women currently view politics in the United States differently. What factors help explain these differences? In the present study, we examined whether boys and girls view politics differently. We interviewed eighth-grade students from six middle schools in Maricopa County, AZ in the spring of 2003 and 2004. Our results indicate that the gender gap in policy and partisanship is established early, before children reach adulthood. This suggests that the persistent gender gap in adult views about politics is rooted, at least partially, in gender differences during childhood socialization.     

Life Satisfaction and Cannabis Use: A Study on Young Adults

Cannabis is the illicit substance most used by young adults and adolescents in rich nations. Cannabis use may have negative consequences on mental and physical health and has been associated with low wellbeing indexes (i.e., life satisfaction). The present study aims to investigate the relationship of life satisfaction with cannabis use in young adults compared with personality and sociodemographic variables. Previous studies have found relationships between the Big Five traits and cannabis use as well as a gender gap. Males have been shown to have a higher consumption of cannabis than females. We conducted a survey by means of a self-report questionnaire on a sample of 600 young adults (average age 22.20 years) and performed a regression analysis to test the relationships of sociodemographic variables, personality, and life satisfaction with cannabis use. The results confirmed the gender gap and showed an association between cannabis use and conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness and life satisfaction. Life satisfaction was negatively related to cannabis use, which suggests that this behaviour may be motivated by coping with unsatisfactory life conditions.     

Navigating the Pathway to Leader Emergence in Self-Managed Work Groups Over Time: Should I Self-Promote and Try to Emerge Initially as a Leader?

Despite literature revealing the negative effects of self-promotion on important outcomes for women in interviews, there is limited attention on whether this relationship exists in a peer-to-peer context (e.g., self-managed work groups). Whereas men’s self-promotion is vital to attain interview success, work has shown that self-promoting men are not viewed favorably in a peer-to-peer setting. Moreover, most self-promotion research has focused on a single time point. It is thus a puzzle as to whether and when one should use self-promotion to emerge as a leader in a self-managed work group over time. My study addresses this gap. A longitudinal study spanning a thirteen-week period and involving 165 participants distributed across 44 self-managed work groups was performed. The results showed that, for women, there was a negative effect of self-promotion on leader emergence, and its effects subsequently accumulated. For men, self-promotion was critical to their leader emergence. The findings also indicated that emerging as a leader at the onset of a project serves as a springboard for subsequent leader emergence. Contrary to existing work, gender salience in work groups does not reduce over time. The present findings imply that managers need to be aware of possible biases in leader emergence ratings resulting from self-promotion if such ratings are utilized in their promotion decisions. Despite progressive improvements made with respect to gender-related issues over the years, societal expectations of gender norms in work groups appear to persist.

     

Power,Conflict, and Community: How Gendered Views of Political Power Influence Women's Political Ambition

We provide a novel approach to understanding the political ambition gap between men and women by examining perceptions of the role of politician. Across three studies, we find that political careers are viewed as fulfilling power‐related goals, such as self‐promotion and competition. We connect these goals to a tolerance for interpersonal conflict and both of these factors to political ambition. Women's lack of interest in conflict and power‐related activities mediates the relationship between gender and political ambition. In an experiment, we show that framing a political career as fulfilling communal goals—and not power‐related goals—reduces the ambition gap.     

The Contributions of Political Life Events to Psychological Distress Among South African

The psychological consequences of adverse political experiences among South African youth were studied in a sample of 540 black and white adolescents from two age groups, evenly divided by gender. Three questionnaires were administered, measuring exposure to political life events, the presence of symptoms of psychopathology, and stressful personal life events during the previous 5 years. The first hypothesis, predicting a substantial contribution of stressful political experiences to psychopathology, was strongly supported; when stressful personal life events were partialed out, a significant effect for political life events remained both on general distress and symptomatology indices. The second hypothesis of a linear relation between exposure to political life events and severity of distress was also confirmed. The findings underscore the enduring impact on children's mental health of past apartheid policies in South Africa specifically, and adverse political environments in general.     

