Sex Roles

In the present article, we analyze a project in a heavy industry plant in Iceland in which the management aims to hire an equal number of women and men and, thereby, to work against the gender segregation of work. For their efforts, called the 50/50 strategy, the plant has received national and international awards. Observations and semi-structured interviews were conducted during five visits to the plant, including 85 interviews with 72 individuals, 49 women and 23 men. We found extensive support for the policy...

Women may respond to being sexual objectified in different ways, such as confronting the perpetrator, ignoring the action, blaming oneself or considering the action as flattering. However, there has been little research looking at what predicts each of these different responses. The present research assessed the role of emotions in promoting and deterring different anticipated responses to sexual objectification. In both Studies 1 ( n  = 189) and 2 ( n  = 187), female participants were asked to imagine themselves in a situation where they received an inappropriate sexual comment...

In two studies we investigated the behavioral process through which visible female leader role models empower women in leadership tasks. We proposed that women tend to mimic the powerful (open) body postures of successful female role models, thus leading to more empowered behavior and better performance on a challenging leadership task, a process we called empowering mimicry . In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated the body posture of the male and female role models and showed that 86 Swiss college women mimicked the body posture of the female (ingroup) but not the male (outgroup) role model, thus leading to more empowered behavior and better performance on a public speaking task...

Objectification of the female body is generating much research. Nevertheless, this has revealed little about whether women's evaluations depend on the level of psychological intimacy with the perpetrator of that objectification. Intimacy theory predicts that objectifying comments would seem more acceptable coming from a close partner, especially for sexist women. The present study begins to fill these gaps by analyzing responses from 301 heterosexual/bisexual adult women in the United States ( M age = 37.02, range = 18-72) to appearance and sexual body comments made by four different male perpetrators: strangers, colleagues, friends, or partners...

Insufficient empirical attention has been paid to Black women's perceptions of Black male gender roles and associated masculinity. Although constructions of Black masculinity have been speculated about in popular media and literature, no known published studies have specifically investigated Black women's perceptions of Black men or offered a conceptualization of Black masculinity informed by their voices. Because women's perceptions of and beliefs about men affect partnership decisions, quality of relationships, childrearing decisions, health behaviors, and other aspects of personal and psychosocial well-being, the purpose of the present exploratory qualitative study was to fill the noted gap in the literature while highlighting context related to these beliefs...

Marriage has significantly changed since Becker proposed his specialization model yet some scholars maintain that specialization characterizes modern couples. Specialization occurs when one partner, traditionally the man, concentrates on market work while the other partner, traditionally the woman, focuses on nonmarket work such as housework or childcare. Using innovative time diary data from primarily highly-educated, White, dual-earner U.S. couples, we examine how couples manage their time in market and household work and leisure across a momentous, gendered life course turning point-the transition to parenthood...

Parental gender expectations, which may be egalitarian or not, may vary by nativity and socioeconomic status. Parental gender expectations provide a model for children's gender role attitudes and could also have effects on reproductive health over the life course, including women's contraceptive choices. Yet, parental gender expectations are not often studied quantitatively. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we examine how parental gender expectations in the United States vary by immigrant generation and socioeconomic status, whether parental gender expectations in adolescence are associated with young women's contraceptive use, and if nativity moderates that relationship...

As many as one in five women worldwide will be sexually assaulted over the course of her lifetime (United Nations 2008), yet myths that downplay the prevalence and severity of sexual assault are still widely accepted. Are myths about sexual assault (rape myths) more likely to be accepted in cultures that endorse more traditional gender roles and attitudes toward women? To explore the relationships among rape myth acceptance, attitudes toward women, and hostile and benevolent sexism, data were collected from 112 Indian and 117 British adults, samples from two cultures differing widely in their gender role traditionalism...

Parental toy selection and responses to toy play are important factors in children's gender socialization. Reinforcing play with same-gender-typed toys guides children's activities and limits their action repertoires in accordance with gender stereotypes. A survey of 324 Austrian parents of three- to six-year-old children was conducted to investigate parents' judgments about the desirability of different types of toys for their children and how these judgements relate to parents' gender-typing of toys, gender role attitudes, and demographics (age, education, gender)...

Extensive evidence has documented the gender stereotypic content of children's media, and media is recognized as an important socializing agent for young children. Yet, the precise impact of children's media on the endorsement of gender-typed attitudes and behaviors has received less scholarly attention. We investigated the impact of stereotypic and counter-stereotypic peers pictured in children's magazines on children's gender flexibility around toy play and preferences, playmate choice, and social exclusion behavior ( n  = 82, age 4-7 years-old)...

