Gender fluidity across the world: a Multilevel Item Response Theory approach

The concept of gender identity refers to the intrinsic self-identification of personal femaleness and maleness. Starting from 1970s, in the framework of gender studies, a theoretical and conceptual demarcation between sex and gender has been proposed. The term “gender” starts being referred to social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities, not to the state of being male or female. Recent studies on gender identity suggest that the binary notion of gender identity is changing, recognizing that there are different views on how gender may be performed or experienced. The purpose of our research is to provide accounts of gender code transformation around the world and identify differences in feelings, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors associated with gender across different identity profiles. Using a web-based survey, 1,600 respondents were recruited by a snowball sampling procedure. Based on the intersections of the responses given by participants on three basic dimensions (biological sex, gender self-identification and sexual orientation) the individuals have been categorized into nine groups. To comply with the aims of this study, a two-parameter Multilevel Item Response Theory model has been employed as an appropriate statistical tool for considering both person and item effects on the response data and assessing the effect of group membership on the overall variability.     

Workplace Dignity: Communicating Inherent,Earned, and Remediated Dignity

Extant research on dignity at work has revealed conditions that contribute to indignity, employees’ responses to dignity threats, and ways in which employees’ inherent dignity is undermined. But while dignity – and specifically indignity – is theorized as a phenomenon subjectively experienced and judged by individuals, little research has privileged workers’ own perspectives. In this study, working adults reveal how they personally experience and understand meanings of dignity at work. I describe three core components of workplace dignity and the communicative exchanges through which dignity desires commonly are affirmed or denied: inherent dignity as recognized by respectful interaction, earned dignity as recognized by messages of competence and contribution, and remediated dignity as recognized by social interactions and organizational practices that conceal the instrumental and unequal nature of work. Based on theoretical insights drawn from examining the relationships between these components, I argue that workplace dignity is a phenomenon theoretically distinct from human dignity.     

Legal Protection From Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation: Findings From Litigation

Since 1964 with the enactment of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the courts have held that although Title VII prohibits discrimination because of sex, sex has been construed to mean gender, but gender and sexual orientation are different. Traditionally sexual discrimination has been interpreted to protect women in male/female encounters. Thus protection for homosexuals based on sexual orientation has not been covered. However, there are some interesting aspects to the concept of discrimination due to sexual orientation, including defining same-sex harassment as being harassment, equal opportunity harassment, and sexual stereotypes. In addition, how homosexuals may be protected under state laws, unions, company policy, and the constitution is discussed as well as protection for public sector employees. An analysis of 98 litigated cases alleging discrimination based on same sex or sexual orientation harassment led to the development of a logit model predicting future case outcomes based on case characteristics. These are type of harassment, physical contact, type of employees, and whether there was equal opportunity harassment. Implications from the study are that the issues of protection from discrimination are complex and one cannot necessarily assume that this type of discrimination is not protected. Recommendations for more effective managerial actions are provided.     

Gender identity inclusion in the workplace: broadening diversity management research and practice through the case of transgender employees in the UK

Based on 14 in-depth interviews, this paper explores the unique workplace experiences of transgender individuals in the UK employment context. The paper identifies gender identity diversity as a key blind spot in HRM and diversity management research and practice. The findings reveal the range of workplace challenges experienced by transgender employees. Major findings are that discriminatory effects are often occupation- and industry-specific; transition is a period where many transgender workers suffer due to lack of proper organisational support; and expertise deficits exist in supporting and accommodating transgender employees' needs. In unpacking these experiences, the paper demonstrates the distinctive dimensions of challenges faced by transgender employees, revealing the need for conceptually expanding how we frame diversity and diversity management. Our findings identify the necessity for an emic approach not only to researching diversity but also to devising organisational diversity strategies. The paper provides recommendations for HRM policy and practice in order to develop a more sophisticated approach to achieving inclusion.     

