03.05.08
Posted in Business, Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, ethics, happiness at 12:04 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Anne Bromley, a senior editor/writer for UVa Media Relations, we look at a recent study by University of Virginia Sociologist Elizabeth Gorman which said, no matter how the data was sliced or certain variables controlled: women say they have to work harder than men.
The statement, “Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good,” may not be totally off the mark in the workplace states a recent study by University of Virginia Sociologist Elizabeth Gorman and Julie Kmec of Washington State University.
The study analyzed five surveys of men and women in Britain and the US, given in 1977, 1992, two in 1997, and 2001. They concentrated their analysis on the two surveys conducted in 1997, both comprising cross-sectional interviews of about 3,500 workers in the US and almost 2,500 in the UK. To yield comparable answers, they evaluated results from the following survey question: “My job requires that I work very hard.” And, according to the results, a gender gap persisted in ratings of the statement. Women were significantly more likely to say they strongly agreed or agreed, than men.
Gorman noted, “The statement in the survey about required work effort is not one in which employees are comparing themselves to the opposite sex, it’s also not asking for a perception of how hard the work is or how much effort they actually exerted. Our focus is on required work effort, the effort that an employee is expected to exert in order to perform her or his job at a level that is satisfactory to the employer. It is important to distinguish required effort from an employee’s actual exerted effort.”
The researchers analyzed the survey data to see if, in fact, women did have more difficult jobs, but that was not the case. Even when the jobs were almost identical, women still were significantly more likely to say they had to work very hard. And, while controlling for physical and mental demands of a particular job, Gorman and Kmec found that neither group of factors explained the different findings about work effort.
Looking for other potential reasons, the sociologists considered domestic responsibilities outside of work. They stated, “Marriage and parenthood had the same effect on reports of required effort for women and men. In the U.S. sample, the researchers matched the number of hours spent on childcare and housework. Between men and women who performed the same amount of time on these tasks, women were still more likely to say their jobs required them to work very hard.”
So what explains the difference between genders and perceived required effort in the work place?
In their paper, “We (Have to) Try Harder: Gender and Required Work Effort in Britain and the United States,” released in the December issue of the journal “Gender and Society” the researchers said, “We argue that the association between sex and reported required work effort is best interpreted as reflecting stricter performance standards imposed on women, even when women and men hold the same jobs.”
Gorman said, “A lot of experimental research has shown that people rate the same performance as better when told it was done by a man. People give lower marks to an essay, a painting or a résumé when it has a woman’s name on it. And when a man and a woman work together on a project, people assume the man contributed more than the woman did. Even when a woman’s work is indisputably excellent, people don’t believe she’s good — they think she got lucky.” It follows then, that women have to do better than a man in order to get the same evaluation.
Gorman then added, “This is what women are up against. They have to work harder… And in light of this previous research, it makes sense to conclude that women have to work harder to win their bosses’ approval.”
Some possible consequences of this “effort gap” in the workplace include: the quality of women’s work experience is likely to be lower than men’s; this difference in required effort could also have consequences for women’s careers, making it harder for them to be recognized and promoted. Also, the physical and emotional effects could, in turn, have negative repercussions for families.
Gorman went on to say, “It wouldn’t be fair to use this research to reinforce stereotypes.”
Kmec added, “Instead, employers should take into account women’s hard work when considering who to promote and reward. We do not want to insist that female workers shirk their job responsibilities to make this gap go away. Rather, we hope employers make job performance standards more transparent and be held accountable for their evaluations of women at work.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will look at the work of Maurie McInnis and her perspective of class politics, social structures and hierarchies of antebellum South through the examination 19th century art and material objects.
Permalink
02.27.08
Posted in Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, ethics, technology at 12:05 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published this month on the Oscar Web site written by Andrea Arco, marketing director for the School of Engineering and Applied Science we observe at the research of Adrienne Felt, a fourth-year computer science major in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, concerning privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms.
Privacy & Facebook [5:44m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download
Facebook, the social networking platform that has redefined communications, has millions of users. According to University of Virginia computer science major Adrienne Felt, all of these users should be concerned about security.
Felt, a fourth-year student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at UVa, leads a research project on privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms and is investigating the information sharing that occurs when users download a Facebook application — a program that allows the user to interact with other users in interesting ways, from sharing music to playing games.
