Gender,Interdependent Self-construals,and Collective Self-esteem: Women and Men Are Mostly the Same

Women and men may differ in how they define themselves in reference to their social world. Baumeister and Sommer () suggest that women prefer close relationships whereas men prefer large-group memberships. We examined how this hypothesized gender difference relates to collective self-esteem from three interdependent groups: friends, family, and gender. Study 1 revealed that women and men report equivalent levels of collective self-esteem from both relational and collective groups. Study 2 replicated this finding, and further revealed that the importance of group membership to individuals is more crucial to understanding collective self-esteem than is a gender differences approach. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of contingencies of social self-worth and potential cognitive processes involved in self-construal.     

Social Status, Not Gender Alone, Is Implicated in Different Reactions By Women and Men to Social Ostracism

Williams and Sommer found that ostracized women, but not men, worked harder on a subsequent collective task, speculating that women’s social compensation was motivated by threatened belongingness. The present 2?×?3 design with 180 U.S. women and men replicated this gender gap in work contributions then closed it using two status-manipulations that favored women’s task abilities or the higher education of undergraduates with high school partners. Additional analyses identified three clusters of participants who failed to compensate: only men in the replication control, women scoring low in self-monitoring, and participants who persisted unsuccessfully to resist exclusion. These patterns shift our focus away from gender and threatened belongingness toward control and status as explanations for the original gender difference.     

Women,Men, and Leadership: Exploring the Gender Gap at the Top

Elite-level leaders in business and government make significant and far-reaching decisions influencing many facets of society. However, relatively few of these powerful positions are held by women. This article explores gender in leadership by focusing on the difficulties women experience in attaining and being seen as effective in top leadership positions. It begins by revealing the lack of parity between the sexes in leadership and in the remaining sections it addresses empirical research that serves to illuminate the leadership labyrinth, or obstacles to women’s progress, also known as the glass ceiling. In the first section, research on gender and leadership styles, traits, and effectiveness is reviewed followed by a consideration of how both domestic responsibilities and current organizational cultures differentially impact women and men on their journey to top leadership positions. The focus then shifts to examining how stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination contribute to women’s under-representation in elite leadership roles by both impacting perceptions of and responses to women as well as impacting the experiences of women themselves. The final section concludes with thoughts on promoting parity in top-level leadership.     

Gender and the Internet: Women Communicating and Men Searching

This research examined gender differences in Internet use and factors responsible for these differences. A sample of 630 Anglo American undergraduates completed the Student Computer and Internet Survey that contained questions about e-mail and Web use, and about potential affective and cognitive mediators of use. Based on a general model of Internet use, we predicted and found that females used e-mail more than did males, males used the Web more than did females, and females reported more computer anxiety, less computer self-efficacy, and less favorable and less stereotypic computer attitudes. Path analysis to identify mediators of gender differences in Internet use revealed that computer self-efficacy, loneliness, and depression accounted in part for gender differences, but that gender continued to have a direct effect on use after these factors were considered. Implications for realizing the democratizing potential and benefits of Internet use are discussed.     

Male Narcissism and Attitudes Toward Heterosexual Women and Men, Lesbian Women, and Gay Men: Hostility toward Heterosexual Women Most of All

The present study investigated links between heterosexual men’s narcissism and attitudes toward heterosexual and non-heterosexual women and men. Male narcissism was predicted to be associated with hostility toward heterosexual women more than toward other groups, indicating investment in patriarchal power more than in conservative gender ideology or nonspecific disdain toward all people. Hierarchical regression analyses of responses from 104 male undergraduates (95% Caucasian) from Ohio in the U.S. supported the hypothesis that men’s narcissism is related most robustly to hostility toward women, rather than to equivalent derogation of all groups. Moreover, men’s narcissism is not merely a maker of traditional gender ideology, but instead is associated with favorable attitudes toward lesbian women and is unrelated to attitudes toward gay men.     

Joking for Gender Equality: Subversive Humor Against Sexism Motivates Collective Action in Men and Women with Weaker Feminist Identity

Sex Roles - Subversive humor has historically been considered a way of protesting, raising awareness, and seeking change. However, to date, no known empirical research has explored the consequences...     