The Economy and Suicide:

A bstract . The suicide rate for the U.S.A. for the period of 1940–84 was posited to be the consequence of the interplay of economic and social variables. The single equation regression was applied to the suicide rates for the total population and for the four sex by race social groups. The results indicated that: (1) suicide rates did not increase during the economic booms and busts as predicted by Durkheim , and the change depended upon the social groups involved; (2) the unemployment rate had significant detrimental impact only on the white male suicide rate; (3) the female labor force participation rate had beneficial impact on both the white and non-white female suicide rates; (4) the divorce rate was the only variable that had a consistent impact for all social groups; and (5) membership in the Catholic Church had a positive association with the suicide rates.     

Perceived superiority of female condoms among female sex workers in India

• This study emphasizes the importance of benefit orientation and the competitive advantage of benefits accrued from an improved social product vis‐à‐vis a current social product as components of a social marketing strategy in order to improve the effectiveness of behaviour change attempts. The views towards female and male condoms of 1939 female sex workers (FSWs) from nine cities in five states of India were investigated. FSWs perceived better peer and male client support, and a more attractive marketing strategy for female condoms over male condoms and thus were likely to use female condoms.

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Chinese managers' career success networks: the impact of key tie characteristics on structure and interaction practices

Structured personal interviews were conducted with 105 senior and mid-level Chinese male and female managers, in which each respondent provided information about their career success network (CSN) ties. Using this data, we tested hypotheses on: (1) the age composition of Chinese managers' CSNs; (2) the face-to-face interaction practices within Chinese managers' CSNs; and (3) the roles of tie sex composition and tie content (position-centred versus person-centred ties) in influencing the age composition of and interaction practices within Chinese managers' CSNs. The results demonstrated that both Chinese male and female managers, while generally preferring to form CSN ties with individuals who are older than themselves, are relatively more reluctant to include middle-aged or elder women in their CSN. The age of those included in the respondents' CSN was also influenced by tie content and whether the tie spans the organizational boundary. With respect to interaction practices within the CSN, tie content moderated the relationship between tie sex composition and interaction practice. Female managers' person-centred ties with men had significantly lower levels of interaction outside the workplace than person-centred ties composed of members of the same-sex. However, this difference was not exhibited in the case of position-centred ties. Interestingly, the reluctance to socialize with the opposite-sex exhibited by female managers did not appear to be shared by their male counterparts. The implications of these results for career success in China are discussed.     

Economies of Desire: Sexuality and the Sex Industry in the 21st Century

New data from sex surveys confirm that demand for commercial sex is based on permanent disparities between male and female desire, and is therefore ineradicable. Demand and supply are growing, facilitated by economic growth, the Internet, globalisation and changing sexual attitudes. A key objection to the sex industry is that pornography, lap dancing and prostitution promote rape and other kinds of violence against women. However, the evidence contradicts this contention. The commercial sex industry is impervious to prohibitions and cannot be eliminated. Laws which constrain sellers of sexual services or criminalise purchasers are not evidence‐based, and are bound to fail, wasting public resources.     

外资企业员工的压力应对策略探索性研究

通过问卷调研对在华的357位外资企业知识型员工的压力应对策略进行了探索性实证研究。通过因素分析发现，员工主要采用四种应对策略：积极应对、消极回避、社会支持和默默承受。此外，性别、职位、服务年限以及岗位对于员工的应对策略选择产生显著影响：（1）性别上，女性员工比男性员工较多地运用“社会支持”策略；（2）职位上，基层员工更喜爱“社会支持”和“默默承受”，而中层管理者则偏爱积极应对；（3）服务年限上，新员工喜爱积极应对，而老员工喜爱消极回避；（4）岗位上，非线性员工比线性员工更喜爱社会支持。     

LGBTQs in the city, queering urban space

Since the 1960s, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) culture has developed in big cities and metropolises everywhere (not only in the West, but also in Asia, Latin America and indeed Africa). This essay examines how cities provide the spatial conditions necessary for the formation of such emancipatory movements based on identity politics and strategies which transcend binary gender dualism. The starting point of this investigation is my thesis that only urban life enables LGBTQ individuals to live their lives fully, realize their (sexual) identities, and furthermore organize themselves collectively, become publicly visible, and appropriate urban, societal and political spaces.     

