̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - ̽��ֱ�� of Zurich

Women are ‘running with leaded shoes’ when promoted at work, says study

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:13:24 +0000

Women and men feel different at work, as moving up the ranks alleviates negative feelings such as frustration less for women than for men, says a sweeping new study on gender differences in emotion at work.

̽��ֱ��study, led by researchers at Yale ̽��ֱ�� and co-authored by Jochen Menges at Cambridge Judge Business School, finds that rank is associated with greater emotional benefits for men than for women, and that women reported greater negative feelings than men across all ranks.

Because emotions are important for leadership, this puts women at a disadvantage akin to running with ‘leaded shoes’, according to the study, which is based on nearly 15,000 workers in the US.

̽��ֱ��results, published in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, tie the different ways women and men experience emotions at work to underrepresentation at every level of workplace leadership.

Little previous research on gender and workplace emotions

̽��ֱ��study notes that, while the glass ceiling for women has been extensively documented, there has been surprisingly little research on gender differences in emotions at work. Understanding this is particularly important as emotions influence job performance, decision-making, creativity, absence, conflict resolution and leadership effectiveness.

̽��ֱ��practical implications of the study are that organisations must provide support to women as they advance, including formal mentoring relationships and networking groups that can provide opportunities to deal with emotions effectively while supporting women as they rise within organisational ranks.

“It would be hard for anyone to break through a glass ceiling when they feel overwhelmed, stressed, less respected and less confident,” said Menges, who teaches at both the ̽��ֱ�� of Zurich and Cambridge Judge Business School.

“This emotional burden may not only hamper promotion opportunities for women, but also prevent them from contributing to an organisation to the best of their ability. More needs to be done to level the playing field when it comes to emotional burdens at work,” said Menges, whose research often focuses on leadership, motivation and other workplace issues.

Women feel more ‘overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated’ at work

̽��ֱ��study finds gender does make a difference for the emotions that employees experience at work. Compared to men, women reported feeling more overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated, tense, and discouraged, and less respected and confident.

Women reported greater negative feelings than men across all ranks. Although these feelings decreased for both men and women as they moved up in rank, the extent to which rank diminished negative feelings differed between the sexes. For instance, moving up rank did alleviate frustration and discouragement in both men and women, but it did so more for men than for women.

̽��ֱ��study says that because women experience more negative and fewer positive feelings in climbing the organisational ladder, this puts women at a disadvantage in attaining leadership roles.

At the lowest levels of employment, women reported feeling significantly more respected than men, yet this reverses as people climb within an organisation, resulting in men feeling significantly more respected than women at higher levels.

̽��ֱ��research used data from 14,618 adult US workers (50.7% male, 49.3% female) reflecting a diversity of race, ethnicity and industries, to test the following factors:

--Differences in the emotions that men and women experience at work.

--If gender interacts with rank to predict emotions.

--Whether the association between gender and emotions is mediated by emotional labour demands.

--If this relationship differs as a function of the proportion of women in an industry or organisational rank.

Feelings ranging from ‘inspired’ to ‘stressed’

Emotions were assessed using two different methods. Participants used a sliding scale to indicate how often they had experienced 23 feelings at work in the previous three months. ̽��ֱ��items included ten positive emotions such as “interested”, “proud” and “inspired”, and 13 negative responses including “bored”, “stressed” and “envious”. Participants were also asked to report their typical feelings about work in open-ended responses about how their job had made them feel over the past six months.

In addition, to assess positional power, participants were asked to place themselves on a ladder with ten steps representing where people stand in their organisation.

Inhibiting negative emotion is not the answer

̽��ֱ��study concludes that simply smothering emotion in the workplace isn’t the answer: Inhibiting negative emotions for a prolonged time increases burnout, and negatively impacts performance and personal well-being.

It recognises there are areas of future research which include how gender interacts with other categories of identity, such as race and ethnicity, social class, and sexuality. Women of colour face stronger glass ceiling effects than white women and have to simultaneously navigate bias and discrimination based on their gender and race.

