Multicriteria approval: application of approval voting concepts to MCDM problems

Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods generally require information that is difficult and expensive to obtain. It is shown in this paper that given an ordering of criteria by importance, and whether each alternative is above the average evaluation of the alternatives for each criterion, considerable information can be extracted concerning the overall rankings of the alternatives. This is done by recognizing the similarity between criteria in MCDM, and voters in social choice theory. Multicriteria approval, proposed in this paper, is an MCDM adaptation of approval voting which can be used to classify decisions into one of several categories, depending on whether, and the manner in which, a superior alternative can be identified. An exhaustive examination of all possible decision situations of tractable size is made to measure the applicability of multicriteria approval, and the approach is demonstrated in an industrial procurement case. In addition to requiring minimal information from a decision maker, multicriteria approval satisfies several desirable criteria for MCDM techniques. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gender Disparities in Mother's Day and Father's Day Comic Strips: A 55 Year History

A content analysis of 495 humorous comic strips published on Mother's Day and Father's Day from 1945 to 1999 indicates that gender stereotypes in this set of Sunday funnies have fluctuated since the end of World War II. Patriarchal gender disparities in the fictional families (i.e., gender disparities favoring father characters) were at their highest between 1945 and 1959, declined between 1960 and 1974, increased between 1975 and 1984, dropped below zero between 1985 and 1989, and went up again between 1990 and 1999. Along with the fluctuation, there was progress. From 1945 to 1999 in the holiday strips, mothers were afforded more freedom and their domestic workload became less onerous; the ratio of daughters to sons improved; and, beginning especially in the 1990s, the families became more racially and ethnically diverse.     

Mentoring,job satisfaction,gender, and the legal profession

We examine the prevalence of mentoring among lawyers and the effect mentoring has on their employment situations, with special attention to gender differences. The data come from a 1989 cross-sectional survey of 1132 Georgia lawyers (80% white and 18% black). No significant difference in having mentors was found across racial categories. Results initially show female lawyers are more likely than males to have mentors, but this is due to gender differences in type of law practice and position in them; among associate-level lawyers in law firms there is no gender difference in having a mentor. Having a mentor improves lawyers' job satisfaction; and the size of this benefit is the same for both sexes.A revision of a paper presented at the 1992 annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 12.