INTERDISCIPLINARIA, 2019, 36(2), 283-298
Men, Women, & Economic Changes: SRs of the
Economic Crisis
Men, Women, and Economic Changes: Social
Representations of the Economic Crisis
Hombres, mujeres y cambios económicos: representaciones
sociales de la crisis económica
Ida
Galli1, Anna Liguori2, Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi3
and Roberto Fasanelli4
1Associate Professor at Department of Social Sciences,
University of Naples “Federico II”, Naples, Italy. E-mail: idagalli@unina.it.
2Post Doc at School of Psychology, University of Geneva, Switzerland. E-mail: anna.liguori83@gmail.com
3Full Professor at School of Psychology, University of
Geneva, Switzerland. E-mail: Fabio.Lorenzi-Cioldi@unige.ch.
4Assistant Professor at Department of Social Sciences,
University of Naples “Federico II”, Naples, Italy. E-mail: fasanell@unina.it.
The authors thank
Willem Doise, Professor Emeritus at University of
Geneva, for his helpful comments on a first draft of this manuscript.
Ethics Statement
This study
was carried out in strict accordance with the recommendations of the Ethic
Commission of the Italian Psychological Association and all procedures complied
with the guidelines approved by the Members of the National Assembly
Resumen
La crisis
económica actual ha sido un fenómeno nuevo e inesperado; es parte del sistema
capitalista, bancario y económico que ha sido conocido hasta el año 2008. La
crisis ha llevado a los bancos, los Estados, las instituciones internacionales,
así como a las personas del común, a ver profundos cambios en sus
representaciones sobre la economía. En este escenario, se plantea la pregunta:
¿cómo los hombres y las mujeres de estratos sociales diferentes afrontan el
fenómeno complejo y desconocido de la crisis económica? ¿El género y el estatus
social justifican diferentes significados atribuidos a la crisis, sus causas y
consecuencias? En el presente artículo se elige la teoría de las
representaciones sociales para estudiar el papel del género y el nivel
educativo en la producción de las representaciones de la crisis. Se presentan
resultados de encuestas realizadas en el sur de Italia (N = 120), los cuales
revelan que tanto el género como el nivel educativo de las personas marcan
diferencias en la forma de definir y afrontar la crisis. Por un lado, los
participantes de alto nivel definen la crisis en términos más abstractos que
los participantes de bajo nivel. Por otra parte, los hombres de alto nivel
mantienen un estado de coping
más proactivo con la crisis que los otros participantes, especialmente mujeres.
La discusión se enfoca en el papel de la teoría de la representación social
entendiendo la relación entre género, estatus y comportamiento económico,
aportando ideas sobre cómo la igualdad de género puede ser mejorada.
Palabras clave: Crisis económica; Representaciones sociales; Teoría
del Rol Social; Ética del cuidado; Estatus social.
Abstract
The current
economic crisis has been a new and unexpected phenomenon; it is part of the
capitalist banking and economic system that has been known until 2008. The
crisis has led to banks, states, international institutions, as well as common
people, changing profoundly their representations about the economy. In this
scenario, some questions arise: how do men and women of different social status
face the complex and unknown phenomenon of the economic crisis? Do
gender and
social status justify the different meanings attributed to the crisis, to its
causes and its consequences? When confronted with an external threat like the
economic crisis, people draw on social representations to provide meaning to
that unfamiliar situation. Through media and interpersonal communication,
social groups produce naive theories that improve familiarity with an unexpected
and distressing phenomenon. In order to analyze these lay theories elaborated
though daily economic thinking and acting, this research has been conducted
using Social Representation Theory and its methodological approaches. This
theory, in fact, contributes to our understanding of the societal process of
sense making when an unexperienced external shock affects society. It offers a
way to understand economic phenomena’s impact on social groups. Social
representations (SRs) serve the purpose of making the unfamiliar become
familiar, and the unusual become usual, as well as to provide orientation in
times of change. In this sense, in this article, social representations theory
is used to examine the role of gender and educational status in the production
of representations of the crisis.
