Psychology Research

In all industrialized nations, women on average earn less money and attain lower occupational status than men do.  This is true across the board, among blue-collar and white-collar workers and professionals, and in capitalist, socialist, and communist economies.  Why? The sex difference in earnings is one of the central concerns of economics and sociology.  Economists and sociologists identify three different parts to the total difference in earnings between men and women.  First, there is the difference in what they call “human capital” – education, job skills, training, and other individual traits that affect productivity and job performance.  Second, sex differences in earnings can be due to occupational segregation by sex – the fact that men and women tend to occupy different jobs.  Men tend to occupy “blue-collar” jobs (manufacturing, construction, truck driving), while women tend to occupy “pink-collar” jobs (secretarial, nursing, teaching).  Third, the sex difference in earnings can be due to sex discrimination, where employers pay equally qualified men and women doing the same job differently. To the extent that the sex gap in pay is due to differences in human capital and productivity, it is considered to be fair by most social scientists.  To the extent that the sex gap in pay results from the existence of blue- and pink-collar jobs, then paying all workers in a given occupation equally will not close the total sex difference in earnings.  Paying the same wages to male and female truck drivers and to male and female secretaries will not close the sex gap in pay if truck drivers make more than secretaries and most truck drivers are male and most secretaries are female.  The existence of occupational sex segration thus requires consideration of “comparable worth.” Being deeply wedded to the traditional social sciences and completely oblivious to evolutionary psychology, most economists and sociologists assume that men and women are on the whole identical in their preferences, values, and desires.  They therefore assume that any remaining sex difference in earnings that is not due to sex differences in human capital or sex segragation on the job must be due to employer discrimination.  The existence of discrimination, however, must always be inferred from statistical evidence and cannot be directly observed.  Social scientists are not likely to witness an employer telling the employees, “I’m paying you more because you are a man, and I’m paying you less because you are a woman.”  Nor are employers likely to admit to such a practice if they indeed engaged in it. The conclusion that there is sex discriminaton by employers crucially depends on the assumption that men and women are on the whole identical, except in their amount of human capital (eduction, job experience, skills) and the jobs that they hold.  If, on the other hand, men and women with the same amount of human capital and in the same jobs are nonetheless inherently and fundamentally different in ways that affect their earnings, for instance, in their preference and desire for earning money, then discrimination becomes unnecessary to explain the sex gap in pay.  If men and women are different in internal preferences and dispositions, such as their desire and drive to earn money, then no external factors, such as employer discrimination or a “glass ceiling,” becomes necessary to explain the sex difference in earnings. In my next post, I will explain how evolutionary psychology can explain sex gap in pay without resorting to employer discrimination. © 2008 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

by André Aleman, Marte Swart The facial expression of contempt has been regarded to communicate feelings of moral superiority. Contempt is an emotion that is closely related to disgust, but in contrast to disgust, contempt is inherently interpersonal and hierarchical. The aim of this study was twofold. First, to investigate the hypothesis of preferential amygdala responses to contempt expressions versus disgust. Second, to investigate whether, at a neural level, men would respond stronger to biological signals of interpersonal superiority (e.g., contempt) than women. We performed an experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in which participants watched facial expressions of contempt and disgust in addition to neutral expressions. The faces were presented as distractors in an oddball task in which participants had to react to one target face. Facial expressions of contempt and disgust activated a network of brain regions, including prefrontal areas (superior, middle and medial prefrontal gyrus), anterior cingulate, insula, amygdala, parietal cortex, fusiform gyrus, occipital cortex, putamen and thalamus. Contemptuous faces did not elicit stronger amygdala activation than did disgusted expressions. To limit the number of statistical comparisons, we confined our analyses of sex differences to the frontal and temporal lobes. Men displayed stronger brain activation than women to facial expressions of contempt in the medial frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. Conversely, women showed stronger neural responses than men to facial expressions of disgust. In addition, the effect of stimulus sex differed for men versus women. Specifically, women showed stronger responses to male contemptuous faces (as compared to female expressions), in the insula and middle frontal gyrus. Contempt has been conceptualized as signaling perceived moral violations of social hierarchy, whereas disgust would signal violations of physical purity. Thus, our results suggest a neural basis for sex differences in moral sensitivity regarding hierarchy on the one hand and physical purity on the other.

In the past couple of weeks I have been researching gender differences in visuo-spatial abilities because I wanted to create a fun experiment for our research & methodology course. The idea came from a recent incident in which my (fairly new) car, perfectly still and parked on an wide entry road to a private car park was scratched by a runaway vehicle. With 14 years no claim discount from my insurance, you can imagine how annoyed i was when i discovered the damage on a sunday morning!

As the area were I live is usually quiet and frequented mainly by locals, for a few days I have been on the lookout to try to detect the useless driver who caused the damage. Even if I’m still looking, this was an opportunity to observe people manouvering their vehicles and struggle with parking in tight spaces. Furthermore, confirming an old italian say “Donna al volante, pericolo costante!” which best translates as “Women driving are a constant danger”, it was amusing to observe how difficult many female drivers were making what I considered fairly simple manouvres.

I know it is sexist and I know that I will attract criticisms, but let’s start with a short clip…

[myspace]http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=37889811[/myspace]

Now that you laughed about this extreme case, think about your friends and consider these two questions:

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After the lighter intro, let’s have a look at some of the published material to see what is the truth about gender difference in visuo-aptial abilities.

Informally, people believe that men and women think differently and have different abilities. These differences are exacerbated by books such as John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Deborah Tannen also published extensively to address apparent gender differences in interaction and communication between genders (i.e. You just don’t understand). Another popular book is Sex on the Brain by Deborah Blum and published in 1997 in which she is exploring the scientific evidence behind gender differences.The fact remains that differences in practical abilities such as map reading, navigation and orientation as well as driving are commonly featuring in popular culture, magazines and jokes.

Such interest in sex difference raises some interesting questions and folk-facts such as the above about women and driving which inspired this post.

Some differences have been substantiated in the literature in psychology and neuroscience. For example women are consistently showed to be better at performing tasks involving verbal abilities (Hyde & Linn, 1988, Kimura 2000, 2002), however the data regarding visuo-spatial abilities is more controversial and research provided contrasting results.