̽��ֱ��authors also suggest further investigation to establish whether women’s negative experiences can impose an emotional glass ceiling because obstacles such as unequal treatment at work causes emotions such as feeling disrespected, which in turn can become an additional barrier to advancement.

Reference:
Christa L. Taylor et al. ‘Gender and Emotions at Work: Organizational Rank Has Greater Emotional Benefits for Men than Women.’ Sex Roles (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s11199-021-01256-z

Adapted from a story on the Cambridge Judge Business School website.

Promotion at work has greater emotional benefit for men than women, says a new study on gender and workplace emotion.

Maskot

Colleagues sitting at conference table

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Astronomers identify new method of planet formation

sc604 — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 09:44:02 +0000

In the last 25 years, scientists have discovered over 4000 planets outside our solar system. From relatively small rock and water worlds to blisteringly hot gas giants, these planets display a remarkable variety.

This variety is not unexpected. ̽��ֱ��computer models which scientists use to study the formation of planets predict this variety as well. What the models struggle to explain is the observed mass distribution of exoplanets.

̽��ֱ��majority fall in the intermediate-mass category – planets with masses of several Earth masses to around that of Neptune. Even in our own solar system, the formation of Uranus and Neptune remains a mystery.

Now, scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Zurich, associated with the Swiss NCCR PlanetS, have proposed an alternative explanation. Their results are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“When planets form from the so-called protoplanetary disk of gas and dust, gravitational instabilities could be the driving mechanism,” said co-author Professor Lucio Mayer from the ̽��ֱ�� of Zurich.

In this process, dust and gas in the disk clump together due to gravity and form dense spiral structures. These then grow into planetary building blocks and eventually planets.

̽��ֱ��scale on which this process occurs is very large – spanning the scale of the protoplanetary disk. “But over shorter distances – the scale of single planets – another force dominates: That of magnetic fields developing alongside the planets,” said Mayer.

These magnetic fields stir up the gas and dust of the disk and influence the formation of the planets.

“To get a complete picture of the planetary formation process, it is important to not only simulate the large-scale spiral structure in the disk: the small-scale magnetic fields around the growing planetary building blocks also have to be included,” said lead author Dr Hongping Deng from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

However, the differences in scale and nature of gravity and magnetism make the two forces challenging to integrate into the same planetary formation model. So far, computer simulations that capture the effects of one of the forces well usually do poorly with the other.

To succeed, the team developed a new modelling technique. First, they needed a deep theoretical understanding of both gravity and magnetism. Then, they had to find a way to translate the understanding into a code that could efficiently compute these contrasting forces in unison. Finally, due to the immense number of necessary calculations, a powerful computer was required – like the Piz Daint at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). “Apart from the theoretical insights and the technical tools that we developed, we were therefore also dependent on the advancement of computing power,” said Mayer.

“With our model, we were able to show for the first time that the magnetic fields make it difficult for the growing planets to continue accumulating mass beyond a certain point,” said Deng. “As a result, giant planets become rarer and intermediate-mass planets much more frequent – similar to what we observe in reality.”

“These results are only a first step, but they clearly show the importance of accounting for more physical processes in planet formation simulations,” said co-author Ravit Helled from the ̽��ֱ�� of Zurich. “Our study helps to understand potential pathways to the formation of intermediate-mass planets that are very common in our galaxy. It also helps us understand the protoplanetary disks in general.”

Reference:
Hongping Deng, Lucio Mayer and Ravit Helled. ‘Formation of intermediate-mass planets via magnetically controlled disk fragmentation.’ Nature Astronomy (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01297-6

Adapted from a ̽��ֱ�� of Zurich press release.

Scientists have suggested a new explanation for the abundance in intermediate-mass exoplanets – a long-standing puzzle in astronomy.

Jean Favre/CSCS

Artist's impression of the protoplanetary disk with magnetic field lines

Yes

Do you say splinter, spool, spile or spell? English Dialects app tries to guess your regional accent

sjr81 — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:06:31 +0000

Along with colleagues from the universities of Zurich and Bern, Cambridge’s Adrian Leemann has developed the free app English Dialects (available on iOS and Android), which asks you to choose your pronunciation of 26 different words before guessing where in England you’re from.

