Category: Gender Difference

 Why do adults continue to play throughout their lives while most other mature mammals cease such behavior? According to researchers at Penn State, playfulness may serve an evolutionary role in human mating preferences by signaling positive qualities to potential long-term mates.

NewsPsychology (July 17, 2012) — Macho men whose partners earn more than they do have worse romantic relationships, in part because the difference in income is a strain for them, according to a new study by Patrick Coughlin and Jay Wade from Fordham University in the US. Conversely, men who are not so traditional in their masculinity do not place as much importance on the difference in income and, as a result, appear to have better quality relationships with their female partner.

The work is published online in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.

The breadwinner role for men is still the accepted norm in marriage, and allows for and supports the husband’s power and authority in the family. It is therefore reasonable for a man who earns less than his female partner to feel removed from this traditional gender role, and feel a void because he does not fulfil this role. However, the reality is that marriages in which both the husband and wife work are becoming the rule rather than the exception. It is increasingly possible for both partners to either earn equal amounts, or for the female to earn more than the male.

Coughlin and Wade were interested in the effects of this growing trend on the experience of marriage and the quality of romantic relationships in particular. Is the extent of men’s masculinity ideology, in other words, emotional control, success, dominance, violence, power, and anti-femininity and homophobia, an influential factor on relationship quality?

A total of 47 men, who were involved in a romantic relationship, and had a female partner who had a higher income, took part in the study. Through an online survey, the researchers assessed their beliefs about masculinity, the quality of their relationships, and the importance of the disparity in income between them and their female partners.

They found, on the one hand, that the stronger a man’s endorsement of traditional masculinity ideology, the more likely he was to report a low-quality romantic relationship, and the more he perceived the difference in incomes as important. On the other hand, the more a man endorsed non-traditional masculinity ideology, the more likely he was to have a high-quality relationship with his female partner and not place too much importance on the income disparity.

The authors conclude: “Our results demonstrate the importance of masculinity ideology in understanding how and why men with higher-earning partners will have low or high quality romantic relationships. The findings are relevant to men who are married as well as non-married men in a romantic relationship.”

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Springer Science+Business Media.

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Journal Reference:

1. Patrick Coughlin, Jay C. Wade. Masculinity Ideology, Income Disparity, and Romantic Relationship Quality Among Men with Higher Earning Female Partners. Sex Roles, 2012; DOI: 10.1007/s11199-012-0187-6

Women who go to medical school just for the financial rewards of being a doctor could be making a mistake, according to a study published in the Journal of Human Capital.

The research found that after factoring in the high upfront costs of becoming a doctor, most women primary-care doctors would have made more money over their careers becoming physician assistants instead. For the median man on the other hand, becoming a doctor pays a substantial premium over becoming a PA.

Two factors drive the results, say the study's authors, M. Keith Chen and Judith Chevalier of the Yale School of Management. First, there's a wage gap; women doctors earn a lower hourly wage than male doctors. But the most important factor is that most women doctors do not work enough hours to make their expensive training pay off compared to PAs.

"One of the takeaways here is it's not all wage gap," Chevalier said. "It's mostly an hours gap. Many women who become doctors simply don't work enough hours to amortize the upfront costs. It's also true for some men, but a much smaller fraction."

Chen and Chevalier used data on thousands of doctors and PAs from the Robert Wood Johnson Community Tracking Physician Survey and the American Academy of Physician Assistants. The data included wages and hours worked for males and females in both professions. The researchers used those data to calculate the net present value of each occupation, taking into consideration the training costs in time and money for both professions. Net present value (NPV) is a calculation economists use to determine whether the gains from a long-term venture are worth the costs.

For men, becoming a doctor is a far better deal than becoming a PA. The NPV of becoming a doctor for the median male was around $2.3 million, while the value of becoming PA was around $1.9 million. But for the median woman, becoming a doctor offers no such advantage. The NPV for women of becoming a doctor was about $1.67 million, while the NPV of becoming PA was $1.68 million.

