An Intersectional Approach to the Glass Ceiling: Gender,Race and Share of Middle and Senior Management in U.S. Workplaces

A robust body of research examines factors affecting the likelihood that women experience increasing barriers to promotion in workplaces. However, limited research examines how racialized and gendered processes may intersect and work differently for racially and gender marginalized workers. Specifically, the processes relating to a worker’s ability to reach middle-level management positions (e.g., those managers who oversee a small group of employees) and senior-level management positions (e.g., CEOs and other executive positions) may vary based on workers’ race and gender. Using 2015 EEO-1 data collected by the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC), we examine how the characteristics of a workplace affect Black men, Black women, White men, and White women’s share of middle- and senior-level management. We find Black women and Black men are strikingly under-represented in both middle and senior management in private-sector workplaces. Our results demonstrate that access to middle- and senior-management varies by the characteristics of the workplace and workers’ race and gender. Overall, our findings point to an important implication: Greater oversight of workplaces, including by the EEOC, is associated with marginalized race/gender groups having higher shares of management.

     

Thought-shape fusion in anorexia nervosa: an experimental investigation

Cognitive biases and cognitive distortions have been implicated as important factors in the development and maintenance of many disorders. The concept of thought-shape fusion (TSF) in eating disorders was developed by Shafran, Teachman, Kerry, and Rachman (British Journal of Clinical Psychology 38 (1999) 167) as a variant of thought-action fusion, described by Shafran, Thordarson and Rachman (Journal of Anxiety Disorders 10 (1996) 379). TSF occurs when thinking about eating certain types of food increases a person's estimate of their shape and/or weight, elicits a perception of moral wrongdoing, and/or makes the person feel fat. Shafran et al. (1999) examined both the psychometric and experimental properties of TSF in an undergraduate sample. This paper reports an extension of this work to a clinical group (N=20) of patients with anorexia nervosa. After completing a set of relevant questionnaires, participants were asked to think about a food which they considered extremely fattening. They were then asked to write out the sentence, "I am eating--.", inserting the name of the fattening food in the blank. After being asked to rate their anxiety, guilt, feelings about their weight, morality, etc., participants were given the opportunity to neutralize their statement in any way they chose. The majority of the participants neutralized in ways consistent with the findings of Shafran et al. (1999). The results are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural formulations of eating disorders, and of the influence of cognitive biases and cognitive distortions on the processing of information relevant to food, weight and shape in anorexia nervosa.     

To stay or to go, to speak or stay silent, to act or not to act: moral distress as experienced by psychologists

The moral distress of psychologists working in psychiatric and mental health care settings was explored in an interdisciplinary, hermeneutic phenomenological study situated at the University of Alberta, Canada. Moral distress is the state experienced when moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints. Psychologists described specific incidents in which they felt their integrity had been compromised by such factors as institutional and interinstitutional demands, team conflicts, and interdisciplinary disputes. They described dealing with the resulting moral distress by such means as silence, taking a stance, acting secretively, sustaining themselves through work with clients, seeking support from colleagues, and exiting. Recognizing moral distress can lead to a significant shift in the way we perceive moral choices and understand the moral context of practice.     

A multilevel analysis of effort, practice, and performance: effects; of ability, conscientiousness, and goal orientation

This article examines the relationship between motivation and performance during skill acquisition. The authors used multilevel analysis to investigate relationships at within- and between-person levels of analysis. Participants were given multiple trials of practice on an air traffic control task. Measures of effort intensity and performance were taken at repeated intervals. As expected, the relationship between effort and performance increased with practice. Furthermore, the rate at which this effect strengthened was faster for individuals with high-ability or low-performance orientation. There was also an interaction between learning and performance orientations that only emerged after practice. By the end of practice, the negative effects of performance orientation were stronger for individuals with high learning orientation. Results highlight the importance of adopting a multilevel framework to enhance understanding of the link between motivation and performance.     

Falsifying mental models: Testing the predictions of theories of syllogistic reasoning

Four experiments are reported that tested the claim, drawn from mental models theory, that reasoners attempt to construct alternative representations of problems that might falsify preliminary conclusions they have drawn. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to indicate which alternative conclusion(s) they had considered in a syllogistic reasoning task. In Experiments 2-4, participants were asked to draw diagrams consistent with the premises, on the assumption that these diagrams would provide insights into the mental representation being used. In none of the experiments was there any evidence that people constructed more models for multiple-model than for single-model syllogisms, nor was there any correlation between number of models constructed and overall accuracy. The results are interpreted as showing that falsification of the kind proposed by mental models theory may not routinely occur in reasoning.     

Target animacy influences chimpanzee handedness

We employed a bottom-up, quantitative method to investigate great ape handedness. Our previous investigation of gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) demonstrated that contextual information influenced an individual’s handedness toward target objects. Specifically, we found a significant right-hand bias for unimanual actions directed toward inanimate target objects but not for actions directed to animate target objects (Forrester et al. in Anim Cogn 14(6):903–907, 2011). Using the identical methodological technique, we investigated the spontaneous hand actions of nine captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) during naturalistic, spontaneous behavior. We assessed both the frequencies and proportions of lateralized hand actions directed toward animate and inanimate targets employing focal follow video sampling. Like the gorillas, the chimpanzees demonstrated a right-handed bias for actions directed toward inanimate targets, but not toward animate targets. This pattern was evident at the group level and for the majority of subjects at the individual level. We postulate that a right-hand bias for only inanimate targets reflects the left hemisphere’s dominant neural processing capabilities for objects that have functional properties (inanimate objects). We further speculate that a population-level right-hand bias is not a human-unique characteristic, but one that was inherited from a common human-ape ancestor.