Face Gender Research Articles

Gender and Religious Identity: Intersecting Axes of Discrimination in The Breadwinner Animated Movie (2017)

This study, entitled “Gender and Religious Identity: Intersecting Axes of Discrimination in The Breadwinner Animated Movie (2017)”, highlights the importance of conceptualizing gender discrimination related to religious identity as inherently shaped by society. Using intersectional theoretical perspectives - the narrative and cinematography elements and gender studies – this study examines how gender and religious identity are inextricably linked to portray the main character’s experiences of discrimination. The analysis begins with narrative and illustrative data showing how the main character’s background as a daughter and Muslim results in multiple layers of discrimination. Her gender and religious affiliation substantially influence the discrimination. Moreover, bias varies for men and women of different age groups. The main character experiences more discrimination as a teenage girl than her disguised character as a teenage boy. Women are significantly more likely to face gender discrimination than men, but girls are enormous. Hence, this concurrent examination of the main character’s gender and religious identity reveals that she is characterized by high rates of discrimination throughout her childhood, in a way teenage boys are not. The main character’s experience of discrimination highlights the importance of conceptualizing gender and religious identity as intersecting axes of discrimination.

Temporal dynamics of face adaptation.

The appearance of a face can be strongly affected by adaptation to faces seen previously. A number of studies have examined the time course of these aftereffects, but the integration time over which adaptation pools signals to control the adaptation state remains uncertain. Here we examined the effects of temporal frequency on face gender aftereffects induced by a pair of faces alternating between the two genders to assess when the aftereffects were pooled over successive faces versus driven by the last face seen. In the first experiment, we found that temporal frequencies between 0.25 and 2.00 Hz all failed to produce an aftereffect, suggesting a fairly long integration time. In the second experiment, we therefore probed slower alternation rates of 0.03 to 0.25 Hz. A rate of 0.0625 Hz (i.e., 8 seconds per face) was required to generate significant aftereffects from the last presented face and was consistent with an average time constant of 15 to 20 seconds for an exponentially decaying integration window. This integration time is substantially longer than found previously for analogous effects for alternating colors, and thus points to a potentially slower mechanism of adaptation for faces compared with chromatic adaptation.

Millennials and the gender wage gap: do millennial women face a glass ceiling?

PurposeThis study aims to measure the gender wage gap among millennial workers in Colombia and determine if there is a marked wage difference between millennial women and men. Furthermore, this study analyzes whether millennial women face a glass ceiling, that is, whether there is a larger gender wage gap among workers earning relatively high wages.Design/methodology/approachThe study data included a sample of 2,144 millennial workers employed in 11 organizations located in the five main cities of Colombia. Oaxaca–Blinder econometric methods of wage decomposition were used to calculate both raw and adjusted gender wage gaps. The latter results in estimating the gender wage gap while controlling for observable characteristics related to individual, family, and labor. In addition, wage decompositions by education levels were carried out to approximate the extent of the glass ceiling among young workers.FindingsThe results show that millennial workers in Colombia face gender inequality in the labor market and that professional millennial women experience a distinct glass ceiling. The adjusted gender wage gap is 9.5%, and this gap increases with education level, increasing to nearly 14% among college-educated workers.Research limitations/implicationsThe empirical results are supported by a self-report survey of millennial workers. An important limitation is that the data include millennial workers employed in the formal sector and exclude the informal sector (activities not regulated or protected by the state), which represents an important part of the economy in developing countries.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the empirical literature on gender wage inequality for younger workers. This paper is original in reviewing the gender pay gap in Colombia using a primary dataset. Most of the work in this area has been done in developed countries and this research adds to the findings that have had focused on those nations.

