Category: Gender Difference

 Male leaders who make mistakes are judged more harshly than women in the same situation.

What do employees think of their boss when he or she makes a mistake? According to a new study, leaders who make mistakes are seen as less competent, less desirable to work for and less effective than leaders who do not. And if the leader is a man making a mistake in a man's world, he is judged more harshly than a woman making the same mistake in a man's world. The work by Christian Thoroughgood, from the Pennsylvania State University in the US, and his colleagues, is published online in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology.

It is a fact that leaders do make mistakes, and these mistakes can have far-reaching negative consequences. For leaders to be effective, followers must trust their ability to make difficult decisions, execute their initiatives and act as positive organizational figureheads — it is critical that followers see their leaders as competent. So when they get it wrong, followers question their competence and are less willing to follow them and work for them.

Thoroughgood and his colleagues looked at how male and female leaders are rated, not when they succeed, but when they make mistakes. They were particularly interested in whether subordinates would perceive their leaders differently according to the type of mistake they made and their gender, i.e., a man or a woman working in either a man's world (construction) or a woman's world (nursing).

A total of 284 undergraduates from a large northeastern university in the US, who had worked on average for nearly three years, read a series of fictional emails describing a leader's behavior. They were asked to envision themselves as subordinates of the leader — either a man or a woman. In the emails, the leaders made two types of errors: task errors and relationship errors.

The participants then answered an online survey measuring their perception of the leader's competence in both task and relationship matters, their desire to work for the leader as well as their opinion of whether the leader was effective or not.

The researchers found that errors did damage perceptions of leaders who commit them. Leaders who made mistakes were viewed as less competent in both task and relationship areas and 'subordinates' were less likely to want to work for them. They were also seen as less effective.

In addition, the authors observed an effect of gender. Male leaders were evaluated more negatively than female leaders for errors made in masculinized work domains. The authors suggest that male leaders may be seen as violating expectations of male performance in this context, whereas women are expected to fail in masculine work settings.

The authors conclude: "Our results suggest that leader errors matter; errors damage perceptions of a leader's competence and follower's desire to work for them. While it is impractical to suggest leaders should attempt to avoid errors altogether, they should recognize the different types of errors they make and consider how these errors impact their followers in different ways."

Timing can affect whether females and minorities experience discrimination — says a study recently published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Emails were sent from fictional prospective doctoral students to 6,500 professors across 258 institutions, requesting a meeting either that day or next week. Prospective doctoral students with Caucasian male names were 26% more likely to be granted an appointment with a professor when requesting one for next week than those with names signaling that they were minorities (African American, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese) or females. But if the requested appointment was for that day, students of all types were equally likely to get an appointment.

The difference, the paper explains, is that the time delay between the decision to meet and the moment of the requested appointment affects the way the request is processed. An individual considering scheduling an appointment today thinks concretely and considers "Can/where/when will I do it?" whereas an individual considering the same appointment in the distant future thinks more abstractly, and considers "Is doing it worthwhile/valuable/desirable?" Those who focus on the desirability of a meeting are more likely to discriminate against women and minorities than those who focus on logistical concerns.

These results fit well with previous research showing that decision-makers thinking more abstractly rely more on stereotypes to fill out their picture of future events and their impact. The research both highlights discrimination in academia and shows that subtle shifts in context, such as timing, can alter patterns of race- and gender-based discrimination, even eliminating it altogether.

The study was conducted by professors Katherine Milkman at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Modupe Akinola at Columbia Business School and Dolly Chugh at New York University Stern School of Business.

After seeing faces for less than a blink of an eye, college students have accuracy greater than mere chance in judging others' sexual orientation. Their "gaydar" persisted even when they saw the photos upside-down, and gay versus straight judgments were more accurate for women's faces than for men's.

The findings, published May 16 in the open-access online journal PLoS ONE, suggest that we unconsciously make gay and straight distinctions.

"It may be similar to how we don't have to think about whether someone is a man or a woman or black or white," said lead author Joshua Tabak, a psychology graduate student at the University of Washington. "This information confronts us in everyday life."