Relational Comparison and LGBTQ Activism in European Cities

This article examines the role of city twinning as a device for conducting transnational activism around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) politics. It focuses on the city of Leiden in the Netherlands, examining how the city's twinning links with the cities of Torun in Poland and Oxford in the UK have been used at different times as a device to mobilize transnational solidarities with LGBTQ people outside of the Netherlands. Drawing on qualitative semi‐structured interviews with LGBTQ activists in Leiden as part of a wider study of transnational LGBTQ activism in Europe, I seek to understand how twinning links are used to forge sustainable solidarities both across national boundaries and within Leiden. I suggest that relational comparisons about the status and treatment of sexual dissidents in Leiden and its twin cities are central to the production of these solidarities. While twinning has significant potential as a device for the production of sustainable transnational LGBTQ activism, I also suggest that it can be used to advance problematic geo‐temporalities about the relative ‘progressiveness’ or ‘backwardness’ of LGBTQ politics in specific cities.     

Bridging “quality” and “quantity” in the study of criminal action

This article summarises the main findings of a study on the narrative construction of deviant actions which focused both on the contents and the structures of the narrative accounts provided by criminals. The research was conducted by collecting narrative interviews. These involved 34 individuals detained in two penal institutions in Rome. These accounts are typically constructed in a non-investigative context. Their exploration is mainly qualitative, but our aim here concern the quantitative sight of qualitative data and viceversa. The project was focused to find if there are any differences in the narrative accounts provided by different offenders, classified according to the type of crime they committed and their experience in the area of deviance. All interviews were analysed using a qualitative data analysis software and taking the “Evaluation model” as a reference. Participants were divided into three groups according to their criminal experience and into four groups according to the crime they committed. The results show that there are important differences in the way a crime is reconstructed by offenders with different criminal history. The paper also proposes solutions and innovative strategies to deal with quantification and qualitative data.     

A mixed-mode sensitive research on cannabis use and sexual addiction: improving self-reporting by means of indirect questioning techniques

In this article, we describe the methods employed and the results obtained from a mixed-mode “sensitive research” conducted in Spain to estimate certain aspects concerning patterns of cannabis consumption and sexual addiction among university students. Three different data-collection methods are considered and compared: direct questioning, randomized response technique and item sum technique. It is shown that posing direct questions to obtain sensitive data produces significantly lower estimates of the surveyed characteristics than do indirect questioning methods. From the analysis, it emerges that male students seem to be more affected by sex addiction than female students while for cannabis consumption there is no evidence of a predominant gender effect.     

Compulsory work-focused interviews for inactive benefit claimants: an evaluation of the British ONE pilots

Using administrative panel data on individuals, we evaluate the effect of compulsory work-focused interviews (CWFI) on the probability of leaving social security benefit for the two main recipient groups of out-of-work benefits outside the unemployed: lone parents and the sick or disabled. CWFI for these groups were first introduced for new benefit claimants in Britain under the ONE programme in a limited number of benefit districts, enabling us to identify the policy effect. Using a difference-in-differences procedure, we find little evidence to suggest that CWFI increases labour market participation amongst inactive benefit claimants.     

Senior female international managers: empirical evidence from Western Europe

Abstract This paper is an assessment of the international career transitions made by senior female managers in Western Europe. The perspective explored is that of currently employed senior female managers in a wide range of companies, who have made at least one international career move. The article is based on data collected from interviews with fifty senior female international managers. The voices of the female managers illustrate difficulties they encounter in a 'man's world', and confirm that there is still much improvement to be made in order to accommodate and entice more women to senior management assignments. The study, for the first time, assesses an exclusively senior sample of female international managers in Western Europe. Previous studies have established that, throughout Europe, women's promotion into senior domestic management positions has been very slow, despite legislative changes, including the European Union's social protocol, to enforce issues related to equal opportunity such as equal pay and measures against sex discrimination (Davidson and Cooper, 1993). This article examines a number of explanations from the relevant literature and analyses the empirical data collected from the fifty interviewees in order to develop an understanding of senior female international career progressions in Europe. From the data, a model of the typical senior female international path was developed (Linehan, 2000). This research is particularly relevant, as existing European studies have not specifically addressed issues pertaining to senior female international managers.     