Not lie detection but stereotypes: Response priming reveals a gender bias in facial trustworthiness evaluations

Using an innovative variant of the response-priming paradigm, ten Brinke et al. (2014) seemingly found evidence for unconscious lie detection. In the present study, however, we conducted a reanalysis of this experiment showing that the data can be explained better by the assumption of a gender bias in facial trustworthiness evaluations than by the assumption of unconscious lie detection abilities. To corroborate the hypothesis that female faces are subjectively perceived as more trustworthy than male faces, we conducted two response-priming experiments: Participants (Ns = 39 and 61) had to categorize target words as truth-related or lie-related. These words were preceded by male and female face primes explicitly rated as trustworthy or untrustworthy by an independent sample. First, categorization times showed that trustworthy-appearing faces biased responses towards “truth” and untrustworthy-appearing faces biased responses towards “lie”. Second, within the group of trustworthy-appearing faces, there was a gender effect with female faces biasing responses towards “truth” and male faces biasing responses towards “lie”. These results suggest that (a) trustworthiness evaluations are biased by face gender and that (b) trustworthiness evaluations can be measured with the response-priming paradigm.

How do people perceive sexual harassment targeting transgender women, lesbians, and straight cisgender women?

Third-party observers' opinions affect how organizations handle sexual harassment. Prior research has focused on perceptions of sexual harassment targeting straight cisgender women. We examined how targets' sexual orientation and gender identity impact these perceptions. In three preregistered studies, straight cisgender participants imagined a coworker confided that a male colleague had sexually harassed her. The target was a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, or a woman whose sexual orientation and gender identity were unspecified. In Study 1 (N = 428), participants reported believing that sexual harassment targeting lesbians and women with unspecified identities was most likely motivated by attraction and power, whereas sexual harassment targeting transgender women was seen as most likely motivated by power and prejudice. Despite these differences in perceived motivation, in Study 2 (N = 421) perceptions of appropriate consequences for the perpetrator did not vary based on the target's identity. Study 3 (N = 473) demonstrated that the specific behavior of which sexual harassment is assumed to consist differs based on the target's identity. Whereas women with unspecified identities and lesbians were assumed to face stereotypical attraction-based harassment, transgender women were assumed to face gender harassment. Stereotypes about sexual harassment can bias third-party assumptions, invalidating experiences that do not match pervasive stereotypes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Common and unique neural mechanisms of social and nonsocial conflict resolving and adaptation.

Humans often need to deal with various forms of information conflicts that arise when they receive inconsistent information. However, it remains unclear how we resolve them and whether the brain may recruit similar or distinct brain mechanisms to process different domains (e.g. social vs. nonsocial) of conflicts. To address this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and scanned 50 healthy participants when they were asked to perform 2 Stroop tasks with different forms of conflicts: social (i.e. face-gender incongruency) and nonsocial (i.e. color-word incongruency) conflicts. Neuroimaging results revealed that the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex was generally activated in processing incongruent versus congruent stimuli regardless of the task type, serving as a common mechanism for conflict resolving across domains. Notably, trial-based and model-based results jointly demonstrated that the dorsal and rostral medial prefrontal cortices were uniquely engaged in processing social incongruent stimuli, suggesting distinct neural substrates of social conflict resolving and adaptation. The findings uncover that the common but unique brain mechanisms are recruited when humans resolve and adapt to social conflicts.

Effects of English Proficiency on Caucasian Face Gender Perception by Chinese-English Bilinguals: Evidence from ERP

Chinese and English differ in the encoding of biological gender in the spoken forms of 3rd person singular pronouns. Linguistic relativity theories predict that structural differences across languages are accompanied with differences in non-linguistic cognition. However, the pronoun difference between the two languages seems so trivial that its influence on gender perception is unbelievable except with empirical support. The present study conducted an ERP experiment with native speakers of Chinese learning English as a foreign language and differing in English proficiency. The odd-ball paradigm was used to examine whether L2 proficiency would influence how these Chinese-English bilinguals perform on Caucasian face gender perception. The experiment yielded null effect of L2 proficiency on the vMMN that was elicited for the gender category, as well as the control age category. The results suggest that the difference in the pronoun encoding of biological gender between Chinese and English may not influence gender perception in the nonlinguistic context, although it is not surprising considering the triviality of such cross-linguistic difference and the widespread gender binary opposition in daily life.

Cosmetic makeup enhances facial attractiveness and affective neural responses.