Although these applications add variety to a Facebook user’s profile page, they also increase the user’s vulnerability. Here’s how: anyone with an account on Facebook can create an application. Although this application appears as if it is part of Facebook’s platform, it is actually running on application developer’s server. When a user installs an application, that application’s developer is given the ability to see everything the user can see — name, address, friends’ profiles, photos, etc.
An experienced Facebook application developer, Felt said, “The Facebook privacy policy always seemed unsatisfactory to me.” It was this unsettling feeling that led her to investigate Facebook’s vulnerabilities. Working with David Evans, an associate professor in UVa’s Department of Computer Science and fourth-year physics major Andrew Spisak, Felt examined the 150 most popular Facebook applications.
She discovered that 8.7 percent of these applications needed no personal information to run, while 82 percent needed only the user’s public information: name, network, list of friends. Still, 9.3 percent require a user’s private information in order to function. Felt said, “since all applications receive access to private information, this means that 90.7 percent of Facebook’s most popular applications unnecessarily have access to private data.”
Felt said, “there are currently no restrictions on what applications, and their developers, can do with user data. And though the Facebook “Terms of Use” warn developers not to abuse the data they have access to, Facebook cannot enforce this rule. In fact, when a user installs an application, the user’s computer communicates with the Facebook servers and the Facebook servers then communicate with the application developer’s servers. Once users’ private data leave the Facebook servers, the company has no way of knowing what happens to it.
Evans said, “an application developer could easily acquire personal information for millions of users. There is a risk it could be used to launch targeted phishing attacks, exploited by identity thieves or sold to marketing companies.”
Felt’s goal is to make users more aware of how their private information is being used — and to close this privacy loophole.
Felt has developed and refined a privacy-by-proxy system and is building a prototype implementation — a way for Facebook to hide the user’s private information, while still maintaining the applications’ functionalities. Under Felt’s system, at the point at which the Facebook server is communicating with the application developer’s server, the Facebook server would provide the outside server with a random sequence of letters instead of the user’s name and other personal information.
Felt said, “this is the first step… Hopefully the research findings and proposed solution will trigger more responsible privacy and information management policies from social networking sites and will better inform users.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be a recent study by University of Virginia sociologist Elizabeth Gorman whose work came to the same conclusion, no matter how the data was sliced or certain variables controlled: women say they have to work harder than men.
Permalink
02.13.08
Posted in Business, Fraud, Jacob Canon, Social Psychology, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, Uncategorized, University of Virginia, ethics, philosophy at 3:21 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar web site written by Melissa Maki, we look at business ethics and strategy through the eyes of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and his search for the answers to these questions:
“What motivates a company to cook the books? AND What happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?”
Financial Fraud [6:11m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download
Arthur Anderson… Enron…The Mortgage Loan Crisis, these names and events are synonymous with corporate malfeasance. They symbolize a loss of business ethics that occurred when financial profits were prioritized above all else, even to the long-term detriment of the firm. So, what motivates a company to cook the books? And what happens to businesses that get caught committing financial fraud?
Such business ethics and strategy questions drive the research of Jared Harris, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Harris joined Darden’s faculty in 2006 and has taught ethics and strategy courses for the MBA program as well as a doctoral seminar on corporate governance and ethics. His teaching responsibilities in business ethics and strategy align with his research interests. Harris said, “at the Darden School, cross-disciplinary work is valued… we take ethics seriously, not only within the classroom but also in our research, it’s a great fit for me.”
Harris recently won accolades for his dissertation research at the 2007 annual meetings of the Academy of Management — one of the foremost professional associations dedicated to the study of management and organizations. His work titled, “Financial Misrepresentation: Antecedents and Performance Effects” won the Best Dissertation Award from the academy’s Social Issues in Management Division and was also one of six finalists in the academy’s Business Policy and Strategy Division, an unusual cross-disciplinary accomplishment.
Harris’ thesis builds his academic theory through two related empirical studies. He examined nine years of data from a large sample of publicly traded corporations that were identified by the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, as having misrepresented their financial information.The first study, featured as the lead article in the May-June 2007 issue of Organization Science, focuses on predictors of a company’s propensity toward financial fraud.