We use sexual scripting theory in the present paper to gain a better understanding of older men's perceptions of their sexuality in relation to dominant Tanzanian cultural norms of masculinity. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 older men, and ten focus group discussions were conducted with 60 men aged 60-82. Participants' recruitment was guided by theoretical sampling strategies. Consistent with the principles of grounded theory, data collection and analysis occurred simultaneously. Our findings indicate that Jando (male initiation rites) serves as a script for male sexuality that outlines the expectations and rewards of male sexuality...

The present study examined to what extent selection and influence processes for physical aggression and prosociality in friendship networks differed between sex-specific contexts (i.e., all-male, all-female, and mixed-sex classrooms), while controlling for perceived popularity. Whereas selection processes reflect how behaviors shape friendships, influence processes reveal the reversed pattern by indicating how friends affect individual behaviors. Data were derived from a longitudinal sample of early adolescents from Chile...

Research points to the positive impact that gender-segregated schooling and classroom initiatives exert on academic attainment. An evaluation of these studies which reveal positive effects highlights, however, that students are typically selectively assigned to single- or mixed-gender instructional settings, presenting a methodological confound. The current study controls for students' prior attainment to appraise the efficacy of a single-gender classroom initiative implemented in a co-educational high school in the United Kingdom...

Women are vastly underrepresented in the fields of computer science and engineering (CS&E). We examined whether women might view the intellectual characteristics of prototypical individuals in CS&E in more stereotype-consistent ways than men might and, consequently, show less interest in CS&E. We asked 269 U.S. college students (187, 69.5% women) to describe the prototypical computer scientist (Study 1) or engineer (Study 2) through open-ended descriptions as well as through a set of trait ratings. Participants also rated themselves on the same set of traits and rated their similarity to the prototype...

Women who lack social support tend to have a higher risk of postpartum depression. The present study examined the traditional female role, understood here as the adoption of passive and submissive traits specific to Mexican women, as another risk factor for postpartum depressive symptomatology that interacts with social support. Using two waves of data from a longitudinal study of 210 adult Mexican women (20-44 years-old, M age = 29.50 years, SD = 6.34), we found that lacking social support during the third trimester of their pregnancy was associated with greater depressive symptoms at 6 months in the postpartum, although this relationship depended on the level of endorsement of the traditional female role during pregnancy...

The influence of masculinity and femininity on behaviors and outcomes has been extensively studied in social science research using various measurement strategies. In the present paper, we describe and evaluate a measurement technique that uses existing survey items to capture the extent to which an individual behaves similarly to their same-gender peers. We use data from the first four waves of The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of adolescents (age 12-18) in the United States who were re-interviewed at ages 13-19, 18-26, and 24-32...

Relationship quality often declines following the birth of child, likely reflecting in part the shift towards role traditionalization that occurs through gender specialization. The current study used longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, an urban birth cohort in 2000 consisting of structured interviews of mothers and fathers who were followed over 5 years ( n =1275), to examine whether low levels of fathers' involvement and coparenting, two indicators of role traditionalization, were linked to negative trajectories of mothers' and fathers' relationship quality for couples whose first child was born in marriage or cohabitation...

The present paper reports on longitudinal associations between parenting stress and sexual satisfaction among 169 heterosexual couples in the first year after the birth of a first child. Actor Partner Interdependence Modeling (APIM) was used to model the effects of the mother's and father's parenting stress at 6 months after birth on sexual satisfaction at one year after birth. Based on social constructivist theory and scarcity theory, two hypotheses were posed: (a) mothers' parenting stress will predict their own later sexual satisfaction whereas fathers' parenting stress will not predict their own later sexual satisfaction (actor effects) and (b) mothers' parenting stress will predict fathers' later sexual satisfaction but fathers' parenting stress will not predict mothers' later sexual satisfaction (partner effects)...

We examine the relationships among the division of housework and childcare labor, perceptions of its fairness for two types of family labor (housework and childcare), and parents' relationship conflict across the transition to parenthood. Perceived fairness is examined as a mediator of the relationships between change in the division of housework and childcare and relationship conflict. Working-class, dual-earner couples ( n = 108) in the U.S Northeast were interviewed at five time points from the third trimester of pregnancy and across the first year of parenthood...

Online social networking sites, such as Facebook, have provided a new platform for individuals to produce and reproduce gender through social interactions. New mothers, in particular, may use Facebook to practice behaviors that align with their mothering identity and meet broader societal expectations, or in other words, to "do motherhood." Given that Facebook use may undermine well-being, it is important to understand the individual differences underlying new mothers' experiences with Facebook during the stressful first months of parenthood...