̽��ֱ��app also encourages you to make your own recordings in order to help researchers determine how dialects have changed over the past 60 years. ̽��ֱ��English language app follows the team’s hugely successful apps for German-speaking Europe, which accumulated more than one million hits in 4 days on Germany’s Der Spiegel website, and more than 80,000 downloads of the app by German speakers in Switzerland.

“We want to document how English dialects have changed, spread or levelled out,” said Dr Leemann, a researcher at Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. “ ̽��ֱ��first large-scale documentation of English dialects dates back 60-70 years, when researchers were sent out into the field – sometimes literally – to record the public. It was called the ‘Survey of English Dialects’. In 313 localities across England, they documented accents and dialects over a decade, mainly of farm labourers.”

̽��ֱ��researchers used this historical material for the dialect guessing app, which allows them to track how dialects have evolved into the 21st century.

“We hope that people in their tens of thousands will download the app and let us know their results – which means our future attempts at mapping dialect and language change should be much more precise,” added Leemann. “Users can also interact with us by recording their own dialect terms and this will let us see how the English language is evolving and moving from place to place.”

̽��ֱ��app asks users how they pronounce certain words or which dialect term they most associate with commonly-used expressions; then produces a heat map for the likely location of your dialect based on your answers.

For example, the app asks how you might say the word ‘last’ or ‘shelf’, giving you various pronunciations to listen to before choosing which one most closely matches your own. Likewise, it asks questions such as: ‘A small piece of wood stuck under the skin is a…’ then gives answers including: spool, spile, speel, spell, spelk, shiver, spill, sliver, splinter or splint. ̽��ֱ��app then allows you to view which areas of the country use which variations at the end of the quiz.

It also asks the endlessly contentious English question of whether ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’ or ‘cone’.

“Everyone has strong views about the pronunciation of this word, but, perhaps surprisingly, we know rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where,” said Professor David Britain, a dialectologist and member of the app team based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Bern in Switzerland.

“Much of our understanding of the regional distribution of different accent and dialect features is still based on the wonderful but now outdated Survey of English Dialects – we haven’t had a truly country-wide survey since. We hope the app will harness people’s fascination with dialect to enable us to paint a more up-to-date picture of how dialect features are spread across the country.”

At the end of the 26 questions, the app gives its best 3 guesses as to the geography of your accent based on your dialect choices. However, while the Swiss version of the app proved to be highly accurate, Leemann and his colleagues have sounded a more cautious note on the accuracy of the English dialect app.

Dr Leemann said: “English accents and dialects are likely to have changed over the past decades. This may be due to geographical and social mobility, the spread of the mass media and other factors. If the app guesses where you are from correctly, then the accent or dialect of your region has not changed much in the last century. If the app does not guess correctly, it is probably because the dialect spoken in your region has changed quite a lot over time.”

At the end of the quiz, users are invited to share with researchers their location, age, gender, education, ethnicity and how many times they have moved in the last decade. This anonymous data will help academics understand the spread, evolution or decline of certain dialects and dialect terms, and provide answers as to how language changes over time.

“ ̽��ֱ��more people participate and share this information with us, the more accurately we can track how English dialects have changed over the past 60 years,” added Dr Leemann.

After taking part in the quiz, users can also listen to both historic and contemporary pronunciations, taking the public on an auditory journey through England and allowing them to hear how dialects have altered in the 21st century. ̽��ֱ��old recordings are now held by the British Library and were made available for use in the app. One of these recordings features a speaker from Devon who discusses haymaking and reflects on working conditions in his younger days.

Dr Leemann added: “Our research on dialect data collected through smartphone apps has opened up a new paradigm for analyses of language change. For the Swiss version nearly 80,000 speakers participated. Results revealed that phonetic variables (eg if you say ‘sheuf’ or ‘shelf’) tended to remain relatively stable over time, while lexical variables (eg if you say ‘splinter’, ‘spelk’, ‘spill’ etc.) changed more over time. ̽��ֱ��recordings from the Swiss users also showed clear geographical patterns; for example people spoke consistently faster in some regions than others. We hope to do such further analyses with the English data in the near future.”

