Measuring collective action intention toward gender equality across cultures

Collective action is a powerful tool for social change and is fundamental to women and girls’ empowerment on a societal level. Collective action towards gender equality could be understood as intentional and conscious civic behaviors focused on social transformation, questioning power relations, and promoting gender equality through collective efforts. Various instruments to measure collective action intentions have been developed, but to our knowledge none of the published measures were subject to invariance testing. We introduce the gender equality collective action intention (GECAI) scale and examine its psychometric isomorphism and measurement invariance, using data from 60 countries (N = 31,686). Our findings indicate that partial scalar measurement invariance of the GECAI scale permits conditional comparisons of latent mean GECAI scores across countries. Moreover, this metric psychometric isomorphism of the GECAI means we can interpret scores at the country-level (i.e., as a group attribute) conceptually similar to individual attributes. Therefore, our findings add to the growing body of literature on gender based collective action by introducing a methodologically sound tool to measure collective action intentions towards gender equality across cultures

Gendered self-views across 62 countries: a test of competing models

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting the greater autonomy support and flexible self-construction processes present in these countries. Using data from 62 countries (N = 28,640), we examine binary gender gaps in agentic and communal self-views as a function of country-level objective gender equality (the Global Gender Gap Index) and subjective distributions of social power (the Power Distance Index). Findings show that in more egalitarian countries, gender gaps in agency are smaller and gender gaps in communality are larger. These patterns are driven primarily by cross-country differences in men’s self-views and by the Power Distance Index (PDI) more robustly than the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI). We consider possible causes and implications of these findings

Progress in Ecological Stoichiometry: Research Topic

Ecological stoichiometry concerns the way that the elemental composition of organisms shapes their ecology. It deals with balance and imbalanced elemental ratios and how that affects organism growth, nutrient cycling, and the interactions with the biotic and abiotic worlds. It has been over a decade since the publication of Sterner and Elser's book, Ecological Stoichiometry. In the intervening years, hundreds of papers on stoichiometric topics ranging from evolution and regulation of nutrient content in organisms, the role of stoichiometry in populations, communities, ecosystems and global biogeochemical dynamics have been published. Rather than having one or a few authors attempt to revise and update Ecological Stoichiometry, we encourage contributions from the broad community that will highlight recent insights in the field. The elemental composition of organisms is a set of constraints through which all the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles must pass. All organisms consume nutrients and reduced compounds from the environment proportional to their needs. And their needs are determined in turn by the energy required to live and grow, the physical and chemical constraints of their environment, and their needs for relatively large polymeric biomolecules such as RNA, DNA, lipids, and proteins that constitute most of their biomass. Although there may be little variability in stoichiometric ratios of many of these biomolecules, changing the proportions of different biomolecules can have important effects on organismal elemental composition. Furthermore, recent work has demonstrated tremendous variability in organism elemental biomass composition with important implications for Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. This Research Topic will bring the field of Ecological Stoichiometry up to date. Contributions on the following are welcome: the stoichiometry of all organisms, from microbes to elephants, at sub-cellular, individual, population, community and ecosystem spatial scales and evolutionary time scales. Any habitat, terrestrial, freshwater or marine, is considered relevant to the goal of asking what is the state of Ecological Stoichiometry at the present time. It is important to understand controls on stoichiometry at multiple organizational, spatial and temporal scales. We welcome studies using new tools, whether they utilize novel field, culture, sequencing, theory, and/or modeling approaches to address these questions with the goal of achieving a new synthesis regarding ecological stoichiometry across all types of systems and organization