Tabak says that our ability to spontaneously assess sexual orientation based on observation or instinct conflicts with the assertion that if people just kept their sexual orientation to themselves then no one else would know and discrimination wouldn't exist, an argument frequently used by opponents of anti-discrimination policies for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

In the study, 129 college students viewed 96 photos each of young adult men and women who identified themselves as gay or straight. Concerned that facial hair, glasses, makeup and piercings might provide easy clues, the researchers only used photos of people who did not have such embellishments. They cropped the grayscale photos so that only faces, not hairstyles, were visible.

For women's faces, participants were 65 percent accurate in telling the difference between gay and straight faces when the photos flashed on a computer screen. Even when the faces were flipped upside down, participants were 61 percent accurate in telling the two apart.

At 57 percent accuracy, they had a harder time differentiating gay men from straight men. The participants' accuracy slipped to 53 percent — still statistically above chance — when the men's faces appeared upside down.

The difference in accuracy for men's and women's faces was driven by more false alarm errors with men's faces — that is, a higher rate of mistaking straight men's faces as gay.

This may be because participants are more familiar with the concept of gay men than with lesbians, so they may have been more liberal in judging men's faces as gay, Tabak suspects. Another possibility is that the difference between gay and straight women is simply more noticeable than the difference between gay and straight men, Tabak said.

He was surprised that participants were above-chance judging sexual orientation based on upside down photos flashed for just 50 milliseconds, about a third the time of an eyeblink.

Don't think you have gaydar? You're not alone. Tabak says that in his experiments there are "always a small number of people with no ability to distinguish gay and straight faces."

It's unclear why some have better gaydar than others, since studies have only tested this aptitude in college students. Tabak speculates that "people from older generations or different cultures who may not have grown up knowing they were interacting with gay people" may be less accurate in making gay versus straight judgments.

Vivian Zayas at Cornell University is the other author of the paper. Funding was provided by Cornell University and the National Science Foundation.

— A new study from Social Studies of Science (published by SAGE) reveals that when men chair committees that select scientific awards recipients, males win the awards more than 95% of the time. This new study also reports that while in the past two decades women have begun to win more awards for their scientific achievements, compared to men, they win more service and teaching awards and fewer prestigious scholarly awards than would be expected based on their representation in the nomination pool.

The authors wrote, "On the face of them, awards for women may not raise concerns … yet women-only awards can camouflage women's underrepresentation by inflating the number of female award recipients, leading to the impression that no disparities exist."

The researchers analyzed the composition of award committees in order to explain why there is such a large disparity between male and female scientific award recipients. They found that committees that were chaired by men awarded 95.1% of their prizes to men despite the fact that women made up 21% of the nomination pools. While having women on a committee did increase the chances that women were awarded prizes, women made up only 19.5% of the average award committee and male chairs trumped any effect of having women on the committee.

Researchers Anne E. Lincoln, Stephanie Pincus, Janet Bandows Koster, and Phoebe S. Leboy studied the dissemination of awards given by 13 societies from the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) between 1991 and 2010. They found that while awards to women increased by 78.5 % during these two decades, between the years of 2000 and 2010, men were more than eight times more likely than women to win a scholarly award and almost three times more likely to win a young investigator award. Interestingly, this disparity grew instead of diminishing between the years of 2001 and 2010 — women won 10% of research-based awards while winning 32.2 % of service awards and 37.1 % of teaching awards.

The researchers suggested some possible solutions to this problem such as increasing the proportion of female nominees for all types of scientific prizes, ensuring that women are well represented on prize committees, constantly reviewing award criteria to check for implicit bias, and establishing an oversight committee to maintain standards of equality.

"The fact that women are honored twice as often for service as for scholarship may arise from … the tacit assumption that scientists and rigorous scholars are men, and that women are incongruent with the scientist role," wrote the authors. "Professional societies must inform leadership and awards committees about such bias."

— Perfume ads, beer billboards, movie posters: everywhere you look, women's sexualized bodies are on display. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women's bodies as objects, while they see sexy-looking men as people.

Sexual objectification has been well studied, but most of the research is about looking at the effects of this objectification. "What's unclear is, we don't actually know whether people at a basic level recognize sexualized females or sexualized males as objects," says Philippe Bernard of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Bernard cowrote the new paper with Sarah Gervais, Jill Allen, Sophie Campomizzi, and Olivier Klein.