Most of the male/female NPV disparity is driven by the fact that women doctors tend to work fewer hours than male doctors in the prime of their careers. Early in their careers male and female doctors work similar hours, the researchers found. But between the ages of 31-35, the median male doctor works 50 hours per week while the median female works 40. And a gap in hours worked remains through age 55.

The results add to a growing literature suggesting that women may be overinvesting in professional degrees, the researchers say. The question is why women invest in these degrees when higher returns can be found elsewhere.

It could be, Chevalier says, that women simply perceive that being a doctor will be more satisfying work. But it's also possible that women "don't foresee the extent to which they're going to cut back working when they have kids."

"There are lots of reasons the decision to be a doctor could be rational," she adds. "But for the median woman, it doesn't make financial sense."

Forty years into the Title IX era, female athletes have risen to prominence and populate the sports landscape. Female viewership, however, has not witnessed the same rise. What sports are women watching (or not), and why? Of the many events in this summer's Olympics, which will be favored by women viewers?

A recent study conducted by Erin Whiteside (University of Tennessee) and Marie Hardin (Pennsylvania State University) explores these questions. The results, published in Communication, Culture & Critique, show that women prefer condensed sporting events like the Olympics to sports with longer seasons, and that in selecting which particular Olympic sport to watch, women often select events that are seen as traditionally "feminine," like gymnastics and figure skating.

"Our research provides some insight into why the Olympics remain popular with women," said Hardin. "It's not just about the types of sports that are featured, although that is certainly a big part of it. It's also about the way in which the Olympics is delivered: in bite-sized chunks that may require just a 10-minute commitment to see an exciting sporting event, during a time of day when women feel they can make that commitment."

The study looked at conversations from female focus groups to determine how women consume sports media. The findings show that female spectatorship is often tied to gender roles and related domestic work.

Nearly all women surveyed expressed preference for the Olympics, for patriotic reasons as well as for the fast pace. "Women preferred the condensed style of coverage, something they described as easy to follow," Whiteside explains. The frequency of events during the Olympics, as well as the omnipresent discussion around it — from television to radio to the news — made it preferable for women who otherwise did not identify as avid sports viewers or didn't regularly have the time to devote to watching sports.

Women in the study favored sports that were more traditionally feminine rather than masculine. Participants generally saw little value in following women's sports and were especially uninterested in watching or following women in sports such as basketball, which showcase athletic displays that challenge traditional gender roles. Rather, they expressed a passing interest in sports such as gymnastics, tennis, and figure skating."

The study included 19 women in 3 focus groups, with 90 minutes spent with each group. The average woman was married, had children, and was middle-class. They ranged in age from 26 to 43.

 People make complex judgements about a person from looking at their face that are based on a range of factors beyond simply their race and gender, according to findings of new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The findings question a long-held belief that people immediately put a person they meet into a limited number of social categories such as: female or male; Asian, Black, Latino or White; and young or old.

Dr Kimberly Quinn at the University of Birmingham found that people 'see' faces in a multiple of ways. This could have wider importance in understanding stereotyping and discrimination because it has implications on whether and how people categorise others.

Categorisation is not done purely on the physical features of the face in front of us, but depends on other information as well, including whether the person is already known and whether the person is believed to share other important identities with us.

"How we perceive faces is not just a reflection of what's in those faces," Dr Quinn said. "We are not objective; we bring our current goals and past knowledge to every new encounter. And this happens really quickly — within a couple of hundred milliseconds of seeing the face."

Dr Quinn and her colleagues explored social categories such as sex, race and age; physical attributes such as attractiveness; personality traits such as trustworthiness; and emotional states such as anger, sadness and happiness.

She found that although social categories are used to gather information on faces, these can be easily undermined. This research found that we reject simple stereotypes when something about the situation alerts us to the fact the stereotype does not tell the whole story. If we take, for example, a racial group and the corresponding stereotype of members of that group as unintelligent, seeing a person in that group playing an intellectual game such as chess would tell us to cancel out the stereotype.

In order to investigate the causes, mechanisms, and results of social categorisation, Dr Quinn used techniques from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to investigate how people process faces. The research was designed to provide insight into when and why people categorise others according to social group membership.

