Job Search and Sex Segregation: Does Sex of Social Contact Matter?

In this study, we investigate how the sex of the social contact women use to find jobs affects the segregation of women into jobs in female-dominated occupations. Using women in the Metropolitan Employer-Worker Survey (MEWS), we test two competing hypotheses from the literature. One body of literature argues that women who use men as social contacts in job search have a higher probability of finding a non-female-dominated job; another body of literature argues that sex of social contact has no effect on the probability of finding a non-female-dominated job. There are 1131 working women in the MEWS; 73% are white, 20% African American, and 2% other races. Our analysis shows that women are significantly less likely to find jobs in female-dominated occupations when their social contact is a man rather than a woman and this holds true regardless of the strength of the tie to the social contact or whether or not the social contact is work-related. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and research on sex segregation.     

Auditory recognition without identification

When visual recognition test items are unidentifiable--through fragmentation, for example--participants can discriminate between unidentifiable items that were presented recently and those that were not. The present study extends this recognition without identification phenomenon to the auditory modality. In several experiments, participants listened to words and were then presented with spoken recognition test items that were embedded in white noise. Participants attempted to identify each spoken word through the white noise, then rated the likelihood that the word was studied. Auditory recognition without identification was found: Participants discriminated between studied and unstudied words in the absence of an ability to identify them through white noise, even when the voice changed from male to female and when the study list was presented visually. The effect was also found when identification was hindered through the isolation of particular phonemes, suggesting that phoneme information may be present in memory traces for recently spoken words.