Psychological research has worked out that our brains see people and objects in different ways. For example, while we're good at recognizing a whole face, just part of a face is a bit baffling. On the other hand, recognizing part of a chair is just as easy as recognizing a whole chair.

One way that psychologists have found to test whether something is seen as an object is by turning it upside down. Pictures of people present a recognition problem when they're turned upside down, but pictures of objects don't have that problem. So Bernard and his colleagues used a test where they presented pictures of men and women in sexualized poses, wearing underwear. Each participant watched the pictures appear one by one on a computer screen. Some of the pictures were right side up and some were upside down. After each picture, there was a second of black screen, then the participant was shown two images. They were supposed to choose the one that matched the one they had just seen.

People recognized right-side-up men better than upside-down men, suggesting that they were seeing the sexualized men as people. But the women in underwear weren't any harder to recognize when they were upside down — which is consistent with the idea that people see sexy women as objects. There was no difference between male and female participants.

We see sexualized women every day on billboards, buildings, and the sides of buses and this study suggests that we think of these images as if they were objects, not people. "What is motivating this study is to understand to what extent people are perceiving these as human or not," Bernard says. The next step, he says, is to study how seeing all these images influences how people treat real women.

While white men are expected to be assertive and aggressive leaders, black men and white women are often penalized for that kind of behavior in the workplace. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, looks at another group: black women. They find that, rather than being viewed as a combination of black men and white women, black women also seem to be expected to act assertively.

"Traditionally, women have been assigned to a more subordinate role," said Robert W. Livingston of Northwestern University, who co-wrote the new study with Ashleigh Shelby Rosette of Duke University and Ella F. Washington of Northwestern. Rosette explained that according to prevailing cultural norms, men are expected to occupy dominant roles, while women are typically prescribed to more communal roles. And previous research has shown that when people think about a prototypical leader, they tend to think about a white man. If women behave in a way that is at odds with these prototypical roles — more dominant and less communal, for example — they will be perceived in a negative light. This "backlash effect" or "agency penalty," has been found in both experimental research and in studies of real-life settings.

While considerable research has examined this gender-based effect, there hasn't been much research that has looked at gender in conjunction with race. Researchers had assumed that the perceptions that people applied to white women would also be applied to black women, Rosette noted.

"So the logical next question," said Livingston, "was what about black female leaders? Do they suffer double jeopardy?"

The authors were inspired in part by a newspaper article describing how Ursula Burns became the CEO of XEROX and the first black woman to head a Fortune 500 company. The article described a lot of behavior that seemed assertive and dominant to Livingston. "It didn't seem like she was being shy or docile or tiptoeing on eggshells," he said.

In the new study, each participant was shown a picture of a fictitious official at a Fortune 500 company. Each picture was paired with a scenario in which the leader was meeting with a subordinate who wasn't performing well. Dominant leaders demanded action and were assertive; communal leaders encouraged the subordinate and communicated with compassion. Participants rated the leader on questions like how well the leader handled the situation and how much they thought employees admire this leader.

While people were negative about assertive black men and white women, black women had as much latitude as white men to be assertive. This shows that black women really are a separate category when it comes to leadership. "Black women leaders occupy a unique space," said Rosette. "These findings show that just because a role is prescribed to women in general doesn't mean that it will be prescribed for black women."

This study does not suggest, however, that racism is no longer a problem or that black women leaders don't experience problems because they are perceived more like white men than white women. Rosette emphasized the fact that this new study only talks about women who have already reached top leadership roles. "This research doesn't examine what it is like for black women to get to those roles in the first place," she said.

Livingston suspects that one of the reasons that there aren't as many black women as white men running Fortune 500 companies is because black women may actually be more likely to be penalized for a mistake. "It is possible that black women can be assertive, but any mistake on the job might be interpreted as evidence that she is not suited for the leadership role," he said. That may make it extremely difficult for black women to climb the corporate ladder.

"The reality is that there isn't a huge population to draw from when it comes to black women leaders, so the evidence that complements our work is anecdotal," said Rosette. As such, this field of research represents a new frontier at the cross-section of the psychological and management sciences.

