Day: November 16, 2011

How did she do that? Help with a biblio.

annejjacobson3 Comments

Suppose a woman gets promoted to a fairly powerful and interesting position. As you hear her home group discuss it, you see the following ideas playing a significant role

Powerful women are very threatening.
Women are tricky and deceitful.
Women are less good than men in intellectual endeavors.
Women cannot be good at science.
Accomplishments of men that might be explained by intelligence or skills are explained for women by personal features such as charm, charisma or even sex.
Women do use sex to gain advantages.
Women are motivated by base interests (self-promotion) in comparson to men.
And, in any case, she isn’t really doing any work in the new position.

Thus you might hear it said that she’s always trying to take over, but she’ll be a disaster, that she is only after promoting herself, and that she got it by using her sexual charisma on the men who decided the position.

I take it that we’d mostly agree that these are pretty awful sexist cliches. And I could look back on many posts on this site to see a number of them discussed. But suppose you are writing about such situations and you want to cite some literature. In fact, it would be particularly important to get literature that people not entirely on top of the topic can read fairly quickly and easily. But let’s add in a few volumes that are by impression and perhaps not wildly controversial people.

Suggests for the bibliography would be greatly appreciated. Self-references are absolutely fine.

Read this before you decorate your university for the holidays

redeyedtreefrog37 Comments

Last year–too late to do much good–we ran a post about some research done on the harms caused by Christmas trees in public places. I was especially concerned about universities. The university is an environment that’s stressful for many people to start with and it seems the tree has become an acceptable display of secular Christmas. Don’t most university campuses have Christmas trees? The one I’m at does.

Here’s last year’s post reprinted in time to do things differently:

“Reminders of Christmas can make religious minorities feel ill at ease — even if they don’t realize it. When people who did not celebrate Christmas or who did not identify as Christian filled out surveys about their moods while in the same room as a small Christmas tree, they reported less self-assurance and fewer positive feelings than if they hadn’t been reminded of the holiday, according to a new study.” The full news story is here.

The researcher Michael Schmitt, a social psychologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada said, the presence of the tree caused non-celebrators and non-Christians to feel subtly excluded.
“Simply having this 12-inch Christmas tree in the room with them made them feel less included in the university as a whole, which to me is a pretty powerful effect from one 12-inch Christmas tree in one psychology lab,” said Schmitt. Study participants did not know the study was about the effects of Christmas trees.

“Identity moderates the effects of Christmas displays on mood, self-esteem, and inclusion
Identity moderates the effects of Christmas displays on mood, self-esteem, and inclusion,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (November 2010), 46 (6), pg. 1017-1022.

Abstract: In two experiments we examined the differential psychological consequences of being in the presence of a Christmas display on participants who did or did not celebrate Christmas (Study 1), or who identified as Christian, Buddhist, or Sikh (Study 2). Participants completed measures of psychological well-being in a cubicle that either did or did not contain a small Christmas display. Across several indicators of well-being, the display harmed non-celebrators and non-Christians, but enhanced well-being for celebrators and Christians. In Study 2, we found that the negative effect of the display on non-Christians was mediated by reduced feelings of inclusion. The results raise concerns about the ubiquitous presence of dominant cultural symbols (such as Christmas displays) in culturally diverse societies.