Although it is well established that cosmetic makeup enhances perceived facial attractiveness, few studies have examined whether facial makeup modulates neural responses to face images. This study investigated behavioral and attractiveness-related brain responses to self-applied makeup, focusing on the N170, early posterior negativity, P300, and late positive potential components of event-related brain potentials. A total of 77 Japanese women participated in two experiments (N = 34 and 43 for Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). Experiment 1 assessed the effects of self-applied makeup on attractiveness-related event-related potential amplitudes using facial images during a makeup identification task in which makeup was directly relevant to task demands. Experiment 2 examined the effects of self-applied makeup using images of one's own face and another female's face when performing a gender classification task, where the presence of makeup had no explicit connection to facial gender classification. In both experiments, faces with makeup were rated as more attractive and elicited more negative early posterior negativity and more positive late positive potential components, regardless of the participant's own face or another person's face. These findings suggest that people are spontaneously motivated to pay visual attention to faces with makeup, which supports the idea that makeup adds reward value to the facial appearance of the human. Moreover, neural evidence empirically confirmed that the benefits of makeup are not just limited to how others see your face but also extend to how you see your own face.

Chipping Away at the Glass Ceiling: A Social Psychological Perspective on the Role of Women Directors

The glass ceiling in corporate boards all over the world has sparked debate in research and practice. Advocates of chipping away at this glass ceiling argue the importance of gender diversity to improve board monitoring and eventually firm outcomes, while others dispute the benefits of increasing women on boards. In this study, we draw on the social psychological perspective to analyze whether increasing the proportion of women on the boards of publicly listed Spanish firms is relevant for corporate governance. Our findings show that the presence and leadership positions of women on the board and/or the nomination committee are not significantly associated with the increase in incorporating new women directors. Moreover, we find that women are less likely than men to be assigned with leadership positions, both in the board as a whole or its board committees. These findings suggest that women face gender bias, resulting in a double glass ceiling in corporate boards. Furthermore, the presence of women directors—even when assigned with leadership positions in the board or relevant board committees—does not improve or diminish the main board monitoring activities, thus uncovering that women on boards may yield similar outcomes despite being outnumbered by men in the boardroom.

Review: Single attribute and multi attribute facial gender and age estimation.

Facial age and gender recognition have vital applications as consumer profile prediction, social media advertisement, human-computer interaction, image retrieval system, demographic profiling, customized advertisement systems, security and surveillance. This paper presents a study on Single Attribute (Attribute: either Gender or Age) and Multi-Attribute (both Gender and Age) prediction model. We present a review for facial age estimation and gender classification methods based on conventional as well as deep learning approaches developed so far with analysis of their pros, cons and insights for future research. Moreover, this study also enlists the databases used for benchmarking results with their properties for both constrained and unconstrained environment.

U.S. Women Faculty in the Social Sciences Also Face Gender Inequalities.

There is a national interest in United States women’s underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); however, gender inequality in the social sciences has not received similar attention. Although women increasingly earn postgraduate degrees in the social sciences, women faculty still experience gender inequities. Consistent gender inequities include slower career advancement, blunted salaries, unequal workloads, work-life conflict, systemic gender biases, underrepresentation in positions of power, and hostile work environments. Cultural biases suggest that once women have achieved parity, gender bias no longer exists. This review challenges that notion by providing evidence from social science domains in which women are well-represented but continue to face systemic gender biases. We examine cultural influences on gender representation and career advancement in psychology, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. We make interdisciplinary comparisons of career trajectories and salaries using national data, documenting patterns across the social sciences. For example, women economists face gendered standards in publishing, and women political scientists are less likely to have their work cited than men. Furthermore, data show that salaries become stagnant as the representation of women in these fields increases. These disparities reflect cultural biases in perceptions of women’s competence stemming from social role theory. We discuss best practices to address these problems, focusing on the ADVANCE organizational change programs funded by the National Science Foundation that target (a) improving academic climate, (b) providing professional development, and (c) fostering social networking. Federally supported interventions can reveal systemic gender biases in academia and reduce gender disparities for women academics in the social sciences.