Powerless Men and Agentic Women: Gender Bias in Hiring Decisions

Sex Roles - We examined male power-roles as a potential moderator of gender bias in hiring decisions. Drawing from previous work on perceptions of agentic women and precarious manhood theory, we...     

Collective Identities of Class and Gender: Working-Class Women in the Pittston Coal Strike

This article investigates the intersections and tensions between two collective identities, those of class and gender, for working-class women involved in supporting the 1989–1990 strike against Pittston Coal Group in southwestern Virginia. In the case of this year-long (and ultimately successful) strike, women were organized by United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) staff in strike support activities, but they also sought to organize themselves as women. The tensions between their identity as members of the working class and their identity as women are revealed by examining their forms of activism, their relationship with the UMWA, the divisions between groups of activist women, and the articulation of women's involvement in the strike. The experiences of these women are briefly compared with women's activism in the 1984–1985 British Coal strike. The article concludes by arguing that collective identity is best understood as it emerges in response to specific contexts.     

Dimensions of the Male Gender Role: A Confirmatory Analysis in Men and Women

As researchers become more interested instudying the influences of the male gender role onpeople's physical and psychological well-being, measuresof several male role domains have been created,including psychological agency, traditional attitudestowards men, and masculine gender role stress (MGRS).These measures of the male gender role, however,typically have been constructed and validated using only samples of men. This restriction introducesquestions about the reliability and validity of theseinstruments in samples of women, leading to problemswhen generalizing findings to this group. The present study addressed these issues by examining thefactor structure, factor correlations, and latent meansof these three male role measures for a sample of mostlyCaucasian men and women, using multiple group confirmatory factor analytic techniques.Results showed only the dimensionality of the agenticpersonality traits differed significantly for men andwomen. The interrelationships among and latent means of agency, attitudes, and MGRS differed by sex.These findings demonstrate the utility of the currentconceptualization of sex and gender; in other words,that gender is not totally determined by sexand that men and women internalize many of the samegender cues, but differentially endorse them to varyingdegrees.     

Gender and Emotions at Work: Organizational Rank Has Greater Emotional Benefits for Men than Women

Sex Roles - The way people feel is important for how they behave and perform in the workplace. Experiencing more positive?and less negative?emotions at work is often associated with...     

Women with Beards and Men in Frocks: Gender Nonconformity in Modern American Film

The present study examines the portrayal of gender nonconformity in 36 American films released from 2001 to 2011. Mainstream and independent films with at least one character portrayed in a gender transgressive way were chosen for analysis. The films were coded at two levels: (1) the entire film, and (2) the individual characters. The entire films were coded for mainstream versus independent production, genre, and screen time of gender nonconforming characters. The characters were coded for the type of gender transgression, the characters’ demographics, and their purposes in the plot. The most common purpose of the non-conforming characters was humor, especially in mainstream films. Exploring identity was a much less common purpose and these films were far more likely to be independent films. The non-conforming characters were far more likely to identify as a static identity, man or woman, rather than anything else. Gender identity was almost always presented as something simple, static and binary.     

Gender Role Expectations of Disgust: Men are Low and Women are High

Little is known about the gender-based stereotypes of the emotion of disgust. We hypothesized that when addressing core (gross-out) disgust specifically, men would be perceived as lower in disgust matching masculine roles and women would be perceived as higher in disgust consonant with feminine gender roles. In Study 1, we modified and validated the Gender Role Expectations of Pain graphical scale (GREP, Robinson et al. 2001) to address disgust and gave it and a disgust sensitivity scale to 136 (48 men) undergraduates from the northeastern United States. Rating disgust sensitivity of themselves and stereotypical men and women, both genders rated men low in disgust sensitivity compared to a typical woman and women high in disgust compared to a typical man. A significant trend for men higher in masculinity to be less willing to show their disgust was also seen. This exact pattern of significant results was found in an additional sample of 134 students (37 men) from the northeastern U.S. on an online version of the GREP. Study 2 examined gender role expectations for comparison emotions of anger and amusement in a different set of undergraduates from the northeastern U.S. Anger showed a trend toward an opposite pattern of ratings than for disgust; no gender biases were expected or seen for amusement, a control emotion. Thus, the stereotypical profile of high disgust reported for women did not merely reflect general overarching gender-based stereotypes of emotion, but gender-based expectations specific to core (gross-out) disgust. We suggest awareness of gender role expectations of disgust may play a role in observed gender differences reported for disgust.     

