Narrow Results

Using panel data from the 2001 cohort of the Japanese Longitudinal Survey of Newborns in the 21st Century, this paper examines whether financial investments in children differ by child’s birth order and gender. This study is one of a few studies that use information on actual expenditures on the child under study to infer birth order and gender effects rather than using child outcomes such as educational attainment and health. Moreover, we examine specific types of expenditure on children such as expenditure on regular schooling, extra-curricular activities, extra-educational activities, and pocket money. It is found that in Japan, parents spend more money on (a) their first-born child; (b) their male children when they are of preschool age; and (c) their female children when they are of school age. In contrast, parents’ spending on education-related activities outside regular schools is higher for their first-born child and for girls. However, this gender effect is limited to three children families. Spending on extra-curricular activities and regular schooling is higher for girls and for first-born children. Interestingly, girls receive more pocket money than boys, whereas a first-born child receives less pocket money compared to a later-born child of the same age. With a few exceptions, overall, we observe mostly first-born preference and more of a ‘daughter preference’ than ‘son preference’ in parental investments among Japanese children.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between traditional beliefs, practices, and attitudes towards sexual behaviours, including homosexuality, non-marital sex, prostitution, polygamy, and divorce, in 26 Muslim communities across Africa, Asia, and Europe. While religiosity consistently correlates with traditional attitudes– rejecting homosexuality, non-marital sex, and prostitution while accepting polygamy — traditional beliefs, such as witchcraft and the evil eye, exhibit more complex and sometimes contradictory effects. For instance, belief in witchcraft associates with greater disapproval of polygamy, while belief in the acceptability of sorcery under Islam correlates with greater acceptance. These findings reveal significant variation in attitudes even within a religiously homogeneous sample, suggesting that religiosity and traditional beliefs influence sexual norms in distinct ways. This study underscores the importance of moving beyond religion to capture the broader cultural and traditional mindsets shaping attitudes. It calls for further research to better understand the conflicting and multifaceted impacts of tradition on social norms, particularly regarding sexuality.

Populations become increasingly feminized with age. Since older women are more vulnerable to poverty, they may find it more difficult than men to access health care. This study examines factors that may constrain older persons in Southeast Asia from meeting their health-care needs when sick. Our analysis of household survey data from Cambodia, the Philippines, and Viet Nam shows that women are more likely to have reported sickness or injury than men, a difference that is meaningful and statistically significant. While women in Cambodia and the Philippines are more likely to seek treatment than men, the gender difference is reversed in Viet Nam where the stigma and discrimination associated with some diseases may more strongly deter women. The probability of seeking treatment rises with age more sharply for women than men in all countries. However, for the subsample of elders, the gender difference is not significant.

This paper uses the task-content-of-occupations framework to analyze trends in employment and wages of female and male workers in the Indian labor market from 1994 to 2017. Workers are classified into four main occupational categories: nonroutine cognitive, routine cognitive, nonroutine manual, and routine manual. Decomposing the changes in employment shares into between-industry changes and within-industry changes across occupational categories reveals that within-industry employment changes have increasingly played an important role, suggesting the growing importance of using the task-content framework to analyze labor market trends. The biggest increase in employment shares is for nonroutine cognitive occupations for both female and male workers. The wage analysis reveals that, on average, the gender wage gap has been lowest in routine cognitive occupations for most of the period of analysis. However, the analysis finds no consistent, significant changes in wages based on occupational specialization during the period of analysis.

Most computational models for gender classification use global information (the full face image) giving equal weight to the whole face area irrespective of the importance of the internal features. Here, we use a global and feature based representation of face images that includes both global and featural information. We use dimensionality reduction techniques and a support vector machine classifier and show that this method performs better than either global or feature based representations alone. We also present results of human subjects performance on gender classification task and evaluate how the different dimensionality reduction techniques compare with human subjects performance. The results support the psychological plausibility of the global and feature based representation.

We examine and model dynamics in three areas of social cognition: (1) political transformations within Russia, (2) evaluation of political trends in other countries by Russians, and (3) evaluation of Russian stereotypes concerning women. We try to represent consciousness as vectorfields and trajectories in a cognitive state space. We use psychosemantic techniques that allow definition of the state space and the systematic construction of these vectorfields and trajectories and their portrait from research data. Then we construct models to fit them, using multiple regression methods to obtain linear differential equations. These dynamical models of social cognition fit the data quite well. (1) The political transformations were modeled by a spiral repellor in a two-dimensional space of a democratic–totalitarian factor and social depression–optimism factor. (2) The evaluation of alien political trends included a flow away from a saddle toward more stable and moderate political regimes in a 2D space, of democratic–totalitarian and unstable–stable cognitive dimensions. (3) The gender study showed expectations (attractors) for more liberated, emancipated roles for women in the future.