Their findings differ from previous research that adopted a 'dual process' approach and assumed people initially categorised faces based on factors such as gender, race or age before determining whether to stereotype them or to see them as unique individuals.

Dr Quinn's findings were more consistent with a single process that initially focuses on 'coarse' information that is easy to detect, and then immediately starts to include more fine-grained processing as time elapses. This model allows for either categorisation or more individuated processing to emerge, and does not assume that categorisation always comes before recognising unique identities — thereby allowing for more diverse outcomes than previously thought.

Further information: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-061-23-0130/read

Women bear the brunt of being the health police in heterosexual marriages, but gay and lesbian couples are more likely to mutually influence each other's health habits — for better or for worse.

The findings are reported in the June issue of the journal, Social Science & Medicine.

Researchers Corinne Reczek, a University of Cincinnati assistant professor of sociology, and Debra Umberson, professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, followed 20 long-term heterosexual marriages as well as 15 long-term gay and 15 long-term lesbian partnerships in the United States. Their findings reflected previous research that in heterosexual marriages, women put more effort into encouraging good health habits for their spouses.

Sociologists have theorized that from early childhood, the socialization of women into caretaker roles has led to health benefits for husbands. Reczek says this newest study is among the first of its kind to explore how gay and lesbian couples affect each other's health habits.

The researchers examined what they called "health work" — defined as any activity or dialogue concerned with enhancing another's health. The researchers conducted 100 in-depth interviews with couples involved in 50 long-term relationships — couples who were involved for at least eight years or longer.

The study found that at least one partner in over three-quarters of the heterosexual, gay and lesbian couples did some form of health work as a result of two reasons: the other partner had bad health habits, or one partner was considered the "health expert."

Nearly half of the respondents — heterosexual, gay or lesbian — blamed a partner's unhealthy habits for the other partner's attempts at intervention. Among heterosexual couples, men were typically identified as needing the prodding toward healthier lifestyles.

For couples identifying a "health expert," the researchers say that straight women were almost exclusively identified, while gay and lesbian couples identified one partner as the health expert, regardless of gender.

For better or for worse, couples mutually reinforcing health behaviors were more prominent in gay (80 percent) and lesbian (86 percent) couples versus straight couples (10 percent).

"The social and institutional conditions within which gay and lesbian couples live — including a heteronormative and homophobic culture at large, and a non-institutionalized nonheterosexual union — structure a unique relational context for cooperative, more egalitarian health work processes to emerge," write the authors.

The authors state that the findings suggest that gendered relational context of an intimate partnership shapes the dynamics and explanations for health behavior work.

The research was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute on Aging as well as the Mentoring Program of The Center for Population Research in LGBT Health, under the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Demographic Description

In the survey sample, 80 percent of the straight respondents were white, 15 percent were African-American, one Asian-American and one Latina. Gay and lesbian respondents included 63 percent whites, 27 percent who identified as Hispanics, Latinos or Latinas, one African-American, one Native-American/Hispanic, and one South American.

The average age for the straight couples was 45 years — 49 years for gay respondents and 43 years for lesbian respondents.

The average relationship duration for straight couples was 17 years, 21 years for gay couples and 14 years for lesbian couples. Household income averaged $60,000.

Male doctors make more money than their female counterparts, even when factoring in medical specialty, title, work hours, productivity and a host of other factors, according to a comprehensive new analysis from researchers at the University of Michigan Health System and Duke University.

Results of the study appear in the June 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"The gender pay disparity we found in this highly talented and select group of physicians was sobering," says lead study author Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

The researchers surveyed 800 physicians who had received a highly competitive early career research grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2000-2003. By focusing on these grants, the researchers narrowed the pool to an extremely select, highly motivated, highly talented group of physicians who are involved in academic medicine. The physicians were surveyed about a decade after receiving these grants, putting them now mid-career.

"People point to a lot of possible reasons for pay disparities, so we examined a population in which you would be least likely to pick up gender differences in salary. After we adjusted for a host of factors that could explain pay differences, we unmasked a pay disparity of $12,001 a year, or more than $350,000 over a career," Jagsi says.

