Work-to-family conflict and firm performance of women entrepreneurs: Roles of work-related emotional exhaustion and competitive hostility

When entrepreneurs suffer from work-to-family conflict, it can affect firm performance. This article considers how emotional exhaustion experienced in the course of running a business mediates this link and how beliefs about competitive hostility invigorate that effect. Using survey data collected from 200 women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia, a country marked by culturally traditional gender role expectations, the empirical findings show that a sense of being emotionally overextended, due to the demands of running a firm, creates a conduit for the negative interference of the family upon the firm. This escalates into diminished firm performance. The results also demonstrate that this conduit is particularly prominent when entrepreneurs feel more threatened by hostile market environments. For entrepreneurship scholarship and practice, this article establishes two notable factors; a feeling of being ‘worn out’ by the business and adverse competitive markets. These factors clarify the complex link between work-induced family strain and business performance for women entrepreneurs, who might be particularly challenged when balancing time demands in gender-discriminatory environments.

A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Gender Role Expectations in George Gissing’s the Odd Women

George Gissing’s The Odd Women is an engrossing study of gender role expectations in the Victorian society on the cusp of the twentieth century. It is an examination of Nineteenth century discourses on Victorian gender ideology. The novel charts and explores the life trajectories of the female protagonists within the novel. This research paper has attempted to explicate the dynamics of gender role expectations through the application of a modern theoretical framework of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to assess how the discourses of the period inform Gissing’s narrative. The research findings suggest that the perceptions of gender in a period are directly proportionate to the norms championed through the dominant discourses. The discourses are intricately woven within the episteme of the period under analysis and a conscious review of the constitutive elements of these discursive practices reveals possibilities of change for the future through arming research investigators with insights that account for gender construction in a given period.

Gender Role Expectations in the Context of Pain: What is the Role of Socioeconomic Status?

Chronic pain has a significant impact on the overall population but does not impact all people equally. More vulnerable groups, such as women or individuals with a lower socioeconomic status (SES) revealed a higher burden of chronic pain. Gender role expectations and similar conceptualizations related to SES do not fully explain the differences in pain experiences and assessments with the literature showing incongruent results. Thus, intersectionality emerges as a valuable tool to promote the knowledge of health inequalities, by examining how multiple psychosocial factors interact to shape and influence human experience. This study aims to understand how socioeconomic status (SES) influences gender role expectations in the context of chronic pain, i.e., whether gender role expectations are different for women and men from various SES. Two-hundred and twenty-two adults (56.6% women), with an average age of 37.4 years ( SD = 14.1) were asked to imagine a (wo)men of low/medium/high SES and to imagine that persons pain. An experimental design was used to investigate the influence of an imagined persons SES on gender role expectations regarding: (a) sensitivity; (b) tolerance; and (c) willingness to express pain. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) concluded that there was a triple interaction effect between sex and SES of the person imagined and participants sex on pain tolerance, but not on sensitivity or willingness to express pain. Multiple comparison tests revealed that female tend to perceive people from lower SES as more tolerant to pain, independently of their sex, since they imagined women of medium SES and men of low SES with greater pain tolerance than imagined women and men of high SES, respectively. In opposition, male participants imagined women of every SES with the same level of pain tolerance, as well as all men with the same level of pain tolerance. However, male participants attributed different levels of pain tolerance to imagined people in the high SES condition, where the imagined woman was perceived as more tolerant of pain. These findings allow us to better understand the influence of SES on gender role expectations in the context of chronic pain.

Gender and Bullying

The field of bullying research initially paid minimal attention to the influences of gender role expectations (masculinity, femininity, and gender role conformity), as well as heteronormativity, cisnormativity, homophobia, and transphobia in understanding the phenomenon. This has shifted since the late 2000s, when more research emerged that analyzes gender as an influential factor for understanding bullying dynamics in schools. More recent studies have focused on LGBTQ youth, issues of disability, and racialized identities, as well as the impacts of online interactions. When examining gender and bullying, it is important to also examine related forms of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, dating violence, and other forms of sexual and violent assault such as transphobic violence and murder. In order to more effectively support schools and professionals working to reduce bullying, there must be a deeper understanding of what is currently known about gender and bullying, what works to reduce it in schools, and what still needs more attention in the research literature.

Emotion and Gender Typicality Cue Sexual Orientation Differently in Women and Men

Heterosexual individuals tend to look and act more typical for their gender compared to gay and lesbian individuals, and people use this information to infer sexual orientation. Consistent with stereotypes associating happy expressions with femininity, previous work found that gay men displayed more happiness than straight men—a difference that perceivers used, independent of gender typicality, to judge sexual orientation. Here, we extended this to judgments of women’s sexual orientation. Like the gender-inversion stereotypes applied to men, participants perceived women’s faces manipulated to look angry as more likely to be lesbians; however, emotional expressions largely did not distinguish the faces of actual lesbian and straight women. Compared to men’s faces, women’s faces varied less in their emotional expression (appearing invariably positive) but varied more in gender typicality. These differences align with gender role expectations requiring the expression of positive emotion by women and prohibiting the expression of femininity by men. More important, greater variance within gender typicality and emotion facilitates their respective utility for distinguishing sexual orientation from facial appearance. These findings thus provide the first evidence for contrasting cues to women’s and men’s sexual orientation and suggest that gender norms may uniquely shape how men and women reveal their sexual orientation.

The Ambiguity of Perinatal Loss: A Dual-Process Approach to Grief Counseling

Perinatal loss, or the death of a child shortly before or after birth, is an under-researched area of bereavement associated with high levels of complicated and disenfranchised grief. The authors explore how a dual process model of coping with bereavement can provide a unique conceptual framework for understanding counseling processes with parents experiencing perinatal loss. A brief overview of perinatal loss is provided to contextualize the presenting issue. Concepts and clinical practices are then examined in detail related to death competence, empathic validation, autonomy support, complicated grief, disenfranchised grief, and variations in gender role expectations when coping with bereavement. Finally, a clinical case study on perinatal loss is used to conceptualize a dual-process-based approach to couples work in practice, and a prospective research study is outlined.