Stress at Work: A Comparison of Men and Women

A research design was constructed to quantify examined estimates of stress resulting from selected work events and perceived differences of its impact among men and women.     

African American Men,Gender Role Conflict,and Psychological Distress: The Role of Racial Identity

Little research exists exploring the intersection of male gender role conflict (GRC), racial identity, and psychological distress. Accordingly, using a sample of 130 self‐identified African American male participants, this study explored which aspects of racial identity mediated the relationship between GRC and psychological distress. Results demonstrated that racial identity attitudes reflective of internalized racism (Self‐Hatred) partially mediated the relationship between GRC and psychological distress.     

Benevolent Sexism Toward Men and Women: Justification of the Traditional System and Conventional Gender Roles in Spain

The present study aimed to explore sexist attitudes in young people and to investigate the role of these ideologies in the contribution of boys and girls to housework. For this purpose, 139 Spanish high school students (67 females and 72 males) responded to the ASI and AMI scales (Glick and Fiske in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70:491–512, 1996, Psychology of Women Quarterly 23:519–536, 1999) and assessed their contribution to housework in tasks considered traditionally done by women (highly gender-typed) or more neutral tasks (sex-neutral). Results showed that girls contributed significantly more to housework than boys. In addition, correlation analyses showed that benevolent sexism toward women, men and hostility toward men were significant related to highly gender typed tasks only in the female sample. This result shows the relevance of sexist ideologies in maintaining established differences between genders.     

Ladies and Gentlemen, Women and Men: A Study of the Connotations of Words Indicating Gender

Lakoff's hypothesis about the connotations of the words "lady" and "woman" was investigated by asking college students to rate these words, as well as the masculine words "gentleman" and "man", on several adjective scales. Ratings indicated that the term "gentleman" implied greater competence and warmth than the word "man", while the term "lady" tended to suggest to raters relatively less competence and less warmth than the term "woman" did. Further, it was found that the more formal term ("gentleman", "lady") regardless of gender was described more positively than the less formal term ("man", "woman") on several scales concerned with goodness, politeness, morality, and femininity. Lakoff's hypothesis that "lady" conveys some unique meanings relative to sex role stereotypes thus received support, although some of the connotations of "lady" appear to be due to implied formality rather than to gender features. The degree to which feminine terms were differentiated by raters could be predicted to some extent on the basis of rater characteristics; no significant prediction was possible for the masculine terms.     

Reinforcing Gender Roles at the Male Strip Show: A Qualitative Analysis of Men who Dance for Women (MDW)

While stripping has been an attractive topic among sociologists for several decades, much of the existing research concentrates on women who dance for men (WDM) and men who dance for men (MDM). In this study, I use qualitative methods to understand the experiences of men who dance for women (MDW). I spent 18 months at a strip club that I call “Dandelion's,” and conducted 22 in-depth interviews with male strippers. Specifically, I explore how the male strip show reproduces traditional, stereotypical gender roles in two main ways: dancers’ physical interactions with customers, and their hypermasculine presentations of self.     

Group Threat, Collective Angst, and Ingroup Forgiveness for the War in Iraq

We examine the consequences of threat to the ingroup for emotional reactions to ingroup harm doing. It was hypothesized that reminders of a past threat to the ingroup would induce collective angst, and this emotional reaction would increase forgiveness of the ingroup for its harmful actions toward another group. In Experiment 1, Americans read an article about the war in Iraq that implied Americans would soon experience another attack or one where such implied future threat to the ingroup was absent. When the ingroup's future was threatened, forgiveness for the harm Americans have committed in Iraq was increased, to the extent that collective angst was induced. In Experiment 2, Americans experienced more collective angst and were more willing to forgive their ingroup for their group's present harm doing in Iraq following reminders of either the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, or the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor compared to when the victimization reminder was irrelevant to the ingroup. We discuss why ingroup threat encourages ingroup forgiveness for current harm doing.