In his study, Harris found two factors — relative performance and CEO incentive pay — were highly influential. That is, companies performing below average for their industry are more likely to compensate by misrepresenting their financial data. And surprisingly, the higher a CEO’s stock options as a percentage of total pay, the more likely a company is to cheat — running counter to the notion that incentive pay aligns the individual aspirations of management with the collective ambitions of a company. Harris controlled for other possible predictors, such as increasing board independence by having outsiders on the board and separating the CEO and chair roles in a firm, but he notes that they had “no effect whatsoever on preventing the cheating.”
In the second study, Harris looked at what happens to these companies once ethical violations are announced to the public. Predictably, they see an immediate downturn in their stock prices, but he also found that a firm’s operating performance was severely impaired. This negative impact on profitability was more persistent than market-based effects; even a year or two later, companies were still feeling the effects of their transgressions. On average, the companies’ operational profits dropped by nearly 50 percent. Harris said, “Firms do worse by doing bad. If they cheat, they take a big hit in overall performance.”
But, as with much of life…public perception matters more than reality. Despite his earlier finding that an autonomous board does not deter companies from committing financial fraud, Harris noted that corporations are able to recover from some of this negative fallout if they took swift steps to increase the number of outsiders on their board and replace their CEO. Harris went on to say, “the research shows that stakeholders value these things. Firms get rewarded for making such changes because we all think it is part of good governance — yet in the case of something like board independence, this is ironic, given that the data shows it has no actual preventative effect.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Dr. William Petri who directs a U.Va.-led research team doing research on a parasite said to kill nearly 100,000 people each year.
Permalink
01.30.08
Posted in Jacob Canon, The Oscar Show, UVa College of Arts & Sciences, University of Virginia, elections, ethics, technology, voting machines at 5:50 pm by Jacob Canon
In today’s show, adapted from an article published on the Oscar web site written by Andrea Arco, Director of Marketing for U.Va’s Engineering School, we examine the work of Bryan Pfaffenberger, associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and his study of mechanical-lever voting machines, their history and understanding the interaction between technology and culture that has been going on for more than a century.
History of Voting Machines [6:13m]:
Play Now |
Play in Popup |
Download
For more than a century, voting machines have helped shape American political history. The chaos of the 2000 presidential election in Florida and the alleged election fraud in Ohio during 2004, which led to testimony before congress about computer programs that could rig an election, demonstrate the crucial role that voting machines play in shaping the outcome of an election. Bryan Pfaffenberger, a historian of science and an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, believes there is value in understanding that the interaction between technology and culture has been going on for more than a century.
His ongoing study is part of a larger Democracy and Technology program that he and colleagues are developing within UVa’s Department of Science, Technology and Society. Pfaffenberger said, “this initiative that has already sparked several cross-University collaborations and additions to the curriculum. It’s fitting that this initiative is underway at the university Thomas Jefferson founded. Jefferson strongly believed that engineers need to be good citizens; today, the need is greater than ever, so it’s important for science and engineering students indeed, students throughout the University to reflect on how technologies shape our democracy.”
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, U.S. voters got their ballots from political parties, who printed and distributed them at polling places. Voters would then hand their ballots to election clerks in full view of the public. This led to widespread vote-buying, because the vote buyers could see whether corrupted voters fulfilled their end of the bargain.
Beginning in 1888, a movement favoring the Australian secret ballot system swept the country. In this system, the government prints the paper ballots and voters mark them behind a privacy curtain. This cut down vote buying, but election fraud moved inside the polling place as corrupt officials learned other ways to swing an election. This was especially true in large cities, where political machines such as New York City’s Tammany Hall ran the show.
Because of this, and since New Yorks electoral votes often determined the outcome of presidential elections, these voting machines proved attractive because they kept paper out of the hands of election officials. The machines recorded votes directly on odometer-like counters. Still, not everyone liked the machines. For example, voters could not tell whether their votes were recorded as they had intended — or whether they were recorded at all. Paper ballots might have flaws, but at least there was a record of how people voted
Pfaffenberger said, “there’s an almost exact parallel between the debate we’re having today concerning electronic voting machines and the equally divisive, but completely forgotten, debate that greeted first-generation voting machine technology in the 1890s.” One side says, “trust machines, not people.” The other side says, “trust people, not machines.” Electronic “touch-screen” voting machines are today’s version of 1890s machines — they try to keep paper away from biased, partisan, or overworked human counters.
