Affirmative Action Policies in Academic Job Advertisements: Do They Facilitate or Hinder Gender Discrimination in Hiring Processes for Professorships?

Evidence of female-favoring hiring preferences for assistant professorships suggests that universities can implement affirmative action programs successfully. However, research on the role of applicant gender and the actual use of affirmative action policies in hiring processes for high-level professorships remain scarce. A web-based experiment with 481 economic university members assessed whether evaluators perceived a female applicant as less qualified than a male applicant for an associate professorship position when the job advertisement highlighted the university’s commitment to affirmative action (gender-based preferential selection) but not when it solely highlighted its commitment to excellence (non-gender-based selection). Contrary to previous experimental findings that affirmative action would adversely affect female applicants, evaluators perceived the female applicant as more hirable and ranked her first for the job significantly more often than the male candidate. Furthermore, male evaluators had a stronger preference for the female candidate in the gender-based condition than in the non-gender-based condition and a stronger preference for the male candidate in the non-gender-based condition than in the gender-based condition. Overall, the results provide evidence that gender-based preferential selection policies can evoke their intended effect to bring highly qualified women to high-level professorships, especially when being evaluated by non-beneficiaries of these policies, such as men.

The Effects of “Live,” Authentic, and Emotional Instagram Images on Congressional Candidate Evaluations

This study examines how Instagram’s design and norms influence expectations for political imagery and, subsequently, the effects of these images on electability, vote likelihood, and candidate evaluations. Using the Elaboration Likelihood Model, we propose three norms of Instagram that likely function as heuristic cues and affect the reception of political visual communication on the platform: liveness, authenticity, and emotionality. We experimentally test these visual features on Congressional candidate images, finding some evidence that live, authentic, and emotional images positively influence vote likelihood but negatively impact electability. Results also indicate that live, authentic, and emotional images either have no or negative effects on female candidate evaluations or have no or positive effects on male candidate evaluations.

The Contingent Effects of Sexism in Primary Elections

Although the landscape for female candidates in U.S. politics has improved, research continues to find that many voters possess sexist attitudes. We rely on a standard political communication framework to help reconcile sexism in the electorate with increasingly favorable outcomes for women in primary elections. Based on two national survey experiments, we first demonstrate that in the absence of gendered campaign rhetoric, sexism is a weak predictor of support for female candidates on both sides of the political aisle. We then show, however, that when a male candidate attempts to activate sexism among voters by attacking a female opponent, gender attitudes become more salient—but not to the woman’s disadvantage. In a Democratic primary, gendered attacks backfire and lead to a significant boost in support for the female candidate. On the Republican side, a male candidate does not face the same backlash, but the attacks do very little to depress his female opponent’s support. While the persistence of hostile attitudes toward women has slowed the march toward gender equality in society, our experimental results suggest that sexism exerts only contingent effects in primary elections and not systematically to female candidates’ detriment.

A Founding Penalty: Evidence from an Audit Study on Gender, Entrepreneurship, and Future Employment

There is both widespread interest in encouraging entrepreneurship and universal recognition that the vast majority of these founders will fail, which raises an important unanswered question: What happens to ex-founders when they apply for jobs? Whereas existing research has identified many factors that facilitate movement out of an established organization and into entrepreneurship, far less attention has been devoted to understanding what transpires during the return journey—most notably, how employers evaluate entrepreneurial experience at the point of hire. We propose that employers penalize job candidates with a history of founding a new venture because they believe them to be worse fits and less committed employees than comparable candidates without founding experience. We further predict that the discount for having been an entrepreneur will diminish when other stereotypes about the candidate, particularly those based on gender, will contradict the negative beliefs about ex-founders. We test our proposition using a résumé-based audit and an experimental survey. The audit reveals that founding significantly reduces the likelihood that an employer interviews a male candidate, but there is no comparable penalty for female ex-founders. The experimental survey confirms the gendered nature of the founding penalty and provides evidence that it results from employers’ concerns that founders are less committed and worse organizational fits than nonfounders. Critically, the survey also indicates that these concerns are mitigated for women, helping to explain why they suffer no equivalent founding penalty.

Gender and policy persuasion

Are policy arguments more or less persuasive when they are made by female politicians? Using a diverse sample of American respondents, we conduct a survey experiment which randomly varies the gender associated with two co-partisan candidates across four policy debates. We find strong effects contingent on respondent partisanship and gender, most notably on the issue of access to birth control. On this issue, regardless of the candidate's stance, Democratic respondents, particularly Democratic men, are much more likely to agree with the female candidate. Conversely, Republican respondents, particularly Republican women, are much more likely to agree with the male candidate. We discuss the implications of our findings for the meaning of gender as a heuristic in a highly partisan environment.

You seem like a great candidate, but…: race and gender attitudes and the 2020 democratic primary

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary unfolded in a context with significant attention to issues of racial and gender inequality and identity. The field began as an historically diverse one but a white male candidate received the party's endorsement. Did the race and gender attitudes of Democratic primary and caucus participants play a role in shaping the pool of candidates? Using a survey of self-identified Democrats, this study provides evidence that racial resentment, hostile sexism, and modern sexism enhanced the assessments on several evaluative criteria of the white male candidate, while depressing the assessment of the Black woman candidate. These relationships are driven primarily by white respondents. These findings add to our understanding of how race and gender attitudes affect the electoral process well before the general election, particularly by shaping the ultimate choice of candidates in that contest.

Not in His Image: The Moderating Effect of Gender on Religious Appeals

Religious appeals have been part and parcel of campaign strategy for decades. Most often, however, these appeals to have come from men, but little is known about howwomenwould fare using religious appeals on the campaign trail. To remedy this, we used an experimental design to examine voter reaction to religious appeals from a female and a male candidate competing for an open United States Senate seat. We find that women's use of religious appeals is governed by the dynamics of tokenism — reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes and serving to reduce voter support of the female candidate. This suggests that women must be careful in using a key campaign tool traditionally employed by men, and that this may affect the extent to which female candidates can effectively shape voter perceptions on the campaign trail.

Framing Gender on the Campaign Trail: Female Gubernatorial Candidates and the Press

Daily newspaper reporters in 1998 treated female and male gubernatorial candidates equitably in terms of the quantity of coverage. However, newspaper readers were more likely to read about a female candidate's personal traits, such as her appearance or personality, than those of a male candidate. By contrast, they were more likely to read about a male candidate's stand or record on public policy issues than about a female candidate's. Some of these differences disappeared after examining campaigns individually. Results indicate that differences in coverage were due to stories written by male reporters who covered gubernatorial campaigns.

Aglokreon of Torone

In the sepulchral inscription IG ii2. 10453 we are offered Άγλώκρ[ιτος] Τορωνα[ος]. The name Aglokritos, however, cannot stand, for there is room only for a name with a maximum of nine letters. The two extant transcriptions by George Finlay appear to offer two additional letters (AT/IA) at the end of each line, letters which were read by no-one else, Koumanoudes included. It is suggested in this article that Finlay failed to maintain his customary accuracy in making his sketches, and that we should place no faith in the supposed letters AT/IA at the right-hand edge of the stone. We believe that the only nine-lettered male candidate—the female name Aglokrate being less likely than the expected, but ten-lettered Aglokrateia—is Aglokreon.