The purpose of this study was to compare working women, career women, and homemakers on the variable of self-concept, locus of control, and attitudes toward women; to determine the relationship between group membership and age, marital status, education, income level, number of children, age of youngest child, maternal education, maternal training, and maternal work history; and to predict self-concept from a linear combination of locus of control, attitudes toward women, group membership, and all the other variables.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This doctoral thesis is called “Marriages, Microscopes and Missions: Three Women in Postwar Australia.” It takes the form of three stories and a research essay. The stories examine the lives of three Australian women in the decades following the Second World War, while the research essay discusses those lives and the influences that guided and informed the creative writing process. The stories are set in times that encompassed the White Australia Policy, fear of Communism, the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, the sexual revolution and the recent Northern Territory “Intervention.” After the war, women were expected to fit back into the roles prescribed for them before the war. “Populate or Perish” was the catchcry. A single woman was expected, because of her biology, to marry and start a family at a time when marriage often meant losing her job. But the war had changed women. Those who had had wartime jobs or joined the armed forces remembered the freedom, the pay packet and the realisation that they could do the job as well as a man. The old stereotype of women as handmaidens to men seemed out of step with the way women now saw themselves. But with men still in charge there was bound to be conflict ahead. The first story, “The Doctor’s Wife,” looks at a married woman in coastal New South Wales living the prescribed “dream.” The second, “The Drug Analyst,” shows a Sydney-based career woman attempting to live on her own terms. The third, “The Minister’s Maid,” explores the changing role of an Aboriginal woman in a remote semitraditional Northern Territory community. As each story unfolds within its own culture, physical landscape and carrying its history of conflict, the pressures placed on each woman to conform to her society’s expectations, become apparent. In one way or another, the women in these stories are part of my family. While they sometimes find their identities and self esteem under threat, each is sustained by her strong connection to family and community. At this time in our history, finding a sense of belonging is sometimes a difficult task for young people, both white and black Australians. Perhaps that is why family stories are important. They establish our identity and give us a place in history, a sense of belonging to an ongoing, unfolding narrative.

Theories and research in the field of disparaging humor were reviewed, and sexist humor was studied as representative of this field. The relationships of sex-role identification, self-esteem, and attitudes toward women to the judgement of humor in sexist material were investigated. The Scale of Sexist Humor, developed for this investigation, utilized a set of 50 cartoons and jokes devised to approximate overlapping standard curves on the dimensions of sexist content and humor. Subjects were 57 males and 70 female undergraduate students. Each subject performed a forced Q^-sort of the cartoons and jokes, thereby rating them on a five-point scale of funniness, then completed instruments designed to evaluate sex-role identification (the Personal Attributes Questionnaire), self-esteem (The Texas Social Behavior Inventory), and attitudes toward women (the Attitudes Toward Women Scale), A demographic information sheet was also obtained from each subject to utilize in ancillary analysis.

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of individual differences on Sexual Harassment (SH) perceptions at the workplace. Specifically, the effects of attitudes toward women&amp / #8217 / s gender roles and personality attributes (i.e., self-esteem and emotional affectivity) on SH perceptions were examined. Another purpose of the study was to explore the stereotype domains of sexual harassers and to compare it with those of managers. A preliminary study was conducted by interviewing 56 Turkish working women. Based on the content analyses of the responses, a measure of social-sexual behavior manifestations relevant to the Turkish culture and a measure of harasser stereotypes were developed. In the main study, the social-sexual behavior measure was used to assess harassment perceptions and experiences of women, the stereotype measure was used to explore the nature of harasser and manager stereotypes. A total of 353 women employed in various organizations participated in the main study. Social-sexual behavior items based on sexual harassment perceptions yielded six factors (i.e., unwanted personal attention, verbal sexual attention, sexist hostility, physical sexual assault, insinuation of interest, and sexual bribery and sexual coercion). Each factor was regressed on the individual differences variables. Negative affectivity predicted perceptions of unwanted personal attention, verbal sexual attention, and sexist hostility type of behaviors. Attitudes toward women&amp / #8217 / s gender roles predicted physical sexual assault and sexual bribery-sexual coercion type of behaviors. Self-esteem was found to predict all sexual harassment factors, except sexist hostility. Women&amp / #8217 / s stereotypes towards harassers were found to be significantly different from their stereotypes towards managers, except one domain, which was dominancy. Cluster analysis suggested three different profiles of stereotypes towards harassers, and three different profiles of stereotypes towards managers. Women having stereotypes of negative or negative and powerful harassers perceived significantly more sexual harassment than those with ambivalent stereotypes towards harassers.