̽��ֱ��findings of the German-speaking experiments were published last week in PLOS ONE.

An app that tries to guess your regional accent based on your pronunciation of 26 words and colloquialisms will help Cambridge academics track the movement and changes to English dialects in the modern era.

We hope that people in their tens of thousands will download the app and let us know their results.

Adrian Leemann

Screen grab of one of the app's questions

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Young male chimpanzees play more than females with objects, but do not become better tool users

fpjl2 — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 18:03:34 +0000

New research shows a difference between the sexes in immature chimpanzees when it comes to preparing for adulthood by practising object manipulation – considered ‘preparation’ for tool use in later life.

Researchers studying the difference in tool use between our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, found that immature bonobos have low rates of object manipulation, in keeping with previous work showing bonobos use few tools and none in foraging.

Chimpanzees, however, are the most diverse tool-users among non-human primates, and the researchers found high rates of a wide range of object manipulation among the young chimpanzees they studied.

While in adult wild chimpanzees it is females that are more avid and competent tool users, in juvenile chimpanzees the researchers conversely found it was the young males that spent more time manipulating objects, seemingly in preparation for adult tool use.

“In numerous mammalian species, sex differences in immatures foreshadow sex differences in the behaviour of adults, a phenomenon known as ‘preparation’,” said Dr Kathelijne Koops, who conducted the work at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Division of Biological Anthropology, as well as at the Anthropological Institute and Museum at Zurich ̽��ֱ��.

Much of the time young male chimpanzees spent manipulating objects was dominated by ‘play’: with no apparent immediate goal, and often associated with a ‘play face’ – a relaxed expression of laughing or covering of upper teeth.

̽��ֱ��sex bias for object manipulation the researchers found in juvenile chimpanzees is also found in human children. “ ̽��ֱ��finding that in immature chimpanzees, like humans, object-oriented play is biased towards males may reflect a shared evolutionary history for this trait dating back to our last common ancestor,” write the researchers from Cambridge, Zurich and Kyoto, who studied communities of wild chimpanzees and bonobos in Uganda and Congo for several months, cataloguing not just all tool use, but all object manipulation.

Immature females, on the other hand, showed lower rates of object manipulation, especially in play, but displayed a much greater diversity of manipulation types than males – such as biting, breaking or carrying objects – rather than the play-based repetition seen in the object manipulation of immature males.

This seems to prepare the females better for future tool use. In an earlier study at Gombe (Tanzania), immature female chimpanzees were also observed to pay closer attention to their mothers using tools and became proficient tool users at an earlier age than males.

“Immature females seem to focus their attention on relevant tool use related tasks and thus learn quicker, whereas males seem to do more undirected exploration in play,” write the researchers.

They say they believe the findings show that not all object manipulation in juvenile chimpanzees is preparation for tool use, and the different types of object manipulation need to be considered.

̽��ֱ��researchers say that the apparent similarity between human children and young chimpanzees in the observed male bias in object manipulation, and manipulation during play in particular, may suggest that object play functions as motor skill practice for male-specific behaviours such as dominance displays, which sometimes involve the aimed throwing of objects, rather than purely to develop tool use skills.

However, the researchers also point out that further work is needed to disentangle possible functions of object manipulation during development.

“We found that young chimpanzees showed higher rates and, importantly, more diverse types of object manipulation than bonobos. Despite being so closely related on the evolutionary tree, as well as to us, these species differ hugely in the way they use tools, and clues about the origins of human tool mastery could lie in the gulf between chimpanzees and bonobos,” Koops said.

“We found that male chimpanzees showed higher object manipulation rates than females, but their object manipulation was dominated by play. Young female chimpanzees showed much more diverse object manipulation types,” she said.

“We suggest that the observed male bias in young chimpanzees may reflect motor skill practice for male-specific behaviours, such as dominance displays, rather than for tool use skills. It seems that not all object manipulation in immatures prepares for subsistence tool use. It is important to take the types of manipulation into consideration.”

