World Leaders Draw Attention to Central Role of Women’s Political Participation in Democracy by UN Women

Study Says Women Make Better Leaders Than Men

Lower Pitched Voices Viewed as More Competent

Posted on 2012/12/122012/12/13 by Jason Hensel

Finally, something women and men can agree on together–both genders prefer leaders with masculine voices. The research comes from Rindy Anderson (Duke University) and Casey Klofstad (University of Miami), and was published in PLOS ONE.

…the researchers asked people to listen to the phrase “I urge you to vote for me this November” spoken by two voices that differed only in their pitch. They found that both men and women preferred female candidates with masculine voices. Men also preferred men with masculine voices but women did not discriminate between the male voices they heard. According to the authors, their results suggest that the influence of voice pitch on perceptions of leadership capacity is consistent across different domains of leadership and independent of social context.

“We often do not consider how our biology can influence our decision making,” Klofstad said. “The results of this study show that voice pitch–a physiological characteristic–can affect how we select our leaders.”

Why, then, do both genders prefer leaders with masculine voices?

“In the case of women’s voices, this bias could be a consequence of lower-pitched female voices being perceived as more competent, stronger, and more trustworthy,” the authors wrote in the study. “That is, these traits are perceived as positive in the context of leadership and could be the mechanism that leads us to prefer female leaders with lower voices. Additionally, the pitch of the female voice declines over the lifespan. Consequently, selection of female leaders with lower-pitched voices can result in the selection of women who are older, and perhaps more experienced at leading others. Stated differently, men and women may be biased to select older women as leaders, regardless of the type of position in question. In the case of men’s voices, men with lower-pitched voices are larger, stronger, and more aggressive. Again these traits are perceived as positive in the context of leadership, leading us to prefer male leaders with lower voices.”

Knowing this, would you change your vocal pitch to sound more like a leader?

(Story quotes from the Public Library of Science. Image via Flickr: cav… / Creative Commons.)

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Your Stock Photo is Distracting

Posted on 2012/12/03 by Jason Hensel

I recently saw a story online that says “Broadway plays written by women earn on average 18% more than those written by men.” It was a nice, short informative piece, and it raised the question of why aren’t more women playwrights produced on Broadway.

However, right before the story starts, there’s a stock photo of a woman looking at money. A woman in a jacket. A women with no shirt underneath that jacket. Take a look:

Of all the stock images out there in the world, why choose the one that features a shirtless female? It’s distracting. And yes, maybe it’s distracting because I’m a male. Still, to write a story about gender inequality and then post a picture that plays right into that is thoughtless.

Then again, maybe it was done on purpose, because sex sells. Either way, I found the dichotomy between the story and the image amusing, and a great reminder that when choosing photos, make sure they fit the theme of the story.

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Page Views and Comments Motivate Bloggers

Posted on 2012/11/212012/11/21 by Jason Hensel

This blog currently receives 30 page views a month on average. The number of comments is minuscule. It’s safe to say, then, that I write entries for my pure enjoyment and not as a sense of obligation to a huge reader base. That’s not to say I wouldn’t enjoy more page views and comments. I really would. When I see my view average go up, I get excited because I believe I’m making connections with people who enjoy reading about things that interest me. This encourages a continuation to write more.

And wouldn’t you know it, there have been studies conducted about blog writing and motivation. According to researchers from Penn State, traffic-measuring and comments are just the things that may give bloggers more motivation to write. Carmen Stavrositu, one of the researchers, says female bloggers enjoy blogging because it makes them feel empowered and part of a community.

“Women who received a high number of site visitors felt a deeper sense of agency about blogging compared to those who received fewer visitors, ultimately leading to a greater sense of influence,” Stavrositu said. “Also, women who received many comments felt more empowered than those who received very few comments, due to a strong perceived sense of community.”

S. Shyam Sundar, who worked with Stavrositu, says that comments indicate connections and page view stats indicate influence.

To test their theory, the researchers surveyed 340 female blog writers about their blog activities and feelings of empowerment.

The survey of bloggers, who were drawn at random from a Web directory of blogs written predominantly by women, showed that those who blogged for personal reasons felt a greater sense of community in the blogosphere, whereas bloggers who wrote about external subjects believed said they felt that blogging made them competent, assertive and confident.

In a follow-up experiment, researchers asked 106 female college students to create a blog and write over two days about a personal topic — for instance, personal relationships or their health. Another group of 108 participants were asked to write about external issues that were important to them, such as racism, science, social issues and politics.

The researchers then manipulated site metrics indicating the number of visitors to the blog to test how they affected the bloggers’ sense of agency. The site metrics were tweaked to indicate that some blogs received 50 visitors each day, while others received just 20.

To test how a sense of community affected the attitudes of bloggers, the researchers added more comments to some blogs, while leaving only a few comments on others. Even though the content of the comments did not differ, bloggers who received a greater number of comments felt a higher sense of community.

“Those women who write mostly about their personal lives and daily experiences become more empowered by developing a strong sense of community,” Stavrositu said. “That is, they connect with others who share similar experiences and feel like they are a part of the community.”

Stavrositu and Sundar chose female blog writers because they create more more blogs than men and continued them longer.

“In general, it seems that, unlike in a lot of technology areas, women have widely adopted blogging and social networks,” Sundar said. “However, there’s no reason to think that these results would be restricted just to women.”

If you write blog entries, and money isn’t a reason, what keeps you writing?

(Story materials from Penn State. Image via Flickr: Adam Tinworth / Creative Commons.)

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Exercise Can Lead to Female Orgasm

Posted on 2012/03/21 by Jason Hensel

Exercising doesn’t thrill me. I tried running four miles one time, and I was in a terrible mood afterwards. The exercise high just eludes me. But not for women.

According to a recent study out of Indiana University, exercise (not including sex or fantasies) can lead to female orgasm.

“The most common exercises associated with exercise-induced orgasm were abdominal exercises, climbing poles or ropes, biking/spinning and weight lifting,” said Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion in IU’s School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. “These data are interesting because they suggest that orgasm is not necessarily a sexual event, and they may also teach us more about the bodily processes underlying women’s experiences of orgasm.”

Key study findings include:

About 40 percent of women who had experienced exercise-induced orgasms (EIO) and exercise-induced sexual pleasure (EISP) had done so on more than 10 occasions.
Most of the women in the EIO group reported feeling some degree of self-consciousness when exercising in public places, with about 20 percent reporting they could not control their experience.
Most women reporting EIO said they were not fantasizing sexually or thinking about anyone they were attracted to during their experiences.
Diverse types of physical exercise were associated with EIO and EISP. Of the EIO group, 51.4 percent reported experiencing an orgasm in connection with abdominal exercises within the previous 90 days. Others reported experiencing orgasm in connection to such exercises as weight lifting (26.5 percent), yoga (20 percent), bicycling (15.8), running (13.2 percent), and walking/hiking (9.6 percent).

“Magazines and blogs have long highlighted cases of what they sometimes call ‘coregasms,'” Herbenick said. “But aside from early reports by Kinsey and colleagues, this is an area of women’s sexual health research that has been largely ignored over the past six decades.”

Yeah, she just said coregasms. Feel free to use that in your daily conversations.

(Image via Flickr: Dan Machold / Creative Commons)

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