Listen carefully: transgender voices in the workplace

Abstract

We find that only 17% of FTSE 100 company websites refer directly to transgender (‘trans’) individuals, illustrating the extent to which trans voices are unheard in the workplace. We propose that these voices are missing for a number of reasons: voluntary silence to protect oneself from adverse circumstances; the subsumption of trans voices within the larger ‘LGBT’ community; assimilation, wherein many trans voices become affiliated with those of their post-transition gender; multiple trans voices arising from diversity within the transgender community; and limited access to voice mechanisms for transgender employees. We identify the negative implications of being unheard for individual trans employees, for organizational outcomes, and for business and management scholarship, and propose ways in which organizations can listen more carefully to trans voices. Finally, we introduce an agenda for future research that tests the applicability of the theoretical framework of invisible stigma disclosure to transgender individuals, and calls for new theoretical and empirical developments to identify HRM challenges and best practices for respecting trans employees and their choices to remain silent or be heard.     

Understanding career experiences of skilled minority ethnic workers in France and Germany

Human resource management literature pays little attention to the agency of skilled ethnic minorities in Europe in terms of explaining their career choices and outcomes. As a step towards addressing this gap, we draw on two field studies based on qualitative interviews. One of these studies draws on interviews with 49 participants in France, and the other is based on interviews with 30 participants in Germany. Through a Bourdieuan analysis, we contribute to the human resource management literature, and demonstrate the varied forms that the agency of highly skilled ethnic minorities takes, in terms of their work experiences, in the context of structures of inequality in both countries.     

Changes in Perception and Behavior in Mixed Gender Teams

Leadership and conflict on male and female task teams of varying compositions are compared for groups constituted in the late 1960s/early 1970s and the mid-1980s. The data indicates substantial increase in the leadership activities of women in mixed sex situations, striking decrease in conflict on predominantly female teams, and impressive improvement in the ability of young men to work with women on analytical tasks.     

National minorities and their representation in social surveys: which practices make a difference?

This paper presents a systematic study of survey mechanisms that produce or reduce minority bias in social surveys. It extends the work of Lipps et al. (2011) who have demonstrated that, in the Swiss context, the more an ethno-national minority community differs, socio-culturally and socio-economically, from the national majority, the less it is likely to be represented in its proper proportion in the major national surveys. Minority bias furthermore has a vertical dimension: socio-economic bias against individuals from the most deprived backgrounds becomes extreme within ethno-national minority communities. Using data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey, the Swiss Household Panel, and the Swiss sample of the European Social Survey, in the present work we empirically assess the impact of three types of survey practices on minority bias: (1) strategies to increase overall response rates of the whole population indiscriminately from its minority status, (2) the use of pre- and post-stratification measures that take into account the overall share of foreigners in the national population, and (3) the conduct of interviews in a wider range of languages, in order to facilitate survey response among certain (linguistic) minorities. Our findings show that efforts to increase overall response rates can, paradoxically, create even more minority bias. On the other hand, they suggest that a combination of stratified sampling and a wider range of survey languages can have a positive effect in reducing survey bias, both between and within national categories. We conclude that measures that take into account and adapt to the social and cultural heterogeneity of surveyed populations do make a difference, whereas additional efforts that only replicate existing routine practices can be counter-productive.     

The Impact of Sexual Harassment Policy in the Dutch Police Force

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the outcome of sexual harassment policy in the Dutch Police Force. Using a survey, sexual harassment was measured in 2000 and again in 2006 and we tested whether sexual harassment is associated with the comprehensiveness of policies. To be able to identify divisions with comprehensive policies, we interviewed 29 key persons in semi-structured interviews. It appeared that between 2000 and 2006 sexual harassment did not decrease: neither for women nor for men. Furthermore, the risk of sexual harassment was not lower in divisions that implemented comprehensive policies than in divisions with less comprehensive policies. The results suggest that sexual harassment is a workplace hazard that is very difficult to prevent in male dominated workplaces and implementing a comprehensive policy is not sufficient to prevent this workplace hazard.