Perhaps that most important conclusion we can draw from this new study, according to the authors, is that one size does not fit all: context is incredibly important when it concerns issues of race and gender.

The colour red has long been associated with women's sexual attractiveness, but a new study at the University of Kent has shown that this is not linked to any association in men's minds with the redness of women's genitalia.

A common view in popular discussion is that human males have a biological predisposition towards the colour red — making it a very significant or 'salient' sexual factor because it makes them think about female genitals and sexual arousal. It has also been suggested that woman wear red lipstick to attract men by making them think about sexually aroused labia.

To test this hypothesis, a team from the University's School of Anthropology and Conservation generated 16 images of female genitalia by manipulating four individual photographs of the human female vulva to produce four subtle, yet different, colour conditions ranging from pale pink to red.

These images were then presented to 40 heterosexual males with varying levels of sexual experience who were asked to rate the sexual attractiveness of each image.

The results showed that the men rated the reddest shade significantly less attractive than the three pink shades, among which there were no significant differences in rated attractiveness.

Dr Sarah E. Johns, lecturer in evolutionary anthropology and lead researcher in the study, said: "Our results really challenge the commonly held view that the colour red promotes sexual attractiveness by acting as a proxy for female genital colour.

"We found in fact that men showed a strong aversion to redder female genitals. This study shows that the myth of red as a proxy for female genital colour should be abandoned. This view must be replaced by careful examination of precisely what the colour red, in clothing, makeup, and other contexts, is actually signalling to men. What it isn't signalling is female sexual arousal.

"Our findings have important ramifications for the future study of the role of colour signals in human social and sexual interactions," she said.

The research team also included Lucy A. Hargrave and Dr Nicholas E. Newton-Fisher of the School of Anthropology and Conservation. The study is published in the journal PLoS ONE.

— Aging and health issues facing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender baby boomers have been largely ignored by services, policies and research. These seniors face higher rates of disability, physical and mental distress and a lack of access to services, according to the first study on aging and health in these communities.

The study, released Nov. 16 and led by Karen Fredriksen-Goldsen and colleagues at the University of Washington's School of Social Work, indicates that prevention and intervention strategies must be developed to address the unique needs of these seniors, whose numbers are expected to double to more than 4 million by 2030.

"The higher rates of aging and health disparities among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender older adults is a major concern for public health," said Fredriksen-Goldsen, a UW professor of social work and director of UW's Institute for Multigenerational Health. "The health disparities reflect the historical and social context of their lives, and the serious adversity they have encountered can jeopardize their health and willingness to seek services in old age."

She presented some of the study's key findings last week during a congressional briefing.

The study highlights how these adults have unique circumstances, such as fear of discrimination and often the lack of children to help them. Senior housing, transportation, legal services, support groups and social events were the most commonly cited services needed in the LGBT community, according to the study.

Fredriksen-Goldsen and her co-authors surveyed 2,560 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults aged 50-95 across the United States. The researchers found that the study participants had greater rates of disability, depression and loneliness and increased likeliness to smoke and binge-drink compared with heterosexuals of similar ages.

Those seniors are also at greater risk for social isolation, which is "linked to poor mental and physical health, cognitive impairment, chronic illness and premature death," Fredriksen-Goldsen said. Study participants were more likely to live alone and less likely to be partnered or married than heterosexuals, which may result in less social support and financial security as they age.

Histories of victimization and discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity also contribute to poor health. The study showed that 80 percent had been victimized at least once during their lifetimes, including verbal and physical assaults, threats of physical violence and being "outed," and damaged property. Twenty-one percent of respondents said they were fired from a job because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. Nearly four out of 10 had considered suicide at some point.

Twenty-one percent of those surveyed did not tell their doctors about their sexual orientation or gender identity out of fear of receiving inferior health care or being turned away for services, which 13 percent of respondents had endured. As one respondent, a 67-year-old gay man, put it, "I was advised by my primary care doctor to not get my HIV tested there, but rather do it anonymously, because he knew they were discriminating."

Lack of openness about sexuality "prevents discussions about sexual health, risk of breast or prostate cancer, hepatitis, HIV risk, hormone therapy or other risk factors," Fredriksen-Goldsen said.