The survey included 39 questions covering age, medical specialty, marital status, work hours, time spent in research, number of peer-reviewed publications, location, race, additional grants, leadership roles and other degrees.

Overall, the average annual salary was $200,422 for men and $167,669 for women, a difference of $32,764. Medical specialty was the biggest driver of salary difference. When the researchers factored that in, the men made $17,874 more. When the researchers adjusted for all factors, the gap was $12,001.

Spreading this out over 30 years, women would earn over $350,000 less than their similar male colleagues by the end of their career.

"To see that men and women doing similar work are paid quite differently in this cream-of-the-crop sample is both surprising and disturbing. I hope these findings will help inform policy discussions on how to address these disparities and ensure equal pay for men and women who are performing equal work," says Jagsi, who is also a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Physician Faculty Scholar.

Senior author Peter Ubel, M.D., professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and its Sanford School of Public Policy, cautions against attributing the salary difference to conscious discrimination.

"For all we know, women are paid less in part because they don't negotiate as assertively as men, or because their spouse's jobs make it harder for them to entertain competing job offers. Nevertheless, whatever the reason for the salary disparity, academic medical centers should work to pay more fairly. A person's salary should not depend upon whether they have a Y chromosome," Ubel says.

The researchers have been awarded a new grant that will allow them to look at whether gender differences in salary were due to initial starting salaries or whether they accumulated over time.

Additional authors: Kent A. Griffith, M.S.; Abigail Stewart, Ph.D.; Dana Sambuco, M.S.; and Rochelle DeCastro, M.S., all from U-M

Funding: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, University of Michigan Office of the Vice President for Research, and National Institutes of Health

Reference: Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 307, No. 22, pp. 2410-2417, June 13, 2012

Proposed Olympic policies for testing the testosterone levels of select female athletes could discriminate against women who may not meet traditional notions of femininity and distort the scientific evidence on the relationship between testosterone, sex and athletic performance, says a Stanford University School of Medicine bioethicist and her colleagues.

They also warn that the proposed policies would not only be unfair, but also could lead to female athletes being coerced into unnecessary and potentially harmful medical treatment in order to continue competing. The critique was published online June 13 in The American Journal of Bioethics.

The testing policies, adopted a year ago by the International Association of Athletics Federations and now under consideration by the International Olympic Committee, call for using testosterone levels to decide whether an athlete is "feminine" enough to compete as a woman. The problem, the authors explain, is that there is insufficient evidence to set a benchmark for a normal testosterone levels in elite female athletes, let alone persuasive research showing that testosterone levels are a good predictor of athletic performance.

"What makes sex testing so complicated is that there is no one marker in the body we can use to say, 'This is a man,' or, 'This is a woman,'" said first author of the paper Katrina Karkazis, PhD, a medical anthropologist and senior research scholar at Stanford's Center for Biomedical Ethics. "These new policies try to get around that complexity by singling out testosterone levels as the most important aspect of athletic advantage. But what causes athletic advantage is equally complex and cannot be reduced to testosterone levels."

Although it is widely believed that chromosomal testing or genital exams can indicate definitively a person's sex, such methods are flawed. Contrary to the general understanding that women have two X chromosomes and men have an X and a Y, there are actually too many variations on chromosomal markers to use the test accurately in all cases. While it is uncommon for women to have a Y chromosome, it does occur in a small number of women.

What's more, regardless of chromosomes, female anatomy and physiology vary in ways that may make it difficult to quickly classify a person as male or female. There are individuals with intersex traits who are born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the typical definitions of female or male.

The new polices for testosterone testing arose from the controversy surrounding South African runner Caster Semenya, who won a gold medal in the women's 800 meters at the 2009 World Championships. After complaints from competitors that she was "too masculine" — including the comment that, "These kinds of people should not run with us… For me, she is not a woman. She is a man" — she was forced to undergo tests that turned a private question of personal identity into a humiliating and distressful public spectacle.

The IAAF ultimately ruled that Semenya is eligible to compete as a woman, but the experience led the organization to issue new rules when the sex of an athlete is questioned. The IOC is considering adopting these rules, or some variation of them, in time for the London Games this summer.

