HR professionals offer women better salaries when reminded of their role in reducing the gender pay gap

HR specialists offered male candidates a higher salary than female candidates - but highlighting egalitarian social norms made this gap disappear.



By Matthew Warren


Giving Human Resources professionals simple messages about their role in promoting equality could help narrow the gender pay gap, according to research in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

HR specialists tended to offer male candidates a higher salary than female candidates in the new study. But when participants were reminded that they had a collective responsibility to reduce the gender pay gap, this difference disappeared.

“Norm messages that lead HR professionals to pay attention to more equitable behavior may be a way to reduce the gender pay gap that undervalues women’s labor without placing the burden of change on women”, the authors write.
The burden of change

Although the gender pay gap is gradually getting smaller, there are still major disparities in how much men and women are paid. In the UK, the most recent figures show that women in full-time employment earn 8.3% less than men on average.

Plenty of psychology research has attempted to identify the causes of, and solutions to, the gender pay gap. But much of this work has focused on what women themselves can do to improve their chances of getting paid well, effectively putting the onus on women to combat a systemic problem.

So in their new paper, Carolin Schuster from Leuphana University Lüneburg and colleagues instead studied the people who actually make decisions about salaries. The team asked more than 200 HR specialists to read a CV for a job candidate. The CV was identical for all participants, except for the gender of the candidate: their title was either given as “Mr M” or “Ms M”.

Some participants who were given a female candidate’s CV also read a short paragraph highlighting that it is a social norm for HR professionals to help tackle the pay gap. This stated that HR specialists have recently begun helping to reduce the gender pay gap by changing their behaviour to ensure equal treatment of men and women.

Finally, all participants learned that the candidate had asked for a salary of €44,000, and had to come back with a counteroffer. They also indicated the maximum salary that they would be willing to pay the candidate.
Working to a common goal

Schuster’s team found that participants who had seen the man’s résumé offered a significantly higher salary than those who had seen the woman’s résumé without the message about social norms: male candidates were offered €39,251 and female candidates €38,097. (The maximum that participants were willing to pay was similar for both male and female candidates).

However, participants who had seen the social norm message alongside the female candidate’s CV offered her a significantly higher salary. In fact, this intervention brought offers made to women in-line with those made to men, effectively eliminating the gender gap. The gender of the participants themselves didn’t influence any of these effects.

In a second study, the team again found that HR professionals offered female candidates a higher salary after reading the social norm message. In contrast, an “awareness” message, which mentioned the gender pay gap without explicitly stating that HR workers’ behaviour helps to combat it, had more ambiguous results, raising pay offers but not significantly so.

The researchers also found that after reading the social norm message, participants felt more strongly that they were working towards a common goal of reducing the gender pay gap, and this could help to explain why they offered the candidate more money.
Unintended consequences?

In this second study, some participants given the man’s CV also read the social norm message. And this produced a surprising result: these participants offered male candidates a lower salary compared to those who had read the man’s CV without the social norm message. This effectively reversed the gender pay gap, with men getting offered less than women.

However, this effect could be down to the design of the study. Each participant only dealt with a single candidate, and so the only way they could attempt to reduce the gender pay gap was to offer a higher-than-usual salary to a woman or a lower-than-usual salary to a man. In the real world, HR professionals won’t be making decisions in isolation like this – so would hopefully make decisions that would better lead to pay equality.

This unexpected result aside, the results suggest that a really simple message about the role played by HR professionals in helping to reduce the gender pay gap can boost pay offers to women. These messages seem to work by establishing a sense that HR professionals are part of a group with a common goal of working towards equality.

