The Effects of Sexism on Women Miners' Mental Health and Job Satisfaction

In the mining industry, women make up only 19.4% of the workers in Canada, 16.4% in Australia, and 13.3% in the USA (Catalyst, 2015). In the present research, we investigated women’s experiences of sexism in this male-dominated industry and how these experiences related to women’s mental health and job satisfaction.

We surveyed 263 women miners from an Australian-based mining company that has operations in Australia, Africa, South America, and South East Asia. Participants responded to items about sexism, sense of belonging, mental health, and job satisfaction. 

Our research focused on two types of sexism: organizational sexism and interpersonal sexism. Organizational sexism refers to structural inequalities in an organization that are connected with opportunities for promotion and career progression, job stability, training, pay, competence, work-life balance, and performance standards. We found that women miners who felt relatively disadvantaged on these dimensions reported poorer mental health and job satisfaction. Hence, a potential strategy to improve women miners’ mental health and job satisfaction may be to reduce their perceived and actual disadvantage on these dimensions. This might be achieved through a combination of structural changes in the workplace (e.g., more opportunities for women miners’ career progression) and/or greater transparency in the gender-based similarities on these dimensions (e.g., publication of workforce statistics demonstrating equality of pay).

Interpersonal sexism refers to inappropriate images of women in the workplace, sexual harassment, and sexist comments. Like organizational sexism, interpersonal sexism was negatively related to mental health and job satisfaction. Interpersonal sexism is more ingrained in wider intergender relations in society, and addressing interpersonal sexism effectively is likely to require a partnership between employers and (male and female) employees.

A third variable that was associated with women miners' mental health and job satisfaction was sense of belonging in the industry. This variable mediated the effects of organizational sexism on job satisfaction. Hence, an additional approach towards improving women miners’ job satisfaction may be to increase their sense of belonging. An increased sense of belonging may be achieved by promoting community events both within the female group of miners (i.e., as a group of “women miners”) and within the industry as whole (i.e., women identifying as “miners”).

We also found some interesting cross-country differences. Women who worked at Australian mine sites reported significantly less organizational and interpersonal sexism and fewer mental health problems than did women who worked at African, South American, and South East Asian worksites. These differences may reflect cross-cultural differences, with Australia’s more progressive Western culture prescribing less sexism and better mental health practices in the workplace.

It is important to note that our study’s cross-sectional correlational design prevents clear conclusions regarding the causal direction of the associations between the variables that we studied. Future research may wish to use longitudinal research designs to address this issue.

For further information about this research, please see the following journal article:

Rubin. M., Subasic, E., Giacomini, A., & Paolini, S. (2017). An exploratory study of the relations between women miners’ gender-based workplace issues and their mental health and job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. doi: 10.1111/jasp.12448 

For an open access self-archived version, please click here.

How You Feel About People is Related to How You Feel About Cities

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. (Calvino, 1978, p. 44).

There are numerous structural factors that influence people’s attitudes towards cities, including the city’s architecture, size, infrastructure, transport, crime rates, population density, and quality of housing, to name just a few.  However, as the Italian writer Calvino (1978) alluded to in his book Invisible Cities, these factors may be constituents of broader sociocultural “questions” that people ask about their cities.  For example, residents’ concern about the transport and entertainment venues of a city might form part of a broader social psychological concern about the potential for the city to accommodate their need to meet friends and socialize with others. Alternatively, people might focus on a city’s economy and job opportunities because they are concerned about the ability of the city to meet their needs for personal income and wealth.

Hong Kong - Why Would You Want to Live There?

In some recently published research, Dr Tessa Morrison and I predicted that individual differences in individualism and collectivism operate as important predictors of people's city needs and goals. Individualism and collectivism are sociocultural orientations towards treating the self and others as individuals or group members respectively: Individualists see themselves and others as being self-reliant, autonomous, and independent, whereas collectivists are more interdependent and concerned about their social groups, including their family, friends, and community. We predicted that these dispositional orientations towards the self and others might also influence how people feel about cities.

To test our predictions, we asked 148 psychology undergraduate students to take virtual guided tours around one of four Utopian historical cities - cities that had never been built and were unfamiliar to our participants. YouTube videos of the four guided tours can be viewed here: Christianopolis, City of the Sun, New Harmony, and Victoria, and the picture below shows a scene from one of the tours. Participants then evaluated the cities’ liveability and environmental quality and completed measures of individualism and collectivism.

Consistent with our predictions, people with a strong sense of self-responsibility (a form of individualism) tended to evaluate the virtual cities in terms of their potential to meet the goal of acquiring resources, income, and wealth, whereas people with a strong sense of collectivism tended to evaluate the cities in terms of their potential to provide community and a sense of connection with others.

Scene from a virtual tour around the Utopian city of Victoria

To paraphrase Calvino (1978), city evaluation may be based on the answers that cities provide to our questions. However, our research suggests that different types of people have different types of questions. Individualists appear to ask: “can this city enhance my personal wealth?” whereas collectivists appear to ask: “can this city enhance my group’s community?”

These findings are important because they can help us to understand why some people choose to move into certain cities and others choose to leave. However, a key limitation of our work is that it lacked ecological validity because it involved nonresidents evaluating novel, historical, virtual, and unpopulated cities. In our future research, we intend to measure residents’ evaluations of more familiar, modern, real-world, populated cities.