The good news? "LGBT older adults are resilient and living their lives and building their communities," Fredriksen-Goldsen said. Of the study's respondents, 91 percent reported using wellness activities such as meditation and 82 percent said they regularly exercised. Nearly all — 90 percent — felt good about belonging to their communities. And 38 percent stated that they attended spiritual or religious services, indicating a promising social outlet.

Social connections are key, the study noted because, unlike their heterosexual counterparts, most lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender seniors rely heavily on partners and friends of similar age to provide assistance as they age. While social ties are critical, there may be limits to the ability of those older adults to "provide care over the long-term, especially if decision-making is required for the older adult receiving care," Fredriksen-Goldsen said.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging.

Other co-authors at the UW School of Social Work are Hyun-Jun Kim, research associate; Charles Emlet, professor; Elena Erosheva, associate professor; Charles Hoy-Ellis, graduate student, and Jayn Goldsen, project manager. Anna Muraco, assistant professor of sociology at Loyola Marymount University in California, and Heidi Petry, professor of nursing at Zurich University in Switzerland, also are co-authors.

— Working mothers may be busy, but they like it that way. A recent study of employed moms finds that most would work even if they didn't have to, but they're also looking for new ways to negotiate the demands of mothering and the pressures to be an "ideal" employee.

Unlike earlier research, the study — published in the February issue of Gender & Society — finds that many employed mothers emphasize the benefits they, and their children, receive from their paid work. Both married and single mothers said they found more fulfillment (and gained self confidence) in paid work than in parenting — and this is an essential reason why they do not stay at home with their children. Most women — regardless of their class, race/ethnicity, or marital status, said they would work (at least part time) even if they didn't have to. The study was conducted by Karen Christopher, an associate professor of Women's/Gender Studies and Sociology at the University of Louisville.

Over the past several decades, mothers' employment rates have risen sharply. By 2010, approximately two-thirds of North American mothers with young children worked outside of the home. Unlike many previous studies on working mothers, the new research looks at a more diverse, young group of mothers, including women from both Canada and the U.S., as well as women with different racial/ethnic backgrounds, class and marital status. Most women in the study were born between 1970 and 1985. Prof. Christopher interviewed 40 working mothers, each with at least one child under the age of 5; over half the women had two children.

Although the women enjoy their careers, they also place limits on how much they work so that they can remain connected to their children. Many women sought out jobs (even high-powered professionals, such as lawyers) with employers who would not demand that they work overtime or nights on a regular basis. Several women stressed that they only work "reasonable" hours. For example, Jana, an African American nurse with one child, said that she was unwilling to trade in her 8-hour shifts for 10-hour shifts and receive overtime pay. At the same time, whether they were married or single, African-American or white, lower, middle income, or higher income — almost all of the mothers interviewed by Prof. Christopher said they wanted to work. Prof. Christopher argues that while these moms are not spending intensive amounts of time with their kids, they see themselves as involved parents who are "in charge" of their children's lives.

For these women, a new emphasis on their own needs as people helped supersede any feelings of guilt or ambivalence over working for pay. "About one-third of the 40 employed mothers expressed some ambivalence or guilt over their employment, but most employed mothers justified their paid work by saying it made them more fulfilled people, in addition to better mothers," Prof. Christopher says. "So, these mothers are not only reframing what good mothering entails, they also frame employment in ways different than do earlier studies of mothers."

Some Things Haven't Changed

The paper cites research showing that mothers with male partners still perform about twice as much child care and housework as their partners. In addition, Prof. Christopher suggests that inflexible workplaces and inadequate public policies are constraining North American mothers' (and fathers') ability to combine employment with involved parenting.

Hormones shape our bodies, make us fertile, excite our most basic urges, and as scientists have known for years, they govern the behaviors that separate men from women. But how?

Now a team of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has uncovered many genes influenced by the male and female sex hormones testosterone and estrogen that, in turn, govern several specific types of male and female behaviors in mice.

The UCSF team selectively turned many of these genes off one by one and found they could manipulate individual behaviors in the mice, like their sex drive, desire to pick fights, or willingness to spend extra time caring for their young.

