Who Receives More Family Related Support in the Workplace? A Meta-Analysis of Gender Differences in Family Related Support

The purpose of the current study was to meta-analytically estimate if gender differences exist in the provision of family related support in the workplace. Gender differences are of particular interest in the realm of family related support in the workplace because they lie at the intersection of prescribed gender roles for both men and women at home and work. Family related support plays an integral role in an employees’ willingness to utilize family friendly policies that organizations provide to meet the increasing needs of employees to balance work and family demands. Though it may seem like a simple research question, theoretical models provide conflicting predictions on the presence of gender differences and the empirical evidence is inconsistent. Hunter and Schmidt’s (2004) meta-analytical procedures were employed to test for the presence of gender differences in family related support and potential moderators. Results indicate that female employees receive significantly more family related support than male employees in the workplace. Additionally, significant moderators of the gender difference were GDP, unemployment rate, masculinity, and time orientation. Theoretical and practical implications regarding the role that gender roles play in support and work-family conflict are discussed

The roles of race and empathy on contagious yawning

Social Psychologists often consider race to be a marker of in-group or out-group status. When looking at race, implicit bias can take forms that are more subtle than outwards racism. Two research questions were asked in this study to better understand the psychology behind racial issues. The first question was if the number of contagious yawns (CY) a person experiences depends on the race of the stimuli being viewed. Contagiously yawning more to in-group members is a phenomena seen in chimpanzees, but has not been studied in humans in a racial context. Black and white males and females were recruited to view videos of individuals from each race and gender category yawning, while the experimenter documented the number of yawns in response to each video. Contagious yawning has been linked to empathy, and our second question wanted to explore how levels of empathy affected the number of times participants contagiously yawned. A chi square analysis found that participants yawned significantly more to racial in-group members than out-group members, �2 (1)=7.023; p =.008. The number of times a participant yawned was not dependent on the gender of the yawner in the stimuli video, nor was it dependent the combination of race and gender. A correlation between empathy levels and number of contagious yawns was not significant (r = .064, p=.491). Our results suggest that there are other factors, independent of empathy, that could have a bigger effect on contagious yawning, and one particularly salient and powerful factor is race