When Franziska Saxler’s guest spoke up about being sexually harassed during her PhD, she experienced both solidarity and alienation. In this episode, they also talk about predictors for sexual harassment and the over-representation of the perpetrators’ perspective in public discourse about sexualized violence.
In less than one second, we effortlessly and automatically categorize a person according to gender and race. It’s useful to group together things that share characteristics into categories. This allows us to talk about “birds” rather than just “robins and sparrows and those kinds of things”. But the problem is that we also have strong, …
Prototypes: The Gender and Racial Biases That Are Too Obvious To Notice Read More »
What if a person with a stigmatized identity acknowledges some negative stereotypes associated with their identity? Negative stereotypes represent the descriptive, cognitive components of our knowledge about groups that have a negative social value (i.e., being lazy, see the post about stereotypes). What if those negative stereotypes are activated in their brain while completing a related task? What would happen then?
What started off as a one-semester job while I looked for “permanent” jobs in the industry ended up changing my career path altogether. I taught multiple subjects at the Bachelor’s level at Monash Business School for three years and thoroughly enjoyed being in the classroom. This time, on the other side of the desk. But I do not only reflect on my teaching experiences as someone who has been doing this for a few years; I have also interviewed my amazing colleague and friend, Tatjana Graf, who was on the other side of the desk for the first time last year, to understand her perspective and experiences as well.
As I am working on the final corrections of my PhD proposal, my train passes the mountains that mark the border between Italy and Austria. I am on my way to Munich, my hometown where my mom and most of my friends live.
During the annual G-Versity workshop in Venice this April, Mary Ann Ciosk and Clara Plückelmann asked other early-stage researchers to share their survival tips for PhD students.
I arrived in Venice by train, with my trolley, a backpack and a big bag that made me a too large traveler in the packed city. I was traveling to join the annual G-Versity workshop for PhD students that would be held in Venice in the beginning of April 2022.
As a child, I had already internalized that the “neutral” representation of a person is male.
In Social Psychology, a stereotype is defined as the descriptive, cognitive component of our knowledge about groups. This knowledge, like the categorization process, helps our cognition: the cognitive processes of people are less loaded, remembering only the description of one group, instead of information about every single individual within that group. That implicit or explicit description provides a structure that is used to guide judgments and actions. Stereotypes per se do not always assume a positive or negative evaluation (i.e., valence) of a group. When a stereotype conveys a valence, it’s called stereotypical prejudice.
On April 3, 2022, the Hungarian general election takes place, and alongside the election, there is a national referendum on LGBTQ+ in education. The referendum asks citizens four questions, about “teaching of sexual orientation”, “promotion of sex reassignment”, “exposure to sexually explicit media content”, and “showing of sex-change media content” to minors. The wording of the questions, and the accompanying campaign (with the slogan “Protect our children!”, Source), clearly inform citizens what the appropriate answers in the referendum supposedly are.
Research by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) indicates that the long- and short-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic pose a threat to the progress of gender equality in the EU.
The participants of the virtual roundtable continue to discuss different approaches to gender diversity research and their practical implications.
In this first part of the virtual roundtable, Hanna Szabó and Ana-Nzinga Weiß discuss how to define and approach gender in research with Dr. Harriet Tenenbaum (University of Surrey), Prof. Yvonne Benschop (Radboud University), Prof. Peter Hegarty (The Open University), Prof. Margreth Lünenborg (Freie Universität Berlin). The second half of this discussion will be uploaded next week!
Franziska Saxler and her guest who wishes to stay anonymous talk about experiencing sexual harrassment during a PhD. They are discussing the problem of recognizing sexual workplace harassment and also the consequences that come not only from the experience itself but also from interacting with responsible parties who are supposed to protect their employees and students.
Normality is a made-up construct, and it is constantly changing and updating itself. People ditch stigmatized old terms and come up with new names all the time. In recent years, gender and sexuality are two of those concepts undergoing radical changes. Being an international researcher who has traveled to many countries, gender equality has always been a topic of importance for me because of its complicated relationship with people, culture, and time.
Some scholars argue that the norms of traditional masculinity are “dying out” as a result of the movements that advocate for gender equality and challenge traditional gender ideologies.
I often feel I’m not productive enough. There’s always more to be written, more to be read, emails to answer, classes to study for and files to organise. A wise friend once told me that a PhD is a marathon and not a sprint. But how do we stay the course and keep hydrated through the many milestones of PhD life?
Societal and media discourse are linked and strongly influence each other. Hence, societal gender discourse can be observed within different media representations. This regards non-fictional media formats like journalism, self-representations on social media but also fictional productions like series or films.
Even though I am only at the end of the first semester of my doctoral degree, I wonder a lot about how my career will develop. I am somehow constantly reflecting on whether I want to stay in academia or consider other career opportunities, and also borderline anxious about deciding on what opportunities and skills I should invest in and how I can come to the right decision.
With growing media covering of trans* issues, it is paramount to educate journalists and professionals on how to write correctly about a community with a long history of discriminative representation.