The IAAF policies state that female athletes with unusually high testosterone levels, a condition known as hyperandrogenism, will be banned from competition unless they undergo surgery or take drugs to lower their levels. "The new regulations rest on the assumption that androgenic hormones (such as testosterone and dihydrotestosterone) are the primary components of biologic athletic advantage," the authors write. In practice, the policies focus specifically on testosterone, they added.

Under the IAAF rules, all female athletes with a condition leading to hyperandrogenism must report this knowledge to sporting authorities. And beyond that, if suspicions or complaints arise about a specific female athlete — something as simple as an athlete looking "too masculine" — a confidential evaluation can also be initiated. This part of the policy is worrisome, the authors write, because athletes can be targeted for testing by anyone, including their competitors, based on arbitrary concerns about "masculine traits" such as too much body hair, musculature or an unusually deep voice. The resulting required evaluations would include some combination of three types of exams: a clinical exam; testing urine and blood for hormone levels; and/or a full exam that includes genetic testing, imaging and psychological testing. If testosterone levels are found to be too high, the athlete will then be required to undergo medical intervention in order to continue competing.

While such a process is supposed to protect an athlete's privacy, the ability of the governing committees to keep such testing confidential has proven difficult in the past. The high-profile, elite athletes who undergo testing are banned from competition while it is under way, leading to speculation and gossip within the media and sports world. This is what happened in 2009 in the case of Semenya, whose predicament received widespread media coverage despite claims of confidentiality.

Routine sex testing has been done in past Olympic competitions but was dropped 10 years ago because of repeated inaccuracies, stemming from its reliance on a single trait, such as chromosomes, to verify sex. The problem is similar when relying on testosterone levels alone to determine if an athlete is "too masculine" to compete.

"Individuals have dramatically different responses to the same amounts of testosterone, and it is just one element in a complex neuroendrocrine feedback system," said Rebecca Jordan-Young, co-author of the paper and associate professor of women's, gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College and Columbia University.

"We don't even know what typical testosterone levels are for elite female athletes," Karkazis added.

The authors also contend that, even if high testosterone levels were found to be a marker of improved athletic ability, it is not reason enough to bar women with naturally occurring high levels of the hormone from competing.

"There are many biological reasons some athletes are better than others," the authors write, pointing to several runners and cyclists who have rare mitochondrial variations that give them extraordinary aerobic capacity, or basketball players who have acromegaly, a hormonal condition that results in exceptionally large hands and feet. Such biological differences don't cause them to be banned from competition, they write.

"It bears noting that athletes never begin on a fair playing field; if they were not exceptional in one regard or another they would not have made it to a prestigious international athletic stage," the authors note.

Of particular concern with the potential policies is the possible coercion of athletes into undergoing unnecessary and potentially harmful medical treatment if they are found to have hyperandrogenism. "If the athlete does not pass, she is banned from competition until she lowers her testosterone levels," the authors write, noting that the treatment options would entail either pharmaceutical intervention or gonadectomy, both of which carry serious potential side effects.

Instead of adopting such policies, the authors recommend against gender policing by international sporting authorities. Historically, the rationale for sex testing was based on the long-standing concern that men could masquerade as females in elite sports, and must be weeded out. Yet, decades of routine sex testing in international sport have revealed that, at most, there have only been two instances of this. "Men trying to compete in women's competition is not, nor ever has been, a significant problem," the authors write.

In an accompanying commentary to the journal article, Spanish hurdler Maria Martínez-Patiño, a high-profile athlete with an intersex condition, is also critical of the IAAF policy. Martínez-Patiño was stripped of her 1986 national championship in the 60-meter hurdles because an earlier test showed that she had XY chromosomes, typical in males, and yet she developed as a female. A couple of years later the IAAF reinstated her.

"Only those who have lived through having their eligibility and gender identity contested can attest to its egregious impact," Martinez-Patio writes along with co-author Hida Viloria, chair of the Organization Intersex International. "The psychological consequences of this experience are excruciating."

— It is a question that has puzzled evolutionary biologists for years: Why did we stop being promiscuous and decide to settle down to start families?

Sergey Gavrilets, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, may have found the answer, and it lies in the power of female choice. The study reveals how females chose their mates played a critical role in human evolution by leading to monogamous relationships, which laid the foundation for the institution of the modern family.

Using mathematical modeling, the associate director for scientific activities at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at UT has discovered that the transformation may have occurred when early-hominid females started choosing males who were good providers.

Gavrilets' findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The "sexual revolution" entailed males first competing with other males for dominance, as a way to get matings. However, low-ranked males—and eventually all males except those with the highest societal stature—began supplying females with provisions in what is called "food-for-mating" to get a leg up on the competition. Females showed preference for the "provisioning" males, leading males' energy to be spent on providing for females and females becoming increasingly faithful. This spurred self-domestication and the modern family as we know it today.

"This change has confounded scientists for a long time because many species would be much better off evolutionarily if the effort spent on males competing for mates was redirected towards increasing female fertility or survivorship of their offspring," said Gavrilets.

The study demonstrates mathematically that the most commonly proposed theories for the transition to human pair bonding—or coupling—are not biologically feasible.

However, the study advances a new model showing that the transition to pair-bonding can occur when female choice and faithfulness, among other factors, are included. The result is an increased emphasis on males provisioning females over male competition for mating.

"The study reveals that female choice played a crucial role in human evolution," said Gavrilets.

According to Gavrilets, the transition to coupling has opened the path to intensified male parental investment, which was a breakthrough adaptation with multiple anatomical, behavioral and physiological consequences for early hominids and for all of their descendants. It shifted the dynamic away from males competing with each other for sex to males competing with each other to see who is a better provider to get better mates.

"Pair bonding laid the foundation for a later emergence of the institution of the modern family," said Gavrilets.

 Researchers in Spain have developed a new analytical system that allows them to assess the gender gap in the adoption of information and communications technology (ICT). They have used their approach to publish a ranking of 31 European nations in the International Journal of Society Systems Science.

Juan Martín Fernández and José Luis Martínez Cantos of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, explain that while policies aimed at improved gender equality have moved forward in recent years, little research exists as to whether there is a gender gap to coincide with the digital divide between those who use and benefit from ICT and those who do not. With this in mind, the team has developed the Gender & ICT Indicators System, GICTIS, to allow a quantitative and a qualitative assessment of ICT use to be made and so reveal any gender inequalities that might be addressed by new policy at the national and European level.

The well-known Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) developed by the World Economic Forum highlights four specific areas for assessing and addressing gender inequality: economic participation and opportunities, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment. There are various other indices that add and combine many other factors to put a figure on inequality, even in the area of ICT, but the latter has not been seriously considered in the context of gender until now.

Martín and Martínez have investigated ICT use by men and women- computer use, internet access, online banking and e-commerce, use in healthcare and wellbeing and other generic uses — and assigned each aspect of ICT use a variable that can be appropriately weighted and fed into their model to generate a useful index of access and engagement with ICT. The resulting GICTIS Index synthesises all of the information and allows the researchers to uncover gender inequalities based on assessment of ICT use, intensity of use and how this related to gender.

The top ten nations ranked by e-equality are: Iceland, Hungary, Latvia, France, Slovenia, Finland. Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Lithuania. The UK is below the mean average at number 18 in the ranking, Germany 24th and Greece last at number 31.

The team summarises the complete list as follows. There is a high level of ICT use with high e-equality in Northern Europe (Iceland, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden), France, Slovenia and to a lesser extent Holland. There is high use in Luxembourg, Germany and the UK but these nations have low e-equality. Hungary, Malta, Portugal and Slovakia have a medium level of use and e-equality. There is low ICT use in Romania, Czech Republic, Bulgaria and to a lesser extent Poland and Belgium but these countries have high e-equality. Southern Europe (Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Croatia and to a lesser extent Italy and Spain) and Ireland has low use and low e-equality.

"The Scandinavian countries serve as an unavoidable European benchmark for political and social action to promote equality between women and men in ICT," the team concludes.