Gender and Career: Trends in Digital Society

Digitalization of society, including the labour market, noticeably changes women's and men's career expectations and career strategies. Gender philosophy, questions about gender identity, and gender inequality are questions, the answers to which are critical: “the changes in the social status of women and men in our time have fundamentally changed many familiar stereotypes” (Mikhailova, 2011). Kontakt InterSearch Russia conducted a series of studies for Forb’s magazine (Kontakt InterSearch Russia, 2021a, b, c; Forbs, 2021) that evaluated the career expectations of respondents; the qualities of managers that female and male managers lack; the presence and causes of gender discrimination; and “stop-factors” of career for men and women. It was found that female executives twice as often as male executives face gender discrimination; women more often than men consider their personal qualities as the reason for career success (men more often than women cite external aspects such as “mentor” and “good timing” among the reasons for career success). At the same time, experts noted that “the boundaries of “female” and “male” qualities are blurring” (Forbs, 2021). In our opinion, this is also due to the influence of digitalization, which is changing the content of many areas of activity.

Computer-aided Planning and Execution in Facial Gender Surgery: Approaches, Concepts, and Implementation.

Summary:Facial gender surgery (FGS) involves major surgical modification of the craniofacial soft tissues and skeleton. Computer-aided surgery (CAS) has improved precision and accuracy of osteotomies and decreased operative time in complex reconstructive craniofacial surgery. FGS is a natural application for CAS because the procedures are not only technically challenging but also demand a high standard of aesthetic results. Planning FGS cases virtually enables better and more reproducible results through simulated surgical planning and precise execution of osteotomies in surgical fields with limited exposure. We describe our experience with CAS in FGS for each of the facial thirds to introduce new concepts for conceptual planning of osteotomy design and patient-specific implants.

Can Feelings “Feel” Wrong? Similarities Between Counter-Normative Emotion Reports and Perceptual Errors

In popular belief, emotions are regarded as deeply subjective and thus as lacking truth value. Is this reflected at the behavioral or brain level? This work compared counter-normative emotion reports with perceptual-decision errors. Participants (university students; N = 29, 16, 40, and 60 in Experiments 1–4, respectively) were given trials comprising two tasks and were asked to (a) report their pleasant or unpleasant feelings in response to emotion-invoking pictures (emotion report) and (b) indicate the gender of faces (perceptual decision). Focusing on classical error markers, we found that the results of both tasks indicated (a) post-error slowing, (b) speed/accuracy trade-offs, (c) a heavier right tail of the reaction time distribution for errors or counter-normative responses relative to correct or normative responses, and (d) inconclusive evidence for error-related negativity in electroencephalograms. These results suggest that at both the behavioral and the brain levels, the experience of reporting counter-normative emotions is remarkably similar to that accompanying perceptual-decision errors.

Morality extracted under crowding impairs face identification.

We investigated whether morality associated with faces is perceptible even under less optimal visual conditions such as crowding. A facial image was paired with a sentence describing an immoral act or a neutral act. Participants imagined the person performing the actions described in the sentence during the learning phase. Then, in the crowding phase, the target face was briefly presented in the left or right peripheral visual fields. Participants were required to judge the gender or morality of the target face in Experiment 1 and to choose the target face from two faces in Experiment 2. In both experiments, flankers were presented around the target face in the flanker condition, whereas no flankers were presented in the no-flanker condition. Experiment 1 indicated that the accuracy of judgments about the morality of a crowded face was higher for immoral faces than for neutral faces. This demonstrates that morality is preferentially extracted even when conscious access to facial representations is limited. Experiment 2 showed that the accuracy of selecting the flanked face from two faces was higher for neutral faces than for immoral faces. These indicated that the morality processed under the crowding impaired the discrimination of the facial identity.