But voters are concerned that their votes aren’t recorded properly. The verified voting movement wants to put paper back in the process by requiring states to equip electronic voting machines with a printed audit trail. But some voting experts worry that, if the machines and paper continue to come up with different numbers, which has already happened in some municipal and state elections, we could see another presidential election meltdown that might make Florida 2000 look mild in comparison.
Happily, there’s a growing national consensus toward the use of optical scan voting machines, in which voters fill out a paper ballot by filling in bubbles next to candidates’ names. They then feed their ballot into a scanner, which tells them if they’ve made a mistake — and lets them have another chance. Voters can see that their votes were properly counted, and the ballots are kept in case machine malfunction is suspected. Dr. Pfaffenberger said, “After more than a century, the war between those who trust machines and those who trust people seems to be ending, finally. But it’s the voter who’s winning.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week as we again delve into the election season, when our topic will be the work of U.Va. cognitive psychologist Dennis Proffitt whose research focuses on creating computer interfaces to help make life more bearable for patients with ALS and other diseases that are the cause of locked-in syndrome.
Permalink
11.15.07
Posted in Buddhist, Elevation, Jacob Canon, Psychology, Relationships, Social Psychology, The Oscar Show, University of Virginia, anxiety, biology, brain, emotions, ethics, happiness, philosophy, physical health, positive psychology, stress at 10:24 am by Jacob Canon
When social psychologist University of Virginia in 1995, he prepared by reading Thomas Jefferson’s writings and making the requisite pilgrimage to Monticello. Little did he realize the impact this Jeffersonian indoctrination would have on his own research.
Haidt’s area of specialization is moral emotions, but before coming to U.Va., he focused his studies on cross-cultural experiences of disgust. He read ancient Buddhist texts and spent time in India, exploring how the beneficial biological aspects of disgust became codified as religious imperatives and keys to social order.
Then he came across Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Robert Skipwith, in which Jefferson describes how “witnessing acts of beauty and moral goodness — whether in literature or reality — swells the chest and inspires a desire to lead a better life.” Suddenly Haidt began thinking about the antithesis of disgust, the psychological effect of uplifting experiences, an emotion he termed “elevation.” Haidt said,“That letter fundamentally changed the course of my research.”
In a moment of zeitgeist, Haidt’s inquiry into elevation coincided with the burgeoning of the academic field, positive psychology, which studies how people find meaning and happiness in life. His research into what prompts elevation and the resulting physical and motivational effects won him psychology’s largest monetary award, the John Templeton Prize for Positive Psychology, in 2001.
While researching elevation, Haidt continued teaching a large undergraduate survey course introducing the study of psychology. In the classroom, he has found it useful to cite quotations and examples from ancient philosophy and world religion to make his points more memorable. Haidt’s colleague, psychology professor Gerald Clore stated, “This penchant for asking what it all means makes him very appealing as an undergraduate lecturer in Introductory Psychology.”
Having received several university and state awards for teaching, Haidt decided to apply his ancient wisdom approach to a study of happiness. Looking at the relationship between what religious and philosophical traditions say about fulfillment and what scientists have discovered about the biological processes involved in the brain’s response to stimuli, Haidt gleaned 10 psychological truths from ancient religious and philosophical texts, which he examines in the 10 chapters of his 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
Throughout the work, Haidt analogizes the conscious mind to a rider straddling the elephant of the unconscious mind, trying to guide the giant beast where the rider wants it to go. He cited numerous psychological experiments that demonstrate how at odds the conscious and unconscious minds often are, despite the conscious mind’s skill at rationalizing choices and behavior. His book suggests that by understanding ancient wisdom’s insights into our divided nature, we have a chance of establishing a more harmonious relationship between the conscious and unconscious, gently training our elephants to do as we wish.
Haidt, who has also established an accompanying website, Happinesshypothesis.com , said, “every good idea I’ve ever had in my life is in this book, the book is really a gateway to everything I want to work on for the rest of my life.” Although Haidt spent 2005-2006 at Princeton University as the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor of Ethics at the Center for Human Values, his heart remains in Charlottesville. Haidt said,“it really was because of U.Va., because of Jefferson, that I came to study this completely neglected area of emotion.”
Haidt is currently studying the foundations of moral judgment in liberals and conservatives in order to understand how political appeals might be better crafted. In addition, he’s researching how the application of elevation can be used to increase trust in relationships, especially among married couples.
To learn more about his work and this area of study, visit www.happinesshypothesis.com.
Permalink