It remains to be seen whether this intervention works outside of the lab, and it’s unclear when in the process HR professionals need to see these messages or how long their effects last. But if they do work in real world hiring processes, they could help narrow a gap that current estimates suggest will take more than a century to close.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/hr-professionals-offer-women-better-salaries-when-reminded-their-role-reducing(accessed 23.11.22)

Test anxiety makes it harder to absorb information while preparing for an exam

Study suggests that test anxiety doesn't simply impair performance during an exam, but rather makes it harder to acquire knowledge in the first place.
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By Emma Young


Many students find taking exams stressful. “They worry about whether they will be able to recall their knowledge; their hearts beat faster; they sweat and they want to escape the exam room,” write Maria Theobold at the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Germany and colleagues in their new paper in Psychological Science. These are all symptoms of what’s known as ‘test anxiety’. Test anxiety is thought to interfere with a person’s ability to retrieve knowledge from their memory during a test, and has been widely linked to poorer exam performance.

But Theobald and her colleagues wondered whether instead test anxiety might be impairing people’s preparation for an exam, rather than affecting performance during the exam itself. To explore this, they turned to data on 309 medical students in Germany who had used a digital learning platform to prepare for their crucial final university exam. The team was able to track each student’s level of knowledge, starting 100 days before the exam itself. This was revealed in their performance on practice questions, as well as in mock exams that took place shortly before the real thing. The students also all completed a measure of their ‘trait’ (background) levels of test anxiety. And, throughout a 40-day period, they repeatedly reported on their levels of ‘state’ anxiety regarding their exam preparation.

The researchers found that greater trait test anxiety was indeed linked to a poorer performance in the final exam. However, it was also linked to poorer performance on the practice questions, and a lower percentage in the mock exam. So, students with the most test anxiety went into the final exam with less knowledge. In fact, when the researchers took into account performance on the mock exam or the pre-exam practice questions, test anxiety no longer predicted their final exam scores.

The researchers further explored why people with test anxiety might have poorer knowledge. They first looked at each student’s level of trait test anxiety and their performance on practice questions across the course of the pre-exam period. They found that students with higher trait anxiety showed a smaller increase in knowledge over time. This suggests that greater trait test anxiety makes it harder to acquire knowledge.

Finally, the team found evidence that awareness of gaps in one’s own knowledge may trigger more anxiety. During the preparation period, higher state anxiety in the morning was not linked to poorer scores on practice questions that day. However, fewer correct answers on one day was linked to greater test-related anxiety the next morning.

Earlier work has suggested that anxiety during an exam can particularly impair the performance of students with relatively low vs high working memory capacities (worries are thought to take up some working memory, leaving less for the task at hand). The participants in this study were high-performing medical students with presumably capacious working memories. Perhaps this buffered them against any impacts of worries during the exam on performance.

It is possible that anxiety during an exam may interfere with performance in some academic scenarios, but “our work suggests that this interference is not as pervasive as previously believed,” the team writes. Overall, “the results of the present study suggest that the reasons for the negative association between anxiety and test performance are complex and begin well before the final test situation.”

And this has important implications for test-anxious students, they note. There is research suggesting that training sessions designed to improve study strategies can help students who are anxious about an exam. But, as this work found that test anxiety begins to exert its effects early on in exam preparation, these interventions would need to come early, too. (In fact, the new findings might explain why some interventions designed to relieve test anxiety right before an important exam, such as getting students to write about their worries, have not improved exam performance.)

“Future research should focus on the development of interventions that facilitate effective knowledge acquisition during exam preparation, or even earlier, to improve the educational prospects of highly test-anxious students,” the team concludes.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/test-anxiety-makes-it-harder-absorb-information-while-preparing-exam(accessed 14.11.22)

Feeling Better About Our Bodies

link:

https://megjohnandjustin.com/bodies/feeling-better-bodies/

Content note. We discuss how we might feel better about our bodies. So we touch on the social messages we get about bodies and this includes us talking about fatphobia, diets, ‘health’, disablism, but we don’t go into much detail. It’s a long one — sorry about that.



Around the time of year that we recorded this podcast – early Spring – it’s easy to feel bad about our bodies. Cultural scripts suggest that we should overindulge and hibernate over the Winter, but that after new year we should be follow resolutions to diet and ‘get in shape’ for the summer ‘beach body’.