This study aims to determine the relative exercise intensity of classical Yang Tai Chi Chuan (TCC) in different ages and gender. One hundred TCC practitioners (54 men and 46 women) aged 25 to 80 years participated in this investigation. Men and women were separated into three groups: young (25–44 y/o), middle-aged (45–64 y/o) and elderly (65–80 y/o). Heart rate (HR) responses during TCC practice were measured by using electrocardiographic telemetry. An exercise test with breath-by-breath measurements of cardiorespiratory function was also performed for each subject during the incremental exercise of leg cycling. Measurements obtained during the TCC practice and exercise testing were compared to determine the exercise intensity of TCC. While performing TCC, the mean HR of men was 141±12 bpm, 132±9 bpm and 120±10 bpm in the young, middle-aged and elderly groups, respectively. Men practiced TCC with mean HR corresponding to 57.8±3.7%, 56.6±3.4% and 55.1±3.1% of heart rate reserve (HRR) in the three groups. Meanwhile, the mean HR of women was 136±10 bpm, 126±11 bpm and 115±12 bpm in the young, middle-aged and elderly groups, respectively. Women practiced TCC with mean HR corresponding to 52.7±2.8%, 51.5±2.6% and 50.3±2.9% of HRR in the three age groups. The results demonstrate that classical Yang TCC is an exercise with moderate intensity, and its exercise intensity is similar across different ages in each gender. In conclusion, TCC is an aerobic exercise and suitable for participants of different ages and gender to improve their functional capacity.

This paper investigates the role of gender in remittance behavior among migrants using the 2004 Vietnam Migration Survey data. The gender dimension to remittance behavior has not featured strongly in the existing literature and our findings thus contain novel appeal. In addition, we use estimates from both homoscedastic and heteroscedastic tobit models to decompose the raw gender difference in remittances into treatment and endowment components. We find little evidence that gender differences in remittances are attributable to behavioral differences between men and women, and this finding is invariant to whether the homoscedastic or heteroscedastic tobit is used in estimation.

Empirical research on occupational segregation has conventionally measured it with Duncan dissimilarity index. This paper adopts an alternative approach — the L index — using the multivariate analysis introduced by Spriggs and Williams, which we extend to explore the impact of economic development on occupational segregation. This enables us to investigate the importance of individuals' attributes in explaining the segregation. Using data from the Labor Force Survey between 1985 and 2005, our results indicate that the L index controlling only for sex is substantial and persistent. However, the full model L index generally implies that occupational segregation has widened after controlling for individuals' attributes. It is found that segregation in the Malaysian labor market is mainly explained by gender, which, on average, accounts for 82% of the segregation. When a measure of macroeconomic conditions and a time variable economic are factored into the model that controls for gender only, the L index remains unchanged.

Semiparametric estimation has gained significant attention in the study of wage inequality between men and women in recent years. By extending the wage gap at the mean towards the entire wage distribution using quantile regression, it enables researchers to ascertain the direction and the proportions of differences in characteristics and returns to these characteristics at different parts of the wage distribution. This line of research has been prominent in western society but has not yet been explored in the context of the Malaysian labor market. To fill the gap, this paper examines the gender earnings gap in Malaysia between 1994 and 2004 using Malaysia Population and Family Survey data. The gender earnings differential, as measured by the log percentage point is 53% in 1994. The difference reduces to 45% for a restricted sample and 42% for the unrestricted sample in 2004. However, it was found that the gender wage gap reduces as we move up the wage distribution. This suggests that women suffer from a sticky floor effect, i.e., the gender wage gap is bigger at the bottom of distribution. More importantly, the observed gender wage differentials do not reflect differences in the productive characteristics of the workers. In fact, it accounts for very little, if any, of the gap in Malaysia. However, the extent of the price effect is larger at the bottom end of the distribution than at the top.

This paper estimates the gender wage gap and its composition in China’s urban labor market. The traditional Blinder–Oaxaca (1973) decomposition method with different weighing systems is employed. To correct for potential selection bias caused by women’s labor force participation, we employ the Heckman’s two-step procedure to estimate the female wage function. A large proportion of the gender wage gap is unexplained by differences of productive characteristics of individuals. Even though women have higher level of education attainments on average, they receive lower wages than men. Both facts suggest a potential discrimination against women in China.

In 1978, Singapore became the first country to introduce legislation allowing foreign domestic workers to work in the country under special visas. Although Singapore is often cited in the literature as a success story, no studies have quantified the impact of this legislation. In this paper, we use data derived from the Singapore Yearbook of Manpower Statistics between 1974 and 1985 to determine the influence of the 1978 legislation on the labor supply of Singaporean women. We find that the labor supply of women affected by this policy increased by between 3.1% and 6.2%.

With the recent education reforms in Hong Kong, students with special education needs (SEN) are gradually returning to mainstream schools. There are high expectations on the next generation, especially in terms of education achievements to build a successful path for growth; however, when children have SEN that affect their learning, what problems are faced by their working mothers? Findings provide an overview of the latest work–family conflict situation faced by working mothers of children with SEN. Given the financial burden, they suffer from high work–family conflict, as they are forced to work but are also required to spend more time helping their children.

The study examines the extent of gender- and caste-based discrimination among the formally and informally employed in India using the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) Employment-Unemployment Survey (EUS) data for the four major rounds from 1999–00 to 2011–12. Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition results corrected for self-selection show wage discrimination to be significantly higher in informal employment compared to the formally employed. Similarly, caste-based discrimination is found to be lower compared to gender-based discrimination. The quantile decomposition results show discrimination to vary across the quantiles. Our results highlight the need for better regulation of the informal labor market in India.

Deviations from self-interest in economic behavior have recently been featured in models of “social preferences.” This study examines the social preferences of Japanese university students using Charness and Rabin’s [(2002). Understanding social preferences with simple tests. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117, 817–869] experimental design and Martinsson et al.’s [(2011). Social preferences during childhood and the role of gender and age: An experiment in Austria and Sweden. Economics Letters, 110, 248–251] empirical methodology. The obtained distributions of preference types are as follows: self-interest — 14%, competitive — 23%, difference aversion — 73% and social-welfare — 22%. I find a significant age effect for the self-interest preference alone, and a gender difference for the self-interest, difference aversion and social-welfare preferences.

In this research, task errors were obtained during performance of a marker location task in which the markers were shown on a computer screen under nine LED lighting conditions; three illuminances (100, 300 and 500 lx) and three color temperatures (3000, 4500 and 6500 K). A total of 47 students participated voluntarily in these tasks. The results showed that task errors in the morning were small and nearly constant across the nine lighting conditions. However in the afternoon, the task errors were significantly larger and varied across lighting conditions. The largest errors for the afternoon session occurred when the color temperature was 4500 K and illuminance 500 lx. There were significant differences between task errors in the morning and afternoon sessions. No significant difference between females and males was found. Task errors for high myopia students were significantly larger than for the low myopia students under the same lighting conditions. In summary, the influence of LED lighting on task accuracy during office hours was not gender dependent, but was time of day and myopia dependent.

This paper deals with the dynamics of tuberculosis transmission model with different genders and age structures. The basic reproduction numbers ${{ℛ}}_0={{ℛ}}_F+{{ℛ}}_M$ are defined, where ${{ℛ}}_F$ and ${{ℛ}}_M$ are the basic reproduction number of tuberculosis transmission in female and male populations, respectively. The global stability of the disease-free equilibrium was discussed when ${{ℛ}}_0<1$; The existence, uniqueness and global stability of the endemic equilibrium, and the persistence of the system both were proved when ${{ℛ}}_0>1$. The findings indicate that the tuberculosis dynamical model with different genders and age structures will experience the classical threshold dynamic behaviors, that is, if ${{ℛ}}_0<1$, the disease will disappear; while if ${{ℛ}}_0>1$, the disease will spread within the population, and eventually lead to a endemic disease. Finally, the theoretical analysis of the model is verified by numerical simulation and we proposed that male infected individuals should be focused on in the prevention and control of tuberculosis in the future.

This paper examines the impact of motivation (i. e., "need for achievement") and, personality traits (i. e., "individualism/collectivism", "introversion/extraversion") on entrepreneurial potential (EP). The study draws on a sample of 503 students enrolled in business courses at a university in the United Arab Emirates. Statistical analysis reveals that need for achievement is the most significant determinant of entrepreneurial potential. Extraversion is also significantly related to entrepreneurial potential. Statistical examination of interactions (i. e., combined effects) of variables reveals that entrepreneurial potential is explained by the interactive effects of need for achievement, extraversion and collectivism. Surprisingly, and contrary to general expectations, greater entrepreneurial potential is not explained by individualistic aspirations, nor is it found to be gender-related. Practical and theoretical implications of the main findings are discussed.

This study explores gendered lending and marketing practices of start-up capital to women entrepreneurs in South Africa. A multi-method research design, comprising of 6 in-depth interviews with experts, and a survey of 50 women entrepreneurs was adopted using convenience and snowball sampling techniques, respectively. The findings revealed that women entrepreneurs are experiencing gendered discriminatory practices embedded in lending practices used by financial institutions, thereby discouraging them to venture into non-traditional industries. Whilst financial providers may know their products well, many emerging women entrepreneurs in South Africa may find it difficult and costly to obtain information on the thousands of financial products available. Hence, women entrepreneurs resort to taking greater risks than necessary in order to get their businesses off the ground. Educating women on financial matters is extremely important if South Africa is to benefit fully from the untapped entrepreneurial talent that women possess. The study adds voice to the discriminatory lending practices faced by women entrepreneurs in developing countries. Future research could explore the feasibility of establishing a financial institution which caters specifically for the needs of women.

This research aims to investigate whether attitude towards entrepreneurship, perceived entrepreneurial self-efficacy, social norm and gender predict entrepreneurial intentions of Saudi Freshmen students. Starting from the findings of GEM report in Kelley & al. (2010), entrepreneurial intention of Saudi people was recorded as the lowest rate of 1% among 59 countries. This research focuses on studying factors explaining intentions. Based on a literature review, we use a theoretical model of intention based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) which was tested earlier by Boissin et al. (2007a) to French context. We intend to retest it in Saudi context. We add gender as control variable and a potential predictor of intention. Then, we conduct a research survey from Autumn 2013 to Autumn 2014 of 289 Saudi (183 males and 106 females) students. The collected data was analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) through Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique. Then, results are shown and discussed, and finally, some recommendations are presented.