For further information, please see the following journal article:

Rubin, M., & Morrison, T. (2014). Individual Differences in Individualism and Collectivism Predict Ratings of Virtual Cities’ Liveability and Environmental Quality The Journal of General Psychology, 141 (4), 348-372 DOI: 10.1080/00221309.2014.938721
 
A self-archived version of this journal article is available here.

The Disproportionate Influence of Negative Intergroup Encounters on Prejudice

Back in February, I wrote about some research in which my colleagues and I showed that negative experiences with people from other groups are better at drawing attention to the people's group memberships than positive experiences (Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). In other words, if you have a negative encounter with someone from another group, then you are more likely to think about their group memberships (e.g., their gender, race, nationality, etc.) than if you have a positive encounter with them. This increased awareness of a person's group memberships following a negative encounter with them is potentially problematic for the goal of reducing intergroup conflict in society because it means that people are naturally biased towards attributing bad things to out-group members' groups and generalizing their negative experiences with one out-group member to all of the other out-group members. Our preliminary evidence provided some support for this assumption, showing that people were more likely to mention a woman's ethnicity when she behaved negatively rather than positively. However, we did not go as far as testing whether this out-group salience effect led to greater prejudice against the out-group.

Now, Fiona Barlow and colleagues have found this missing piece of the puzzle in a series of research studies published this week (Barlow, Paolini, Pedersen, Hornsey, Radke, Harwood, Rubin, & Sibley, 2012). We looked at prejudice against Black Australians, Muslim Australians, and asylum seekers and found that negative experiences with these people were a stronger and more consistent predictor of negative attitudes towards them than positive experiences were of positive attitudes. For example, negative experiences, but not positive experiences, with Black Americans predicted suspicion about Barack Obama’s birthplace, which represents a subtle measure of racism.
  
These results suggest that negative experiences with out-group members are not only more likely than positive experiences to make people think about out-group members' group memberships, but also to influences people's attitudes towards the out-groups. Taken together, these two recent papers suggest that negative experiences with out-group members have a greater potential than positive experiences to influence people's thoughts and feelings about out-groups. This work implies that we should redouble our efforts to encourage positive experiences between members of different groups because this positive intergroup contact is naturally disadvantaged against improving intergroup relations when compared with the more powerful influence of negative intergroup contact.

For further information, please see the following journal article:  Barlow, F., Paolini, S., Pedersen, A., Hornsey, M., Radke, H., Harwood, J., Rubin, M., & Sibley, C. (2012). The Contact Caveat: Negative Contact Predicts Increased Prejudice More Than Positive Contact Predicts Reduced Prejudice Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38 (12), 1629-1643 DOI: 10.1177/0146167212457953

High Status Groups are the Most Prototypical

Imagine an average, typical person walking down the street. Imagine them speaking on their mobile phone as they walk and waving to a friend who rides past on a bike.

Well done! Good imagining!! Now, what is the gender of your imaginary person? Were you thinking of a man or a woman? My guess is that it is a man rather than a woman! Why? Well, there is some evidence that people tend to perceive men as having a higher status than women and, in a recent research study, I found that people tend to perceive high status groups as being more typical of their overarching categories (in this case “people”) than low status groups.

In my study, I asked 139 undergraduates students to consider six novel, lab-based social groups that were named using colours: Yellow, Blue, Red, White, Orange, and Green. Students were told that the Yellow and Blue groups had a high social status, the Red and White groups had an average status, and the Orange and Green groups had a low status. The students then rated which of the groups they thought were the most typical (“representative” and “good examples”) of the six groups. Participants rated the two high status groups to be significantly more typical than the two low status groups. I believe that this difference occurred because participants placed a positive value on the overarching category of “research study groups”, and they perceived the Yellow and Blue groups to be the most representative of this category because these high status groups possessed the most positive features. In general then, I’m suggesting that the more positive a social group is perceived to be, the more representative it is perceived to be of positively-valued superordinate categories.

So, when asked to think about a typical person, you might think of a man rather than a woman because men tend to be perceived as having a higher status than women and, consequently, they are perceived to be more typical than women of the positively-valued superordinate category of “people”.

For more information about this research study, please see: Rubin, M. (2012). Group Status is Related to Group Prototypicality in the Absence of Social Identity Concerns The Journal of Social Psychology, 152 (3), 386-389 DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2011.614648

A Scale to Measure the Influence of Demand Characteristics in Research Situations

Demand characteristics are cues in a researcher's design, materials, or procedure that allow their research participants to guess their hypotheses. They are a problem because, if participants become aware of the research hypotheses, then they may respond in a way that they believe will confirm the hypotheses in order to be "good" participants and not "ruin" the research (Orne, 1962). These unnatural responses can compromise the ecological validity of the research. In other words, participants do what they think they're supposed to do and not what they would normally do.

To measure the potential influence of demand characteristics, my colleagues and I have created a simple, 4-item scale that measures participants' Perceived Awareness of the Research Hypothesis (PARH; Rubin, Paolini, & Crisp, 2010). The PARH scale is a quick and convenient method for measuring the potential influence of demand characteristics in research situations. An example item is "I knew what the researchers were investigating in this research." Responses are made on a 7-point scale (1 = strongly disagree,7 = strongly agree)

For more information about the PARH scale, please see the following research article:
Rubin, M. (2016). The Perceived Awareness of the Research Hypothesis Scale: Assessing the influence of demand characteristics. Figshare. doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.4315778