The media doesn’t help. At the moment there are a number of billboard adverts and makeover TV shows focusing on weight-loss and ‘improving appearance’. Particularly problematic are the links that are made between looking a certain way and ‘health’ and ‘fun’. Not only are we meant to have a certain appearance in order to be attractive and sexy, but also we’re blamed and shamed for being ‘unhealthy’ if we don’t conform to cultural beauty ideals, as well as often internalising the idea that caring about ‘looks’ is a fun and pleasurable thing to do, and to do otherwise would mean being a killjoy.

But the beauty ideal is incredibly limited. Looking around at the aspirational bodies that surround us they’re overwhelmingly young, thin, white, ‘flawless’, non-disabled, and gendered to match the ideals of rugged masculinity and delicate femininity, and a good deal of wealth is required to buy all the products necessary for maintaining such an ideal. We scientifically estimate on the podcast that 97% of people will not match these ideals for one reason or another, and all of us will move away from them as we age of course.
Love your body?

Most of us are likely to feel bad about our bodies if we’re surrounded by such narrow body ideals that we can’t possibly match up to. But what can we do about this? There has been a move among some people to replace the ‘change your body’ message of so much advertising and other media with a ‘love your body’ message.

This is pretty risky because it still locates the problem in us as individuals – rather than wider society. It’s bloody hard to love your body when the whole world is implicitly – or explicitly – telling you not to. If we receive the message that we should be able to easily love our bodies, that gives us yet another thing to feel bad about.

There’s a real tension when we live in a very individualising culture to know how to address things like this without continuing to individualise our struggles. At megjohnandjustin.com, we find the following diagram helpful – for all kinds of things – to think through how they work on multiple levels, and how we might address them on all those levels too. We can’t just try to relate differently to our body on an individual level if the people around us, our communities, and wider culture simply stay the same.

In the podcast we explore what we might do at each of these levels:Society – We could notice the images around us and be critical of them. We could confront fat-shaming remembering that it’s actually poverty, type of diet, and fitness that relate to health – not fatness; that being ‘underweight’ is generally more risky health-wise than being ‘overweight’; that these categories are based on an old model of measurement that doesn’t relate to how bodies are these days; and that shaming people about their bodies makes everything far worse – not better – for them. We could engage in body-related activism. We could seek out different subcultures that incorporate more diversity of bodies or expand our ideas of what is beautiful.
Communities – We could deliberately share materials that are critical of body ideals, or which incorporate a wider range of bodies. We could curate our social media accounts to avoid body-shaming from others, and to put out different messages ourselves, including filters and content notes. We could find communities which are trying to cultivate different ways of engaging with bodies. We could deliberately follow communities online which challenge narrow body ideals, including fat activists, disability activists, dwarf community activists, age activists, etc.
Interpersonal Relationships – We could keep an eye on whether we shame people in our lives for aspects of their bodies or bodily practices and try to stop doing that. We could have consent conversations about how we like to be treated in relation to our bodies, and what we find difficult from others.
Yourself – We could try to incorporate more embodied experiences into our lives where we feel ‘at one’ with our bodies rather than separate to them and scrutinising of them. These can include activities where the body is in motion, being alone, being in nature, etc.


Acceptance and Change

The ‘love your body’ message risks replacing the idea that we should always change our bodies to fit beauty ideals with the idea that we should always accept our bodies as they are and that changing them in any way is a bad thing that’s always about conforming to cultural norms.

Actually each person needs to find their own way of navigating the possibilities of change and acceptance in relation to their bodies (and in other areas). For example bodily changes of various kinds can be extremely helpful in decreasing physical pain and discomfort and/or improving mental health and/or opening up new possibilities in our lives.