"It's as if you can deconstruct a social behavior into genetic components," said Nirao Shah, MD, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Anatomy at UCSF who led the research, which is published in the 2/3/12 issue of the journal Cell. "Each gene regulates a few components of a behavior without affecting other aspects of male and female behavior.

In addition to illuminating the role of genes in male and female behavior, Shah said, the results also have greater implications: If male and female behaviors can be broken down into individual component parts, what other complex behaviors could similarly be deconstructed?

Identifying how genetic differences in our brains account for the differences in our behavior may also be a starting point for understanding how to better address human mental illness and neurodegenerative conditions in which such gender differences exist. For example, autism is four times more common in males than in females.

"Some of the genes we have identified in our study have indeed been implicated in various human disorders that are found in sex-skewed ratios," said Shah. "We won't immediately find all the answers to these disorders based on this research alone, but in the future, it might indeed help to identify more informed ways of treating such conditions."

Hormones, Sex, and Society

Scientists have known for years that hormones exert a profound control over male and female biology. They influence whether an embryo develops into a male or female fetus. They kick in during puberty and promote gender-specific characteristics, such as facial hair in men and breasts in women. They also stimulate the production of male sperm and female ova.

These actions have led to the widespread use of hormones in mainstream and fringe medicine for years. A major part of sexual reassignment procedures involves the long-term administration of hormones like estrogen or testosterone. Athletes seeking a competitive edge and middle-aged men seeking to prolong the vigor of youth sometimes use testosterone — often inducing aggressive behavior in the process.

While the connection between sex hormones and behavior has been known for years, scientists have only recently made significant headway in demonstrating how profoundly one affects the other by altering the levels of male and female hormones in laboratory animals.

Female mice in the laboratory normally exhibit what one might consider classic motherly behaviors — mating with male mice and nurturing their young. But female mice with a genetic trait making them unable to sense the hormone estrogen lose their interest in sex and spend less time caring for their offspring.

Fortified by testosterone, male mice in the laboratory display behaviors tending toward the aggressive. They will fight with each other, try to mount female mice and mark their territory with urine. Deprived of testosterone, however, castrated male mice no longer behave so aggressively.

Scientists have long suspected that sex hormones ultimately influence gene expression in the brain-. About six years ago, Shah and his colleagues set out to find such genes by using DNA microarrays, a routine laboratory assay, to analyze sex differences in gene expression in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain known to be involved with hormone sensing.

They found 16 genes that were expressed differently between males and females in the hypothalamus and showed that such differences were regulated by sex hormones. But in identifying these 16 genes, Shah and his colleagues also discovered they could tease apart classic, male and female hormone-driven behaviors into individual elements — each governed by its own genes.

The situation is analogous to the way a house draws its power from the grid. A sex hormone is similar to the main breaker that connects the house to the utility pole and regulates electricity to the entire house.

Individual genes influenced by sex hormones are like the light switches in each room, making it possible to turn the lights on in the kitchen while leaving the bedroom dark.

Sex and Behavior — More than the Sum of Parts?

Much like a main electrical box with many breaker switches, male and female behaviors are actually made up of many behaviors, like sex drive or an inclination to fight. Shah and his colleagues demonstrated this by manipulating the genes separately, sometimes with drugs, to turn them off.

Specifically, they showed that they could selectively knock out some male behaviors so that males continued to fight and mark territory normally but altered their mating routine with females. Likewise they could modulate female mouse behaviors to make them maintain active interest in sex but spend less time caring for their young, or vice versa.

"Other components of male and females behaviors appeared unchanged," Shah said. The implications of this simple observation that a complex human behavior may be composed of numerous genetically controlled elements are both intriguing and daunting, he added. Moreover, it is likely, Shah said, that there are many additional genes that will be discovered to be sex hormone regulated that, in turn, control other components of male or female behaviors.

All authors are at UCSF except Dr. Tetsuro Izumi, who is affiliated with Gunma University in Maebashi, Japan.

This work was funded by the Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Foundation, NARSAD, and the National Institutes of Health. Additional support was provided through a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, a Sandler postdoctoral fellowship, two Genentech graduate fellowships, and an ARCS foundation award.