STEREOTYPE THREAT AND THE GENDER GAP IN POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE

Men tend to achieve higher response accuracy than women on surveys of political knowledge. We investigated the possibility that this performance gap is moderated by factors that render the communicative context of a survey intellectually threatening to women and thereby induce stereotype threat. In a telephone survey of college students' political knowledge, we manipulated two factors of the survey context: the alleged diagnosticity of the question set (i.e., whether it was portrayed as being sensitive to potential gender differences) and the gender of the interviewer. Consistent with previous studies of political knowledge, men scored higher than women overall. However, as predicted, this difference was reliably moderated by the manipulated factors. Women's scores were not reliably different from men's when the survey was portrayed as nondiagnostic and when women were interviewed by female interviewers. Diagnosticity and interviewer gender had no effects on men's scores. Consistent with previous research on stereotype threat, these results suggest that explicit and implicit cues reminding women of the possibility that they might confirm a negative gender stereotype can impair their retrieval of political knowledge.     

The Emerging Gender Gap: Cultural and Economic Conservatism in the Netherlands 1970–1992

Research on gender differences in political alignments and cultural orientations in the past decades reveals a large value change in women relative to that in men, indicating that women might recently have become less conservative than men, whereas women used to be more conservative in many respects. In this article this possible reversal in the gender gap in recent decades is analyzed. Recent research has demonstrated that in the Netherlands women are presently less conservative than men. This lower level of conservatism in Dutch women is apparent with respect to both economic and cultural issues. It is investigated whether these gender differences are due to a reversal in the gender gap in the Netherlands and if so, how this emerging gender gap can be explained. Three explanations are hypothesized: one in terms of the characteristics of the youngest generations (the gender-cohort model), the second in terms of growing structural equality between women and men in general (the situational/structural model), and a specification of the second model, in which differential effects of structural factors for women and men are presumed to have their effect (the gender-interaction model). Neither of the three tested models was in itself able to fully explain the results. The gender gap can partly be explained by growing structural equality between women and men, partly by the fact that the gender gap is largest in the youngest generations (economic conservatism), and partly by the fact that the gender gap is largest between groups of "independent" women and their male counterparts. Possible additional determinants are also discussed.     

The end of the end of ideology

The "end of ideology" was declared by social scientists in the aftermath of World War II. They argued that (a) ordinary citizens' political attitudes lack the kind of stability, consistency, and constraint that ideology requires; (b) ideological constructs such as liberalism and conservatism lack motivational potency and behavioral significance; (c) there are no major differences in content (or substance) between liberal and conservative points of view; and (d) there are few important differences in psychological processes (or styles) that underlie liberal versus conservative orientations. The end-of-ideologists were so influential that researchers ignored the topic of ideology for many years. However, current political realities, recent data from the American National Election Studies, and results from an emerging psychological paradigm provide strong grounds for returning to the study of ideology. Studies reveal that there are indeed meaningful political and psychological differences that covary with ideological self-placement. Situational variables--including system threat and mortality salience--and dispositional variables--including openness and conscientiousness--affect the degree to which an individual is drawn to liberal versus conservative leaders, parties, and opinions. A psychological analysis is also useful for understanding the political divide between "red states" and "blue states."     

论周敦颐的人生哲学

周敦颐的人生哲学思想主要有两部分 :第一 ,政治人生 :“政事精绝 ,宦业过人” ;第二 ,人生态度 :“孔颜之乐”与“吟风弄月”。周子人生哲学思想的影响 :一是周子把政治建于其人生理念的基础之上 ,视其为人生延伸的一个领域 ,从而保持了在政坛险恶与污浊包围中的清白和高尚 ,成为中国古代儒家学者从政的典范。二是周敦颐揭示出 ,在人生过程中 ,保持一个快乐的人生态度是非常重要的 ,而这种“乐”决非源于现实之物质性功利 ,而只能来自于人们心灵对仁义道德获取后产生的愉悦。     

The Relationship Between the Gender Gap in Subjective Well-Being and Leisure Activities in China

This study explains the observed gender gap in subjective well-being (SWB) in China using heterogeneous marginal utility derived from leisure hours. We find that women in China exhibit higher levels of well-being than men and that there is a conditional unexplained gender gap in SWB ranging between 0.15 and 0.17. This conditional gap can be partly (30–40%) explained by the gender difference in the marginal utility of leisure hours. Meanwhile, we find a strong negative effect of hours spent on housework. These findings are robust to a variety of model specifications and subsamples.     