Many trans people, disabled people, people with chronic health conditions, fat people, and others face a constant barrage of messages from one group of people telling them they should make changes to their bodies, while another group of people tell them they shouldn’t and that they should accept their bodies as they are. It’s not for anybody else to tell us how we should relate to our bodies, and – as a culture – we should help everyone to navigate these complex decisions about change/acceptance and support them through the various options instead of telling people what they should or should not do with their bodies.

© Meg-John Barker & Justin Hancock, 2018

SOURCE:

https://megjohnandjustin.com/bodies/feeling-better-bodies/(accessed 10.11.22)

Study finds little evidence that particular scents help people sleep better

But the research also suggests that smells you personally like could be beneficial.


By Emma Young


The idea that certain scents promote sleep has been popular for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians believed that myrrh increased sleep quality, for example, while recent studies have suggested that citrus smells may help sleep by improving mood, and a lavender scent is often touted as the perfect pillow spray. However, there has been little systematic objective investigation of the impact of specific odours on sleep, write the authors of a new paper in Scientific Reports. Agnieszka Sabiniewicz at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany and colleagues now report just such a study.

The participants were 139 healthy men and women. They first went into the lab to complete a batch of tests, including measures of their smelling ability and also symptoms of anxiety and depression. They were then given a nose clip to take home with them. Each clip delivered one of: an orange odour; l-Laurinal (a sweet floral scent); a perfume with citrus, floral, musky and orange scents; no scent at all.

Over a two week period, the participants wore their clip each night and completed a sleep diary each morning. (The diary asked about their quantity and quality of sleep.) A subgroup of 66 participants also used wrist-worn devices that measured their minutes of REM, deep sleep and light sleep.

After two weeks, the participants went back into the lab for repeat testing. They also reported on how pleasant or otherwise they had found their scent. Then they went home and, without wearing the nose clip this time, completed a sleep diary each morning for the following two weeks. At the end of this period, they went back into the lab, to re-take the key tests for a final time.

The team found a few small differences in the impact of specific odours on participants’ depression and anxiety scores. Those who’d sniffed the perfume tended to report less anxiety than those who’d smelled the Laurinal, although this effect was only marginally significant. And those who’d sniffed either the perfume or no odour had better depression scores than those who’d sniffed the Laurinal.

But the main aim of the study was to investigate impacts on sleep. The team found that, whatever the nose clips delivered, the participants generally reported feeling better rested as the study period went on. (So even the zero-odour, control group felt that they benefited.) Also, participants who found the odour they had been assigned particularly pleasant tended to report feeling better rested at the end of the study, compared with the beginning.

However, when the team compared the sleep quantity and quality data for each of the four nose clip groups, they found no differences — none of the odour groups had slept any better than the control group. As some earlier studies have suggested that certain odours can improve sleep (the scent of bitter orange has been linked to better sleep quality, for example), why did this research find no odour benefits? One possibility is that perhaps it had something to do with how the scent was delivered— via nose clip, rather than a spray or a scented candle, for example.

Some researchers have suggested that certain scents (including lavender and citrus odours) may act via the central nervous system to exert a direct relaxing or mood-boosting effect, and affect sleep in this way. However, this new work does suggest that how much you like a smell is what matters, rather than the odour itself.

SOURCE:

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/study-finds-little-evidence-particular-scents-help-people-sleep-better(accessed 10/11/22)

Ένα εκατομμύριο ορφανά από μητέρα παιδιά ετησίως, λόγω του καρκίνου

Ο καρκίνος αποτελεί μείζον πρόβλημα δημόσιας υγείας με προφανείς αρνητικές συνέπειες για τα άτομα που διαγιγνώσκονται με τη νόσο και το περιβάλλον του.