̽��ֱ��researchers also found that in chimpanzees, but not bonobos, the types of objects manipulated became more tool-like as the apes age. “As young chimpanzees get older they switch to manipulating predominantly sticks, which in this community is the tool type used by adults to harvest army ants,” Koops explained.

This practice of ant ‘dipping’, when chimpanzees lure streams of insects onto a stick, then scoop them up by running a hand along the stick and into the mouth, provides a quick source of protein.

Koops added: “Given the close evolutionary relationship between chimpanzees, bonobos and humans, insights into species and sex differences in ‘preparation’ for tool use between chimpanzees and bonobos can help us shed light on the functions of the highly debated gender differences among children.”

̽��ֱ��research is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

Research into differences between chimpanzees and bonobos in ‘preparation’ for tool use reveals intriguing sex bias in object manipulation in young chimpanzees – one that is partly mirrored in human children.

We found that male chimpanzees showed higher object manipulation rates than females, but their object manipulation was dominated by play

Kathelijne Koops

Kat Koops

Young chimpanzee playing with branches.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Tool use is 'innate' in chimpanzees but not bonobos, their closest evolutionary relative

fpjl2 — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 08:22:36 +0000

Chimpanzees and bonobos are the two closest living relatives of the human species - the ultimate tool-using ape. Yet, despite being so closely related on the evolutionary tree, wild chimpanzees and bonobos differ hugely in the way they use tools.

Chimpanzees show the most diverse range of tool use outside of humans. For example, chimpanzees use sticks to 'fish' for ants and termites, stones to crack nuts, as well as tools for grooming and communication. Bonobos rarely use tools and never to forage for food.

̽��ֱ��question of 'what makes a tool user?' is a key one in human evolution, says researcher Dr Kathelijne Koops, and the origins of human tool mastery could lie in the gulf between tool use in chimpanzees and bonobos.

Is it to do with the environment the apes live in and the surrounding opportunities for tool use? Or perhaps the opportunities to learn from other apes through social contact? Or something deep-rooted. Something intrinsic.

Koops, in collaboration with colleagues from Kyoto ̽��ֱ��, conducted painstaking research tracking communities of wild chimpanzees and bonobos in Uganda and Congo for months, cataloguing not just all tool use, but also all potential for tool use in terms of the different environments and social time spent.

They also investigated the innate propensity for object manipulation in young apes, regardless of whether said object was deployed as a 'tool' - the first wild inter-species comparison of its kind.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that environmental opportunities did not explain the difference in tool use. From nut trees to ant nests, stones to shrubs, the bonobos had access to as many tools and promising foraging opportunities in their stomping ground as the chimpanzees.

Nor did social opportunities. In fact, young bonobos spent more time with their mothers, and had more individuals in close proximity for more time whilst feeding than young chimpanzees. Young bonobos also had more social partners than young chimpanzees.

However, immature chimpanzees manipulated and played a lot more with objects than bonobos, and played with objects on their own. This was a difference already visible in very young individuals, says Koops. In fact, she says this is the first evidence for a species difference in the innate predisposition for tool use in our closest evolutionary cousins.

"Chimpanzees are object-oriented, in a way that bonobos are not," said Koops, who conducted the work at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��'s Division of Biological Anthropology and at Zurich ̽��ֱ��'s Anthropological Institute and Museum.

"Given the close evolutionary relationship between these two species and humans, insights into the tool use difference between chimpanzees and bonobos can help us identify the conditions that drove the evolution of human technology.

"Our findings suggest that an innate predisposition, or intrinsic motivation, to manipulate objects was likely also selected for in the hominin lineage and played a key role in the evolution of technology in our own lineage," she said.

̽��ֱ��research is published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

Inset image: Young Bonobos Engaged in Social Play. Credit: Kathelijne Koops

First evidence for a species difference in the innate predisposition for tool use in our closest evolutionary cousins could provide insight into how humans became the ultimate tool-using ape.

Insights into the tool use difference between chimpanzees and bonobos can help us identify the conditions that drove the evolution of human technology

Kathelijne Koops

A Young Chimpanzee Playing with Twigs

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes