The sexualization of girls is an ongoing issue that has garnered much attention in recent years, with one contributing factor, media, becoming an ever-increasing part of children’s lives. This study explored four questions: How do mothers and teachers perceive the media’s influence on young girls’ identity development? To what extent do these caregivers engage young girls in analyzing media messages? What observed behaviors of 4-year old girls indicate media’s influence? and What are caregivers interpretations and responses to these behaviors? Analyzing the perceptions of mothers and female teachers of 4-year old girls contributes to a better understanding of how girls are influenced, both by caregivers’ actions and by media consumed. Twelve mothers and female early childhood teachers from three South Florida preschools were interviewed to better understand how girls are influenced by media, and to gain a more holistic perspective of the potential impact of media on young girls’ behaviors and their emerging understanding of what it means to be a girl today. The findings indicate that mothers and female teachers perceive media to be influential in the lives of girls, both in terms of general child development and young girls’ gender identity development. The participants are observing behaviors in their 4-year old girls that indicate media’s influence; these behaviors include sexualized dancing, attitude and language changes, and requests for sexualized clothing and beauty products. Although these mothers and teachers do not yet help girls analyze media messages, they do, however, engage in significant guidance as they interpret and respond to the observed behaviors. These findings reflect a need for media literacy education for parents and teachers, as well as comprehensive sexualization awareness and prevention education for children, parents, and teachers. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Orientadora: Lidia Maria Vianna Possas / Banca: Eliane Rose Maio / Banca: Antônio Mendes da Costa Braga / Banca: Lilian Henrique Azevedo / Banca: Monique Florêncio de Aguiar / Resumo: Esta etnografia foi realizada a partir de cenários de circulação de homens em situação de rua; Praça do Ferreira no centro de Fortaleza/Ce e o Centro POP (política pública para a população em situação de rua). A tese trata de apreender um modo específico de "olhar fronteiriço" para a relação contemporânea entre às margens, os chamados moradores de rua e o centro chamadas de "pessoas de bem". Tendo como pano de fundo essa relação, o objetivo central deste texto é etnografar os estilos de masculinidades forjadas pelos homens em situação de rua com suas identidades abjetas e performatizações de gênero com fins de sobrevivência. Os homens em situação de rua, como categoria plástica de rejeição, acusação e desvinculação social e econômica, evocam e questionam zonas de fronteiras simbólicas, espaciais, sociais, corporais, morais e políticas. Consequentemente, incitam nas "pessoas de bem" uma defesa de ações para a sua retirada dos espaços urbanos pelos quais circulam. Com expressões limites de degradação humana por estarem abaixo na escala social e por subverterem o espaço público, os homens que moram na Praça do Ferreira criam alteridades, gestam territorialidades, acionam o Estado e incitam políticas urbanísticas sanitárias e repressivas, além de provocarem saberes e classificações. A pesquisa foi realizada em dois registros empíricos distintos: i) convivência com os homens no Centro POP e participação nas oficinas socioeducativas; ii) convivência em suas sociabilidades no espaço... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This ethnography was made from scenarios of circulation of street men; the Ferreira Square in the center of Fortaleza/CE and the POP Center (public policy for the street population). The thesis is about apprehending a specific mode of "frontier look" for the contemporary relationship between the margins (street men) and the center ("good people"). Against this background, its central goal is to ethnograph the styles of masculinities forged by street men with their abject identities and their gender performations in order to survive. Street men, as a plastic category of rejection, prosecution and social and economic untying, evoke and enquire areas of symbolic, spatial, social, corporeal, moral, and political frontiers. Consequently, they incite in the "good people" an avid defense of actions for their withdrawal from the urban spaces through which they circulate. With bordering expressions of human degradation, as they are below in the social scale and because they subvert the public space, street people in Praça do Ferreira create alterities, generate territorialities, trigger the State and incite sanitary and repressive urban policies, besides to provoke knowledge and classifications. The research was conducted in two different empirical registers: i) coexistence with the men in the POP Center and participation in socio-educational workshops; ii) coexistence in their sociabilities in the space of the Square of Ferreira and streets of the Fortaleza's center. The descriptions... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Doutor

Lecture note-taking is an important study strategy used by a majority of college students to record important information presented in class. Research suggests that there may be gender differences in note-taking and test taking. However, previous research on lecture note-taking has only examined gender differences, or used gender as an anecdotal variable, in post-hoc analyses. This is the first dissertation to investigate gender differences in lecture note-taking directly. More specifically, the primary purpose of this dissertation was to determine if gender differences in lecture note-taking exist, and if they do, to examine the cognitive and motivational variables that might explain them. A second purpose was to determine if there might be gender related differences in test performance. This research is an extension of research on lecture note-taking expertise (Peverly, Ramaswamy, Brown, Sumowski, Alidoost, & Garner, 2007), in which a reanalysis of their data found that females wrote faster than males, had higher quality notes, higher semantic retrieval scores, and performed better on written recall of the lecture (Reddington et al., 2006). A sample of 139 undergraduate students took notes from a prerecorded lecture, and were later allowed to review their notes before taking a test of written recall. The independent variables included transcription fluency, working memory, verbal ability, conscientiousness, and goal orientation. The dependent variables were note quality and written recall. All procedures were group administered. Results indicated that females recorded more information in notes and recall than males. Females also performed significantly better on measures of transcription fluency, working memory, verbal ability, and conscientiousness. Note quality was significantly predicted by verbal ability, gender, and the gender x verbal ability interaction, while written recall was significantly predicted by transcription fluency, mastery goal orientation, and the gender x conscientiousness interaction. Future research should continue to focus on examining potential gender differences associated with note-taking and test performance.

This dissertation consists of the musical score for my work for voice and ensemble, "Voices from the Killing Jar," and an accompanying paper. "Voices from the Killing Jar" was written for the Wet Ink Ensemble in 2010-2011, and takes as its subject seven female characters from literature, history, and myth. In the paper, a musical analysis of each of the work's seven movements is accompanied by brief literary analyses of the characters and their sources. This is followed by relevant details of my history as a performer, composer, and Wet Ink Ensemble co- director, and a discussion of the unique instrumentation and performance practice encapsulated in this piece as a result of my close work with Wet Ink over the last several years. The paper concludes with an examination of my dual role as a composer and performer in this piece and in my work in general, and with a brief discussion of social and gender-theoretical issues that inform my work as a female composer.

With women's increased education and labor market participation in the last few decades the labor market has changed considerably. At the same time the interaction between household activities and work have been constantly evolving, affecting household dynamics and family outcomes, such as fertility, marriage and divorce. The first chapter explores the effect of unrestricted access to the birth control pill on young people's career plans, using annual surveys of college freshmen from 1968 to 1980. In particular it addresses the question of who was affected by the introduction of the birth control pill by looking at career plans of both men and women, and by separating the effect by level of academic ability and race. The results show that unrestricted access to the pill caused high ability women to move towards occupations with higher wages, higher occupational prestige scores and higher male ratios. The estimated effects for women with low grades and from low selectivity colleges are in the opposite direction. Men were also affected by unrestricted access to the pill, as their aspirations shifted towards traditionally male dominated occupations, across all ability groups. The biggest effect of unrestricted access to the pill is found to be on non-white students, both among men and women. The paper uses Census Data to compare the changes in career plans to actual changes in labor market outcomes. When looking at the actual career outcomes, early access to the pill affects both men and women -- shifting their careers towards traditionally male dominated occupations associated with higher wages. Early access to the pill is also associated with significantly higher actual income for men. In the second chapter I look at the relationship between increased access to reliable fertility controls and men's disappearance from teaching. As the pill has been found to have a substantial effect on women's family responsibilities, career investments and labor market outcomes, men's bargaining position in the marriage market is likely to have changed considerably. Teaching stands out among the career choices of male college freshmen in terms of average income and prestige. The effect of the shift in bargaining power on men's career choices is hence likely to be prominent in the teaching sector. Between 1968 and 1980, the ratio of male college freshmen planning to become a teacher fell from 12.4% to 2.4% and the share of males among those who aspired to teach dropped from 30.6% to 19.7%. Using nationally representative data on the career plans of college freshmen I find that unrestricted access to the birth control pill bears a negative relation to the likelihood that men plan to teach, while changes in the strength of teacher unions and relative wages of teachers have limited effect on their career plans. Men's aspirations shift away from teaching towards occupations that are associated with higher average income like accounting and computer programming. The results are supported by equivalent findings looking at actual career outcomes in the Census Data. The third chapter focuses on the role of discrimination and the possibility that education as a tool to reveal ability is more important among women than men. As social networks tend to run along gender lines and managers in the labor market are predominantly male, it may be more difficult for women to signal their ability without college credentials. Moreover, women may use education to signal their labor market attachment. A game theoretical model of racial discrimination and educational sorting, introduced by Lang and Manove (2011) is applied to examine the gender gap in schooling attainment. As the gender gap differs between demography groups, being more prominent for blacks and Hispanics, the model is estimated separately for each race or ethnicity group. Using data from the NLSY79, the results in the paper are consistent with a model where education is more valuable to women, due to signaling. As predicted by the model, education as a function of ability (measured with AFQT scores) is more concave for women than for men. For over 88 % of the whites in the sample women choose higher level of education given their ability, than do men. On the other hand, the model fits the data better for whites than for blacks and Hispanics, and therefore fails to explain the observed differences across race and ethnicity groups.

This dissertation considers discourses bearing on the social dynamics of immigration and postcolonial diversity in contemporary France in light of their interconnections with issues of sexuality and assimilation. Synthesizing and building on recent work by anthropologists, sociologists and cultural theorists it explores the current debate over French identity--a debate that has to a considerable extent revolved around the impact of recent postwar immigration to France and the "integration" of immigrants on the cultural level, and of which a recent symptom has been the Sarkozy government's launch of a public national debate about "l'identité nationale" (national identity). Overall, my project focuses on the intermingling of the cultural and the political in cultural representations of immigrants and their descendants. Specifically, I consider the highly charged terrain of the representation of sexuality. In the discourse on laïcité (secularism) and integration, gender norms and tolerance of homosexuality have emerged as key components and are now often employed to highlight immigrants' "un-French" attitudes. I argue that, as French and immigrant identities have been called into question, sexuality has constituted a favored prism through which to establish the existence of difference. Through the study of cultural representations of immigration, I will explain how the potential of immigrants and their descendants to assimilate is often judged according to the "fitness" of their attitudes about sexuality. I will further argue that the successful assimilation of immigrants often follows a "required" phase of sexualization, in which the sexuality of the immigrant becomes his or her main marker, the primary factor through which the immigrant is intelligible, beyond other possibly relevant criteria.

This study examined the relationship between perceived workgroup sexual orientation dissimilarity and participant perceptions of group process and withdrawal. Based on the theory of relational demography within groups (Riordan, 2000) and recent research on moderators of the dissimilarity-outcome relationship (e.g., Stewart and Garcia-Prieto, 2008), the study argued that: (1) perceived sexual orientation dissimilarity would be associated with negative group process effects and increased withdrawal for all study participants, (2) that the relationship between perceived sexual orientation dissimilarity and outcomes would be stronger for heterosexual individuals than for those who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LBG), and (3) that participants' level of sexual orientation identity development would moderate their responses to increased sexual orientation dissimilarity in their workgroups. Three hundred and ninety-eight graduate students at Columbia University were asked to respond to an online questionnaire designed to assess their perceptions of workgroup dissimilarity, communication, conflict and peer relations as well as their individual levels of withdrawal. Hypotheses were tested using hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Results indicated that perceived dissimilarity was positively related to increased relationship conflict, task conflict and withdrawal and negatively related to peer relations among all study participants. Additionally, the effects of perceived dissimilarity on task conflict and withdrawal were moderated by participant sexual orientation and participant sexual orientation identity development, consistent with study hypotheses. Slightly different patterns of findings emerged when the results were examined for LGB and heterosexual individuals separately. Though not hypothesized, values dissimilarity was found to mediate the relationship between perceived sexual orientation dissimilarity and several of the group process outcomes, particularly for heterosexual individuals. The contributions and implications of these findings for relational demography and sexual orientation workplace research are also discussed.

This research focuses on the underrepresentation of minoritized groups in scientific careers. The study is an analysis of the relationships between race, gender, and those with careers in the sciences, focusing on the lived experiences of Black women physicists, as viewed through the lens of women scientists in the United States. Although the research is geographically localized, the base-line question is clear and mirrors in the researcher's own intellectual development: "How do Black women physicists describe their experiences towards the construction of a scientific identity and the pursuit of a career in physics?" Grounded on a critical race theory perspective, the study uses storytelling to analyze how these women build their identities as scientists and how they have negotiate their multiple identities within different communities in society. Findings show that social integration is a key element for Black women physicists to enter study groups, which enables access to important resources for academic success in STEM. The study has implications for physics education and policymakers. The study reveals the role of the different communities that these women are part of, and the importance of public policies targeted to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in science, especially through after-school programs and financial support through higher education.

In recent decades, several countries have experienced a rapid increase in their sex ratios at birth. This dissertation examines the causes and consequences of these imbalances in the Indian context. Lower desired fertility can translate into more male-biased sex ratios if son preference remains strong, especially with greater availability of prenatal sex-selection technology. Chapter 1 investigates whether financial incentives can simultaneously decrease fertility and the sex ratio at birth. I build a model where the effects of incentives on child-bearing and sex-selection are determined by the degree of son preference and the costs of children and sex-selection, relative to the size of incentives. I test the theoretical predictions in the context of Devirupak, a scheme adopted by the Indian state of Haryana. Devirupak incentivizes parents to have either one child or two daughters. Parents of one girl receive a larger benefit than one-boy or two-girl families, who receive the same amount. I construct a woman-year panel dataset from retrospective birth histories and exploit variation in the state and the timing of implementation and the composition of pre-existing children to estimate the causal effect of this scheme. Devirupak lowers the number of children by 0.9 percent, but mainly through a 1.9 percent decrease in the number of daughters. I find no evidence for an increase in the demand for daughters in response to a decrease in their relative price in the overall sample. However, the proportion of one-boy couples and the sex ratio of first and second births increased significantly. Thus, schemes that induce parents to choose either sons or daughters may lower fertility, but have unintended consequences for sex ratios, despite larger incentives for girls, if a minimum number of sons is desired. Chapter 2 examines the impact of tariff decline on fertility, the sex ratio at birth, and infant mortality in rural Indian districts. In relative terms, women more exposed to tariff cuts are more likely to give birth and these births are more likely to be female. These results are primarily driven by low-caste, low-wealth, and uneducated women. Moreover, infant mortality decreases for girls (but not boys) born to these low-status mothers. On the other hand, fertility decreases and female infant mortality increases for high-status women. They also exhibit a weak increase in the sex ratio at birth. Differential effect of the tariff reform on the relative economic opportunities of women across socioeconomic groups is the most likely mechanism for these results. Chapter 3 analyzes the effects of sex ratio imbalances on pre-marital investments and marital outcomes in India. Changes in the availability of pre-natal sex-selection technology differentially altered the mating pool of individuals born in different states, cohorts, and endogamous social groups. I show that increases in the male to female sex ratio at birth are associated with a decrease in educational attainment, age at marriage, and labor force participation rates, and an increase in spouse's age for women relative to men. These findings are consistent with an improvement in the position of women in the marriage market due to their relative scarcity.

This dissertation examines the themes of rape and domestic violence in Zionist literature on the "Arab Question" published in Hebrew from the last years of Ottoman rule in Palestine through to the 1929 riots that erupted during the British Mandate. By bringing to light the import of rape and domestic violence in works by authors such as L.A. Arieli, Yehuda Burla, Aharon Reuveni, Yitzhak Shami, and Shoshana Shababo, I demonstrate that Zionist motions of race and gender developed in an intertwined manner as writers imagined the future of Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine. Moreover, while scholarly treatments of gender in the yishuv have thus far largely concentrated on questions of masculinity, I show how reading for masculinity and femininity together reveals Zionism's horror-stricken sexual underbelly; as authors do away with early fantasies of Jewish-Arab interweaving in an increasingly volatile political climate, they translate pogrom-associated fears of bodily violation from Russian and Eastern European settings into the Palestine arena. In novels, short stories, poetry, medical literature, and propaganda pamphlets Zionist intellectuals also urge reform of Jewish family life, sexual partnering, and hygiene education--this, all the while that they mount a case against turning to the Arabs as a viable folk source and partner for the New Jew.