童年中晚期孤独感的发展轨迹：一项潜变量增长模型分析

使用问卷法和同伴提名法对884名小学二年级学生进行历时三年的四次追踪测试, 采用潜变量增长模型建模, 检验小学2~5年级学生孤独感的变化趋势, 并考察不同性别儿童孤独感变化的差异性以及同伴接纳对孤独感变化的影响。结果发现：(1) 2~5年级小学生孤独感呈曲线递减趋势, 递减速度逐渐减缓, 起始水平及发展速度均存在显著的个体差异; (2)女孩起始的孤独感水平显著低于男孩, 而发展速度、加速度则不存在显著的性别差异; (3)较高的同伴接纳对当时儿童孤独感的降低具有显著的促进作用。研究采用孤独感发展的情境观, 并结合儿童认知、自我发展的特点对结果进行了分析。     

How Often Does Deliberate Self‐Harm Occur Relative to Each Suicide? A Study of Variations by Gender and Age

Deliberate self‐harm (DSH; i.e., nonfatal self‐poisoning or self‐injury) occurs much more frequently than suicide, yet there has been little detailed investigation of the comparative rates of DSH and suicide. We conducted a study of how rates of DSH relate to suicide rates across the life cycle by gender and by method of estimation of DSH rates, using 10 years of data from a local system for monitoring DSH presentations to a general hospital and national and local suicide statistics. The rate‐ratio of DSH to suicide was 36 (95% CI 34.9–37.1) based on annual person‐based rates of DSH episodes and was nearly five times higher in females (87.9; 95% CI 84.4–91.6) than in males (18.7; 95% CI 17.9–19.6). The ratio varied markedly across the life cycle, decreasing from more than 200 in teenagers to less than 10 in persons aged 60 years and over. The difference in the ratio between females and males also decreased over the life cycle. There were very similar findings when local suicide rates were used. These patterns were replicated when the data were analyzed, first, on the basis of all episodes of DSH during the study period, but with expectedly larger DSH:suicide ratios (e.g., overall 52.7; 95% CI 51.4–54.1), and second, on the basis of individual persons only engaging in DSH during the study period, but with smaller ratios (e.g., overall 26.2; 95% CI 25.4–27.2). The DSH:suicide rate ratios for those with high and low suicidal intent were similar within age groups except for those aged 60 years and over, in whom there was a greater proportion of high intent acts. These findings illustrate how the nature of self‐harming behavior may vary in intention across the life cycle and between the genders, and provide a basis for further comparative work of this kind.     

Gender and leadership emergence: A meta‐analysis and explanatory model

Research has shown that men tend to emerge as leaders more frequently than women. However, societal role expectations for both women and leaders have changed in the decades since the last empirical review of the gender gap in leader emergence (Eagly & Karau, 1991). We leverage meta‐analytic evidence to demonstrate that the gender gap has decreased over time, but a contemporary gap remains. To understand why this gap in leader emergence occurs, we draw on social role theory to develop a Gender‐Agency/Communion‐Participation (GAP) Model—an integrative theoretical model that includes both trait and behavioral mechanisms. Specifically, we examine a sequence of effects: from gender to agentic and communal personality traits, from these traits to behavioral participation in group activities, and ultimately from participation to leader emergence. The model is tested using original meta‐analyses of the personality and behavioral mechanisms (coding 1,632 effect sizes total). Gender differences in leadership emergence are predominately explained by agentic traits (positive) and communal traits (negative), both directly and through the mechanism of participation in group discussions. In addition, several paths in the theoretical model are moderated by situational contingencies. Our study enhances knowledge of the mechanisms and boundary conditions underlying the gender gap in leader emergence.     

Ideology: Its Resurgence in Social, Personality, and Political Psychology

ABSTRACT— We trace the rise, fall, and resurgence of political ideology as a topic of research in social, personality, and political psychology. For over 200 years, political belief systems have been classified usefully according to a single left–right (or liberal–conservative) dimension that, we believe, possesses two core aspects: (a) advocating versus resisting social change and (b) rejecting versus accepting inequality. There have been many skeptics of the notion that most people are ideologically inclined, but recent psychological evidence suggests that left–right differences are pronounced in many life domains. Implicit as well as explicit preferences for tradition, conformity, order, stability, traditional values, and hierarchy—versus those for progress, rebelliousness, chaos, flexibility, feminism, and equality—are associated with conservatism and liberalism, respectively. Conservatives score consistently higher than liberals on measures of system justification. Furthermore, there are personality and lifestyle differences between liberals and conservatives as well as situational variables that induce either liberal or conservative shifts in political opinions. Our thesis is that ideological belief systems may be structured according to a left–right dimension for largely psychological reasons linked to variability in the needs to reduce uncertainty and threat.