Σε πρόσφατη ανακοίνωση στο Παγκόσμιο Συνέδριο για τον Καρκίνο (World Cancer Congress 2022) ερευνητές παρουσίασαν τα δεδομένα για τον αριθμό των παιδιών που μένουν ορφανά από μητέρα εξαιτίας του καρκίνου. Συγκεκριμένα, το έτος 2020 καταγράφηκαν 4,4 εκατομμύρια θάνατοι γυναικών από καρκίνο. Το 78% αυτών των θανάτων αφορούσαν γυναίκες ηλικίας κάτω των 50 ετών. Οι ερευνητές χρησιμοποίησαν τα δεδομένα του Οργανισμού Ηνωμένων Εθνών για τον παγκόσμιο πληθυσμό αλλά και τον μέσο αριθμό ζώντων παιδιών ανά γυναίκα σε κάθε χώρα καθώς και τα ποσοστά γονιμότητας ανά πενταετία ηλικίας των γυναικών σε κάθε χώρα για τα προηγούμενα 18 έτη. Με βάση τα στοιχεία αυτά, εκτιμήθηκε ότι περίπου 1 εκατομμύριο παιδιά έμειναν ορφανά από μητέρα λόγω των θανάτων από καρκίνο σε όλο τον κόσμο.

Οι περισσότεροι από αυτούς τους θανάτους αφορούσαν την ήπειρο της Ασίας (49%) και της Αφρικής (35%) και σχετιζόταν συχνότερα με τον καρκίνο του μαστού (25% των περιπτώσεων), του τραχήλου της μήτρας (18%) και του ανώτερου γαστρεντερικού (13%). Μάλιστα φαίνεται να υπάρχει αντίστροφη σχέση ανάμεσα στον δείκτη ανθρώπινης ανάπτυξης και τον αριθμό των ορφανών από μητέρα ανά 100 θανάτους γυναικών. Συγκεκριμένα, η Ευρώπη που έχει τον υψηλότερο δείκτη ανθρώπινη ανάπτυξης είχε τον μικρότερο αριθμό ορφανών ανά θάνατο γυναικών από καρκίνο.

Τα στοιχεία αυτά είναι σημαντικά γιατί αποτυπώνουν για πρώτη φορά την έκταση του προβλήματος που μπορεί να έχει σημαντικές επιπτώσεις για τα παιδιά. Όπως αναφέρουν οι Καθηγητές της Θεραπευτικής Κλινικής της Ιατρικής Σχολής του Εθνικού και Καποδιστριακού Πανεπιστημίου Αθηνών, Μιχάλης Λιόντος (Επ. Καθηγητής), Φλώρα Ζαγουρή (Καθηγήτρια), Θεοδώρα Ψαλτοπούλου (Καθηγήτρια) και Θάνος Δημόπουλος (Καθηγητής και Πρύτανης ΕΚΠΑ), είναι γνωστό από μελέτες σε ορφανά παιδιά ότι χαρακτηρίζονται σε μερικές περιπτώσεις από χαμηλότερο επίπεδο εκπαίδευσης και μεγαλύτερη θνησιμότητα από τους συνομηλίκους τους. Προφανώς πρέπει να εντατικοποιηθεί η έρευνα για τον καρκίνο για να μειωθεί η θνησιμότητα από τη νόσο. Τα δεδομένα αυτής της μελέτης όμως δείχνουν ότι αυτό μπορεί να βοηθήσει και την επόμενη γενιά, σημειώνουν οι Καθηγητές του ΕΚΠΑ.


Επιπλέον, προσθέτουν, περίπου οι μισοί θάνατοι γυναικών σχετίζονταν με νοσήματα που μπορούν να προληφθούν ή να διαγνωσθούν πρώιμα όπως ο καρκίνος του μαστού και του τραχήλου της μήτρας. Επομένως, τέτοιες μελέτες αυξάνουν την ευαισθητοποίηση του κοινού για τις επιπτώσεις του καρκίνου μεταξύ των γενεών και υπογραμμίζουν την ανάγκη μείωση του αριθμού των θανάτων από καρκίνου από αίτια που μπορούν να προληφθούν.

Πηγή:

https://www.kathimerini.gr/life/health/562112065/ena-ekatommyrio-orfana-apo-mitera-paidia-etisios-logo-toy-karkinoy/(accessed 2.11.22)