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.     

Does “Making a Difference” Still Make a Difference?: A Textbook Author’s Reflections

Drawing on my experiences with teaching Psychology of Women and writing three editions of a textbook across two decades starting in 1990, I reflect on the core feminist call to make the personal political. By tracing the chronology and interplay of my textbook writing with my teaching, research, and editing, I speculate about an apparent disconnection between my experiences and research with students (who embrace the feminist call to make a difference) and the textbook market to veer toward less women-centeredness and activism in the pursuit of gender studies. I make my case that the activist goal of making a difference continues to make a difference in individual women’s lives, in women’s relationships, and in a social justice agenda.     

The responses of African American women firefighters to gender harassment at work

The purpose of the present study is to describe the responses of African American women firefighters to sexual and gender harassment. Surveys and interviews of 22 firefighters nationwide uncovered universal exposure to harassment. Contrary to prior studies, most of which involved white college students and white collar workers, all these firefighters used externally focused, direct response strategies. Nineteen women directly confronted the harasser; of these, ten responded aggressively, including four women who countered physical harassment in kind. Their stories suggested that most found their strategy to be effective at stopping the present harassment and deterring future occurrences. While few firefighters reported positive work relations, these may have been a precursor to, rather than a result of, their direct response patterns.We wish to thank Maureen Aniakudo, Brenda Brooks, and the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters, and Terese Floren and Women in the Fire Service for their invaluable advice and support. This project was supported by funding from the Fromkin Research Grant and Lectureship at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues' Grants-in-Aid Program, and the University of Wisconsin System's Institute on Race and Ethnicity.     

Comparing sequential associations within a single dyad

We present a new application of sampled permutation testing to examine whether two sequential associations are different within a single dyad (e.g., a teacher and a student). A Monte Carlo simulation with the same (i.e., 100 vs. 100) or a different (100 vs. 400) number of event pairs was used to simulate designs that use time-based (typicallyproducing equal-length comparisons) and event-based (typically producing different-length comparisons) data, respectively. For these pairs of simulated data streams, we compared the Type I error rates and the kappa for agreement on significance decisions, using the sampled permutation tests and the more traditional asymptotic log linear analysis. The results provide the first evidence relevant to evaluating the accuracy of log linear analysis and sampled permutation testing for the purpose of comparing sequential associations within a single dyad.