Gender quotas: Moral Credentialling

Moral credentialling (Monin & Miller, 2001) is a phenomenon where individuals are more likely to be discriminatory if they have previously proved to their own satisfaction that they are not prejudiced. For example, giving people the chance to endorse the election of Barack Obama as US President led to their subsequently describing a job as […]

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Gender quotas: Threat

Integrated Threat theory (Stephan & Stephan, 2000) states that a dominant group (men in this instance) will oppose policies such as gender quotas that cause them to feel threatened. Women who are quota beneficiaries pose realistic threats because they are seen as competition for jobs, promotions, and potential income, and quota policies themselves pose a […]

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Gender quotas: Collective Action

Another issue is the effect of quotas on collective action. According to Social Identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) people have a sense of belonging to distinct social groups. The ability for individuals to move between different groups depends on the permeability of the group boundaries (is it easy to move into the higher status […]

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Gender quotas: System Justification

Institutional changes via quotas may also hasten the narrowing of the workplace gender gap due to system justification (Jost & Banaji, 1994) whereby people are motivated to defend the status quo regardless of whether it is unfair or illegitimate. Therefore, it follows that if the status quo becomes inclusive of females in high-status roles, people […]

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Gender quotas: gender roles

Although the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) made it unlawful to purposefully discriminate against women, imbalances may arise from hiring and promotion decisions unconsciously based on stereotypes about inherent differences between men and women’s traits and abilities. These stereotypes create gender roles which prescribe types of work that men and women are suitable for. Role Incongruity […]

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Calls for gender quotas

Gender quotas are the requirement that women should form a particular percentage of the sample of individuals under consideration: organisations or businesses must employ a certain percentage of female employees, or appoint a certain number of women on their board of directors; political parties must ensure that a proportion of their candidates are women, and […]

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Boycotting sexist music

Happy New Year! Here’s an interesting question that I think may have a range of opinions – should we boycott music/artisits that we deem to have sexist music videos and sexist language? So many songs include sexist lyrics and videos (mostly sexually objectifying women).  However… they are usually very catchy tunes.  Is it possible to […]

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Welsh

I was having a chat with a lecturer recently – we discussed how terrifyingly sad and frustrating it is when languages begin to die out – especially when it’s yours.  Language seems to make your identity, somehow.   People may scoff at my love for Wales.  My little island in the very North West.  My little […]

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Anxiety

“Sometimes, anxiety doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you.  You can’t change your personality, and why would you want to?  You’re such a lovely girl.” I recently realised that there are many Facebook communities/pages for people with mental health issues, each one specific to an issue, such as anxiety or depression (you may […]

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