Women's Studies

This chapter considers problems encountered by women and minority groups in pursuing academic careers. A major problem is that women and minorities are underrepresented in academia.To solve this problem, author proposes a direct, personal plan that enlists the efforts of those who are already in academia.

Development continues throughout the life span. This basic precept of the life-span perspective apparently has not penetrated the discipline judging from the undergraduate psychology curriculum. In consequence of this missing concept, what often passes for a knowledge base on human behavior is, in actuality, an age-specific representation. Courses on the psychology of gender are no exception. Most textbooks designed for these courses rarely consider how gender issues are played out in later life.

After providing an outline of the contents of this book, the chapter considers recent history relevant to the debate on women in science. It discusses the evidence-based grounds for a biologically based argument in a number of the essays in this volume. The chapter describes the need for this volume. The essays in this volume show that the pattern of sex differences is much more nuanced than their depiction in the popular media (e.g., male=right brain; female=left brain).

Society is becoming increasingly scientific, technological, and knowledge-based, depending on the utilization and maximization of human talent and potential (Friedman, 2005). A nation's strength, both economically and civically, is now linked to what it can call forth from the minds of its citizens. Consequently, much attention is being focused on strategies for increasing the number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals produced in the United States and possible untapped pools of talent.

There are interesting differences between the average male and female mind. In using the word average, I am from the outset recognizing that such differences may have little to say about individuals. In addition, the differences are subtle and are to do with the relative proportions of different drives in the typical male and female mind. The field of sex differences in psychology in the 1960s and 1970s was so conflict-ridden as to make an open-minded debate about any potential role of biology contributing to psychological sex differences impossible.

Performed a content analysis on 1,733 TV commercials shown on 3 Canadian TV networks during an 8-wk period in the spring of 1983. Data were coded in terms of voice-overs, central characters, product type, locale, and the appearance of elderly and visible minority characters. Results indicate that men accounted for over 88% of voice-overs. For those commercials having an identifiable central character, 35% were female. Of these, 54% were supported by a male voice-over.

Examined to what extent young and elderly populations agreed in their representation of semantic categories. 90 elderly (77 women, 13 men, mean age 71.8 yrs) and 90 young (74 women, 16 men, mean age 27.3 yrs) Ss wrote down the first 4 associations evoked by each of 30 semantic categories. Chi-square tests of association revealed that elderly and young Ss differed in their representation of most of the categories. As such, the norms generated by the data may be useful in future research in cognitive growth and regression.

Preferential hiring policies are often based on the erroneous assumption that if a designated group is not represented in an occupation or profession in the same proportion as it is represented in the population, then negative discrimination has taken place. In the school of discrimination-logic, no alternative explanations are considered. Not only is it asserted that the white male majority keeps women out by deliberate exclusion, but also by creating a climate in which women are uncomfortable.

By the early 1990s, public concern in Europe over discrimination against women and minority groups had grown manifestly. This confronted psychologists with the problem of the disproportionate representation of various subgroups in certain kinds of jobs. In this article, the authors deal with the major upheaval in the legal issues that presently shape the selection practices in Europe and the US. Then they turn the attention to the problem of indirect discrimination and the discussion on the validity of some of the most representative assessment devices used in selection.

Several recent findings support the notion that changes in the environment can be implicitly represented by the visual system. S. R. Mitroff, D. J. Simons, and S. L. Franconeri (see record 2002-15293-003) challenged this view and proposed alternative interpretations based on explicit strategies. Across 4 experiments, the current study finds no empirical support for such alternative proposals. Experiment 1 shows that subjects do not rely on unchanged items when locating an unaware change.