Reengineering Gender: Relations in Modern Militaries: An Evolutionary Perspective

20 pagesThis article presents an evolutionary framework for understanding the sexual assault of women in the military. We specify the evolutionary underpinnings of tensions among heterosexual males, among heterosexual females, and between males and females and discuss how these tensions have played out in the strongly gendered context of warrior culture. In the absence of cultural interventions that take into account deep-seated conceptions of women in the military as unwelcome intruders, sexual resources for military men, or both, military women operate in an environment in which sexual assault may be deployed to enact and defend traditional military structures. We discuss how unit norms are likely to affect the choice of strategies by men and by women and how the resulting behaviors—including celibacy, consensual sex, and sexual assault—should affect horizontal and vertical unit cohesion. The framework is intended to guide future data collection in theoretically coherent ways and to inform the framing and enforcement of policies regarding both consensual and non-consensual sex among military personnel

Perceptual asymmetry in gendered group decision making

Does the gender composition of a group affect decision making? Small groups are a primary arena in which political behavior takes place; behavior such as coalition formation and status competition. There are reasons to believe that the number of males and females in a group might affect the process of decision making as well as the outcomes. The literature to date suggests that males and females have distinctly different preferences and behavioral tendencies and perceive decision making scenarios differently due to the socialization of traditional gender roles. I propose an alternative explanation for the source of gendered preferences and behavioral predispositions---an evolutionary biological explanation. Within this framework, both innate biological features and socialization give rise to gender differences in perceptions, preferences and behavior. It is not nature versus nurture but both that best explain group decision making behavior. From this conceptual framework I suggest a number of hypotheses and test them using original laboratory experiments. My experimental results show that group gender composition does play a significant and substantive role in decision making. This role, however, is more subtle than has been portrayed in the existing literature. Group gender composition seems to exert a systematic influence in shaping individual preferences. There is at least some empirical support for the claim that this influence affects males and females differently---male preferences seem to be more sensitive to gendered groups. Multivariate path analyses provide an indication that the statistical relationships in the data are consistent with the relationships specified by my conceptual model. There are important links between the behavioral predispositions of males and females and the decisions that arise from the groups or communities they make up that are not well understood. The relationship between individual preferences and predispositions and group or community-level outcomes are complex and dynamic, and often avoided by researchers who prefer to focus on individual level analyses. I believe the study of political behavior is ultimately about attempting to unravel the individual cognitive processes and the mediating effects of group contexts that lead to group outcomes. This dissertation is a contribution to that endeavor

Theorizing Sex Differences in Political Knowledge: Insights from a Twin Study

It is well established that women and men differ in their psychological orientation to politics (Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001; Dolan 2011; Fox and Lawless 2004; Thomas 2012). In addition to willingness to run for office, expressing interest in politics, and political efficacy, men and women tend to differ in reporting their factual knowledge of politics, but how do we explain the gap? This question is not merely important from a measurement standpoint (e.g., Mondak and Anderson 2004) but also has implications for our understanding of gendered political attitudes and behaviors. The gap can be reduced when controlling for a number of factors, but there remains a residual when measuring knowledge with the scale most widely used. This paper aims at providing insight on how we think not only about measuring something like “political knowledge” but also how we theorize gendered political behavior. We present a behavioral genetic analysis of sex differences in political knowledge using a genetically informative twin design to parse out the source of variation in knowledge. We do so predicated on a framework for thinking about gendered patterns in political behavior as well as findings from the existing literature on gender differences in the psychological orientation to politics. We believe our findings give us insight on what is wrong with current and seemingly gender-neutral measures of political knowledge

New Research on Gender in Political Psychology

This symposium consists of three papers written after a small mentoring conference, New Research on Gender in Political Psychology, which was held in New Brunswick, New Jersey, March 4-5, 2011. As junior scholars, we received a grant from the National Science Foundation (#SES-1014854) to organize a conference for the purposes of mentoring pretenure faculty and promoting scholarship on gender in political psychology. Each of the three articles in this symposium focuses on a different aspect of the conference

Gender Differences in Demographic and Health Characteristics of the Million Veteran Program Cohort

The Department of Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program (MVP) is the largest ongoing cohort program of its kind, with 654,903 enrollees as of June 2018. The objectives of this study were to examine gender differences in the MVP cohort with respect to response and enrollment rates; demographic, health, and health care characteristics; and prevalence of self-reported health conditions. The MVP Baseline Survey was completed by 415,694 veterans (8% women), providing self-report measures of demographic characteristics, health status, and medical history. Relative to men, women demonstrated a higher positive responder rate (23.0% vs. 16.0%), slightly higher enrollment rate (13.5% vs. 12.9%), and, among enrollees, a lower survey completion rate (59.7% vs. 63.8%). Women were younger, more racially diverse, had higher educational attainment, and were less likely to be married or cohabitating with a partner than men. Women were more likely to report good to excellent health status but poorer physical fitness, and less likely to report lifetime smoking and drinking than men. Compared with men, women veterans showed an increased prevalence of musculoskeletal conditions, thyroid problems, gastrointestinal conditions, migraine headaches, and mental health disorders, as well as a decreased prevalence of gout, cardiovascular diseases, high cholesterol, diabetes, and hearing problems. These results revealed some substantial gender differences in the research participation rates, demographic profile, health characteristics, and prevalence of health conditions for veterans in the MVP cohort. Findings highlight the need for tailoring recruitment efforts to ensure representation of the increasing women veteran population receiving care through the Veterans Health Administration