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor

Relative tuning of holistic face processing towards the fovea

Humans quickly detect and gaze at faces in the world, which reflects their importance in cognition and may lead to tuning of face recognition toward the central visual field. Although sometimes reported, foveal selectivity in face processing is debated: brain imaging studies have found evidence for a central field bias specific to faces, but behavioral studies have found little foveal selectivity in face recognition. These conflicting results are difficult to reconcile, but they could arise from stimulus-specific differences. Recent studies, for example, suggest that individual faces vary in the degree to which they require holistic processing. Holistic processing is the perception of faces as a whole rather than as a set of separate features. We hypothesized that the dissociation between behavioral and neuroimaging studies arises because of this stimulus-specific dependence on holistic processing. Specifically, the central bias found in neuroimaging studies may be specific to holistic processing. Here, we tested whether the eccentricity-dependence of face perception is determined by the degree to which faces require holistic processing. We first measured the holistic-ness of individual Mooney faces (two-tone shadow images readily perceived as faces). In a group of independent observers, we then used a gender discrimination task to measured recognition of these Mooney faces as a function of their eccentricity. Face gender was recognized across the visual field, even at substantial eccentricities, replicating prior work. Importantly, however, holistic face gender recognition was relatively tuned—slightly, but reliably stronger in the central visual field. Our results may reconcile the debate on the eccentricity-dependance of face perception and reveal a spatial inhomogeneity specifically in the holistic representations of faces.

The Effect of the 5-HT4 Agonist, Prucalopride, on a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Faces Task in the Healthy Human Brain.

Depression is a common and often recurrent illness with significant negative impact on a global scale. Current antidepressants are ineffective for up to one third of people with depression, many of whom experience persistent symptomatology. 5-HT4 receptor agonists show promise in both animal models of depression and cognitive deficit. We therefore studied the effect of the 5-HT4 partial agonist prucalopride (1 mg daily for 6 days) on the neural processing of emotional faces in 43 healthy participants using a randomised placebo-controlled design. Participants receiving prucalopride were more accurate at identifying the gender of emotional faces. In whole brain analyses, prucalopride was also associated with reduced activation in a network of regions corresponding to the default mode network. However, there was no evidence that prucalopride treatment produced a positive bias in the neural processing of emotional faces. Our study provides further support for a pro-cognitive effect of 5-HT4 receptor agonism in humans. While our current behavioural and neural investigations do not suggest an antidepressant-like profile of prucalopride in humans, it will be important to study a wider dose range in future studies.

The Status of Women Among the Tribal Communities of West Bengal, India

The tribal population has been enumerated as scheduled tribe population since 1951 in accordance to the constitution (Scheduled tribe) order, 1950. They are the aboriginal or Adivasi or early settler of India and they are the most backward groups in India. This paper focuses on the status of tribal women in their community with respect to their male counterparts both in general and tribal populations. Four indicators such as sex ratio, literacy rate, the general fertility rate of women and women's work participation rate are taken to assess the status and the gender discrimination among the tribal communities. The modified Sopher’s Disparity Index (1974) of Kundu and Rao (1986) has been used to identify the gender disparity and Pearson’s correlation co-efficient techniques have been used to analyze the correlation among the indicators. It has been found that like any other community in India, tribal women face gender discrimination. They are engaged in different economic sectors as economic assets of tribal households but they are often deprived to get their social rights. This paper also finds out the causes of gender disparity and suggests some measures to mitigate the gender discrimination.

The influence of facial attractiveness and personal characteristics on imitation

ABSTRACT Imitation plays a crucial role in learning and communication, although a little is known whether individuals imitate each other based on particular personality traits. Facial features and personal characteristics are the major components of personal impressions. This study adopted the color paradigm to explore the effect of the two factors on imitation. Experiment 1 examined the effect of facial attractiveness and face gender on imitation. The results showed that woman who appeared attractive drove imitation more than woman who did not. However, men who appeared attractive and unattractive differed insignificantly. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of facial attractiveness and personal characteristics on imitation. The results of Experiment 1 were verified, stating that positive personal characteristics drove imitation more than negative personal characteristics. The study found that facial attractiveness still affected imitation when characteristics information appeared. Regarding negative personal characteristics, individuals who appeared attractive drove imitation more than individuals who did not. The results indicate that imitation is automated, influenced not only by face types but also by personal characteristics.