Gender differences in occupational role conflict and psychological well-being, job satisfaction, job involvement and stress.

The study investigated gender differences in occupational role conflict and the effects on emotional and motivational aspects of occupational behaviour in the male-dominated occupation of law enforcement. Male and female police officers rated themselves and their colleagues on an occupational image rating scale. Three image ratings were obtained for each subject (a) self occupational image, (b) perceived occupational image, and (c) actual occupational image. The discrepancy between the self and perceived occupational images was used as an indicator of occupational role conflict. It was argued that due to the relatively recent inclusion of policewomen as generalist officers, male officers' predominantly negative attitudes towards female officers, and the 'masculine' image associated with the policing role; female police officers would experience greater role conflict than their male counterparts. Contrary to predictions, the results showed that female police officers did not experience greater role conflict than male officers. Furthermore, occupational role conflict did not correlate significantly with measures of psychological well-being, job satisfaction, job involvement or felt stress. Self and perceived occupational images were found to relate positively with one another. In addition, it was shown that, compared with male officers, female officers had more accurate perceptions of the views their counterparts held towards them. Gender differences in the self, perceived and actual occupational images were found. The results were discussed in the context of symbolic interactionism theory and the recent findings on occupational self-efficacy expectancies

The Role of Signaling When Promoting Diversity and Inclusion at the Firm Level: A Financial Advisory Professional Case Study

Based on signaling theory and visual perception theory, this study evaluated how financial advisory firms depict diversity through online platforms. Signals sent by firms may impact outsiders’ understanding of race and gender inclusion at the firm level, which may explain why some struggle to recruit and retain a diverse workforce. To evaluate, 1,379 advisor biographies on 73 firm websites were analyzed. In this study, 29% of all client-facing advisors with known gender were women; only 0.5% of those with known race were Black. This is much lower than what other studies, based on different industrial codes, have reported. The fact that White males featured predominantly in depictions of employees on firm websites may influence who applies for positions in financial advisory firms. This signaling pattern may also indicate hiring preferences among firm owners and managers. Results have implications for firms that wish to recruit and retain a diverse workforce

A Look at the Generalized Heron Problem through the Lens of Majorization-Minimization

In a recent issue of this journal, Mordukhovich et al.\ pose and solve an interesting non-differentiable generalization of the Heron problem in the framework of modern convex analysis. In the generalized Heron problem one is given $k+1$ closed convex sets in \Real^d equipped with its Euclidean norm and asked to find the point in the last set such that the sum of the distances to the first $k$ sets is minimal. In later work the authors generalize the Heron problem even further, relax its convexity assumptions, study its theoretical properties, and pursue subgradient algorithms for solving the convex case. Here, we revisit the original problem solely from the numerical perspective. By exploiting the majorization-minimization (MM) principle of computational statistics and rudimentary techniques from differential calculus, we are able to construct a very fast algorithm for solving the Euclidean version of the generalized Heron problem.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure

Rapid, efficient functional characterization and recovery of HIV-specific human CD8+ T cells using microengraving

The nature of certain clinical samples (tissue biopsies, fluids) or the subjects themselves (pediatric subjects, neonates) often constrain the number of cells available to evaluate the breadth of functional T-cell responses to infections or therapeutic interventions. The methods most commonly used to assess this functional diversity ex vivo and to recover specific cells to expand in vitro usually require more than 106 cells. Here we present a process to identify antigen-specific responses efficiently ex vivo from 104–105 single cells from blood or mucosal tissues using dense arrays of subnanoliter wells. The approach combines on-chip imaging cytometry with a technique for capturing secreted proteins—called “microengraving”—to enumerate antigenspecific responses by single T cells in a manner comparable to conventional assays such as ELISpot and intracellular cytokine staining. Unlike those assays, however, the individual cells identified can be recovered readily by micromanipulation for further characterization in vitro. Applying this method to assess HIV-specific T cell responses demonstrates that it is possible to establish clonal CD8+ T-cell lines that represent the most abundant specificities present in circulation using 100- to 1,000-fold fewer cells than traditional approaches require and without extensive genotypic analysis a priori. This rapid (<24 h), efficient, and inexpensive process should improve the comparative study of human T-cell immunology across ages and anatomic compartments