Advertising, Marketing & Stereotypes

From Stanford University News:

Since Schiebinger launched the Gendered Innovations project in the summer of 2009, the project has produced 14 case studies to demonstrate how applying sex and gender analysis to research studies has helped create new knowledge and technologies.

The project was initiated with start-up funding from Stanford's Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Schiebinger, a former director of the Clayman Institute, is the editor of the 2008 book, Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering.

All the project's peer-reviewed case studies can be found on its website, including:

• Stem Cells: Analyzing Sex
• Animal Research: Designing Health and Biomedical Research
• De-Gendering the Knee: Overemphasizing Sex Differences as a Problem
• Heart Disease in Women: Formulating Research Questions
• Pregnant Crash Test Dummies: Rethinking Standards and Reference Models
• Water: Participatory Research and Design

"The website is a resource for researchers," Schiebinger said. "It's globally accessible and freely available to anyone with an Internet connection.

An international cast of contributors

The Gendered Innovations project was developed through six international workshops. In 2011, the European Union joined the project, followed by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2012.

"The project was created through a unique international collaboration of scientists, engineers and gender experts," Schiebinger said.

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From The Atlantic:

PROBLEM: Few would argue that the objectification of women is a real thing -- and a real problem -- but as yet there's been no cognitive explanation for it in a literal sense. Do we really look at women differently than we do men, and are they actually objectified in the eye -- and brain -- of the beholder?

METHODOLOGY: Images of average, fully clothed individuals (read: no supermodels in bikinis) were quickly flashed before the eyes of participants. After each one, the participants would then be shown two side-by-side images that zoomed in on one, "sexual" aspect of the individual (for example, a woman's midriff) and asked to identify the version that hadn't been modified. The experiment was also reversed, so that participants first looked at a specific part and then had to identify it in the context of an entire body. The test was designed to clue researchers in on whether the participants were using global or local cognitive processing while looking at the images -- in other words, whether they perceived the individuals as a whole or as an assemblage of their various parts.

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From The Arizona Republic:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona acquired thousands of Pearce e-mails through a public-records request and included dozens of them in a legal motion to block a portion of the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month in a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice that the part of the law that requires law-enforcement officers to ask about a person's legal status in certain situations does not conflict with federal authority. Lower courts could issue a ruling on how and when that goes into effect as soon as today.

The e-mails from Pearce in the court documents include statements such as: "Can we maintain our social fabric as a nation with Spanish fighting English for dominance? ... It's like importing leper colonies and hope we don't catch leprosy. It's like importing thousands of Islamic jihadists and hope they adapt to the American Dream."

They also include unsupported statistics such as "9,000 people killed every year by illegal aliens," and "the illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two-and-a-half times that of non-illegal aliens."

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Read the e-mails from Russell Pearce

From CBS News:

A new study in the journal Organization Science finds that when managers have to explain their pay-raise decisions to employees, they give more money to men than they do to women -- even if the workers' performance is equal. 

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In the study, originally done for Emory University, 184 managers were given a set amount of money that they needed to distribute among employees with identical skills and responsibilities. Half of the managers were told they would need to justify their decisions to their employees, and half were told there would be no discussion afterwards.

Unfortunately, women can't overcome an initially low raise by negotiating because the corporate budget has already been spent. In many companies, each manager receives a budget for raises that is then divided among employees. All workers are notified at the same time (or over a very short time period) of their increases. Because every penny has already been allotted, there is no money left to give to someone who questions a small raise. Managers won't typically go to an employee with a higher raise and say, "Oops! Jane needs a few more bucks, so we're taking a percent off your raise and giving it to her!"

The only way a raise can go through at this point is for an exception to be granted. And that requires a lot of hard work on the part of the manager and (most likely) the manager's manager. HR and senior management must be convinced that this additional raise, outside of the spent budget, is worth the money. And managers, who are cognizant of their own reputation, will try to do this without stating that they made a mistake in allocating raise money.

From Slate:

From CNN:

From the Huffington Post:

But this wasn't just any excited mom-to-be. This was 37-year-old Marissa Mayer, the newly named CEO of Yahoo – obviously a huge achievement for anyone, but especially for a woman in the male-dominated tech industry. And she was about six months pregnant, to boot.

Exciting news – especially for Mayer and her husband, of course – but did it mean something for the rest of us, too? Was it a watershed moment in the perennial debate over whether women can "have it all," with the pendulum swinging happily in the positive direction?

Or was it, as some claimed in the inevitable back-and-forth on Twitter, actually a development that would increase pressure on other working moms, who might not have nearly the resources that Mayer does, in terms of wealth, power, talent and flexibility on the job?

Or was it even sexist to raise the question at all? Would anyone be saying anything if the new Yahoo CEO were an expectant father? No, went a frequent online thread: No one would even pay attention to that.

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From LiveScience:

From ABC News:

The author of the study, James Flynn, a New Zealand-based researcher known as an IQ testing expert, said that over the past century, women have lagged slightly behind men in IQ testing scores, at times by as much as five points. But now, Flynn said women have closed the gap and even inched ahead in this battle of the intelligent sexes.

“Over the last 100 years, everyone in the developing world has been gaining about three IQ points, but women have been gaining faster,” Flynn told ABC News. “This is the result of modernity. In every country where women have an equal chance of modernity, women have caught men [in IQ testing].”

Flynn has not yet published the results of his study, saving that for a book he will publish in September. But he told ABC News that he collected data from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Estonia and Argentina on scores on a standard IQ test, called the Raven test. Each country tested at least 500 men and 500 women, most between the ages of 15 and 18, Flynn said.

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