A Content Analysis of the Way the Same Product is Advertised to Men and Women.

The purpose of this work was to see if there was a difference in the way the same product was advertised to men and women. Literature suggested that no study like this had been undertaken, and there was a lot of support within the literature to suggest that the answer to this question might be yes. The researcher undertook a content analysis of magazines that come with weekend newspapers to see if she could answer the question she was proposing. Her research found two things. Firstly, it found that products aimed at women are more likely to be advertised in magazines aimed at men and women as well as in women’s magazines. Secondly, it found that women appear more in advertisements aimed at both men and women than men do. The researcher draws these conclusions with some caution: her content analysis was small, coded by one person and due to time limitations not all of the advertisements were analysed under every heading. However, she must conclude that the answer to her question was yes, products for men and women are advertised differently but that this research has its limitations

Identity and the Legislative Decision Making Process: A Case Study of the Maryland State Legislature

Both politicians and the mass public believe that identity influences political behavior yet, political scientists have failed to fully detail how identity is salient for all political actors not just minorities and women legislators. To what extent do racial, gendered, and race/gendered identities affect the legislation decision process? To test this proposition, I examine how race and gender based identities shape the legislative decisions of Black women in comparison to White men, White women, and Black men. I find that Black men and women legislators interviewed believe that racial identity is relevant in their decision making processes, while White men and women members of the Maryland state legislature had difficulty deciding whether their identities mattered and had even more trouble articulating how or why they did. African American women legislators in Maryland articulate or describe an intersectional identity as a meaningful and significant component of their work as representatives. More specifically, Black women legislators use their identity to interpret legislation differently due to their race/gender identities

Defining the Millennial Superwoman: Strategies for Work-Life Integration

Defining the Millennial Superwoman: Strategies for Work-Life Integration uncovers the perceptions of millennial females and contrasts them with the perceptions of working women in other generations. This research determines how millennial females are different in their search for work-life integration – the act of mixing work and personal life – and explains what this difference means for companies in the upcoming years. Historically, there has been much literature focused on women fighting for equality to get into the workforce, as well as why highly educated and successful women began taking themselves out of the workforce. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding why and how millennial women are different from their past counterparts, as well as what this discrepancy means for companies. This capstone includes a research paper and short film which highlights why women perceive work-life integration differently across generations; additionally, it offers insight into what strategies will best suit millennial women in their search for work-life integration

Does Academic Performance Predict Workplace Productivity?

This research examines if college GPA affects productivity and compensation in the workplace. It uses data collected from a survey of approximately 23,000 Bryant University graduates in different stages of their career. About 10 percent of the alumni surveyed completed the survey. The econometric model used in this study allows estimating the effect of GPA on income after controlling for various demographic and socioeconomic variables, including education, major, occupation, gender, among others. The empirical work provides evidence that GPA has a positive and statistically significant impact on workplace productivity for females, but GPA seems to be a weaker predictor of workplace productivity for males. In addition, there is strong evidence of a significant gender wage gap, but no evidence of a race wage gap

At the intersection of disability and masculinity: Exploring gender and bodily difference in India

This is the accepted version of the following article: STAPLES, J. (2011), At the intersection of disability and masculinity: exploring gender and bodily difference in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17: 545–562. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01706.x, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2011.01706.x/abstract.Despite a conventional view that bodily impairments are necessarily interpreted as emasculating and negative, this article – drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with men affected by leprosy and by cerebral palsy (CP) in India – offers a more nuanced account of how disabled men negotiate their gendered identities. Different kinds of impairments have very specific, context-defined, meanings that, in turn, have different implications for how gender and disability might intersect. Rather than diminishing masculinity in all instances – some bodily differences, as the article demonstrates, might even be enacted as hyper-masculine – impairments are shown rather to reshape understandings of the masculine in sometimes unexpected ways. And while my informants were constrained both by ableist norms and by the biological limitations of their own bodies, ambivalence towards certain forms of masculinity also afforded them space to perform their identities more creatively, sometimes to potentially positive effect.The Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy

Transforming Masculinist Political Cultures? Doing Politics in New Political Institutions

In the devolved legislative assemblies of Scotland and Wales the proportion of women representatives is approaching parity. This is in marked contrast to Westminster where one in five MPs are women. In this paper we explore the extent to which the masculinist political cultures characterising established political institutions are being reproduced in the National Assembly for Wales or whether its different gendering, both in the numbers of women representatives and in terms of its institutional framework, is associated with a more feminised political and organisational culture. Drawing on interviews with half the Assembly Members, women and men, we show that the political style of the Assembly differs from that of Westminster and that Assembly Members perceive it as being more consensual and as embodying a less aggressive and macho way of doing politics. AMs relate this difference to the gender parity amongst Assembly Members, to the institutional arrangements which have an \'absolute duty\' to promote equality embedded in them, and to the desire to develop a different way of doing politics. We suggest that the ability to do politics in a more feminised and consensual way relates not only to the presence of a significant proportion of women representatives, but also to the nature of the institution and the way in which differently gendered processes and practices are embedded within it. Differently gendered political institutions can develop a more feminised political culture which provides an alternative to the masculinist political culture characterising the political domain.Gender, Political Culture, New Political Institutions, Consensus Politics, Political Style, National Assembly for Wales

The Puzzle of Heterogeneity in Support for Free Trade

Over time and across countries, researchers have noted frequent and mostly unexplained gender differences in the levels of support for policies of free or freer trade: according to aggregate results from many surveys, women tend to be less favorable toward policies of liberalizing trade than men. Positing an economic security explanation based largely on a mobile factors approach, we ask if it is women generally who are more negative toward trade or rather women who are more economically vulnerable – i.e., women from the scarce labor factor. We utilize data from two recent surveys on individuals’ attitudes toward different facets of trade and its effects to examine this hypothesis empirically. Rejecting a monolithic definition of “women,” we find that disaggregating by education level illuminates to some extent what underlying characteristics might be helping to drive some of these findings. Lower-skilled women in the US are much less likely to support free trade compared to higher-skilled women and this may largely explain previous negative findings. The low versus high-skill dynamic is, however, much less clear in the findings using survey data from a small sample of developing countries