Presented
findings came from a survey carried out in Southern Italy (N = 120) revealing
status and gender differences in the ways people define the crisis and cope
with it. Participants were asked to order the first most important five
statements and the first least important statements, among a list of 15
(according to the rule of a multiple of 3) to code every item with a score of 1
(less characteristic), 3 (more characteristic), or 2 (not chosen). Every
Questionnaire of Characterization was created starting from social descriptions
and explanations of the crisis, identified in a previous study. They covered
every sub-dimension of the content (complementary to the structure) of the
social representation of the crisis, such as: cognitive-evaluative aspects
about the representation’s structure (central and peripheral elements);
descriptive-defining aspects of the representation; informative sources and
interaction networks; level of involvement/implication with the object;
relationship between representation and social practices; perceptions,
attributions and
categorizations
(causes, responsibilities, duration/evolution, solutions, positive
implications, the EU’s role). In this paper, we will only consider the answers
related to the following dimensions: crisis definitions, strategies to tackle
the crisis and social practices related to the crisis. The analysis of the data
was carried out primarily using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). In this
analysis, in order to uncover the objectification and anchoring processes, we
considered the interaction of status and gender as an illustrative variable. These
findings were further substantiated with the use of Discriminant analysis. The
social anchoring of social representations of the economic crisis is influenced
by gender and social status. Nevertheless, the difference in status modifies
the stereotypical dimensions, also coherently with predictions derived from
gender role theory about the reduction of the impact of gender stereotypes when
men and women occupy similar social positions. On the one hand, high-status
participants defined the crisis in more abstract terms than low-status
participants. On the other hand, high-status men hold a more proactive style of
coping with the crisis than other participants, especially women. The
discussion focuses on the role of social representations theory in understanding
the relationships between gender, status and economic behavior, providing
insights into how gender equality might be improved.
Keywords: Economic crisis; Social representations; Social Role Theory; Ethic of
care.
Introduction
“Crisis is not the same for everyone” claims the title of a book by the
Italian economist Tito Boeri (2009) to stress how differently members of
various social groups have experienced the impact of the financial and economic
crisis. The financial crisis began in 2007 with a “credit crunch”, and evolved
in 2012 as a sovereign debt crisis. It first hit the
In this complex scenario, men lose their jobs more often than women do,
experiencing frustration for not being able to assume the typically masculine
role of the breadwinner anymore. As for women, they engage in new roles, in
some cases even that of breadwinners, without being able to reconcile
efficiently work and traditional female roles (European Commission Report,
2013).
Also in Italy, where the effects are more limited than in other European
countries (European Commission Report, 2009, 2010; OECD, 2009, 2010), the
crisis affected men even if they were better protected by social safety nets
(Altieri, 2010). However, it seems to have worsened the structural problems of
female employment (segregation, flexibility, conciliation) (Istat,
2011). These dynamics occurred in a labor market profoundly changed when
compared to the crises of the previous years. In particular, matched to the
early ‘90s, labor market today registers certainly a greater female presence
and a considerable weight of the unstable work. In the new, more flexible,
market, the spaces for women have expanded. This rise has been driven by the
spread of higher education and the gradual dematerialization of the economy,
but also from the flexibilization of the market. That process has certainly
made it more a dynamic confrontation between supply and demand, but it has
generated high levels of job instability, which is thickened female employment.
In the middle of the crisis, women accounted for over 53% of unstable
employment, although they constituted just over 39% of total employment
(Altieri, 2009). In the South of Italy this phenomenon is relatively wide and
persistent, and especially interesting in the adult age group (35-54 years),
where almost 1/4 woman are occupied. Therefore, the effects produced by the
process of flexibility show a very contradictory reality, made of the
development of opportunities, the lack of stability and remuneration. The
growth of female employment has been very significant and represents much of
the increase in employment recorded in the last two decades. Anyway, the
employment rate—in Italy 12% lower than EU—have negatively influenced the differences
between the Centre-North and the South of the Country. The increasing
non-participation in the work of Southern women contributes to depress the rate
of the national average occupancy, making the target agreed at the EU Lisbon
Treaty in 2007 (female employment rate to 60%) a distant utopia (Altieri,
2010).
This socio-economical background inspired the following research
questions: How do these men and women living in a period of crisis conceive of,
and cope with, the situation? How do they build their social knowledge about
this complex and unfamiliar phenomenon, starting from their gender and social
status?
Theoretical framework
When confronted with an external threat like the economic crisis, people
draw on social representations to provide meaning to this unfamiliar situation.
Through media and interpersonal communication, social groups produce “naive
theories” that improve familiarity with an unexpected and distressing
phenomenon. In order to analyze these lay theories elaborated though daily economic
thinking and acting, this research has been conducted using Social
Representation Theory (Moscovici, 1961) and its methodologies. This theory, in
fact, contributes to our understanding of the societal process of sense making
when an unexperienced external shock affects society (Puashunder,
2012). It offers a way to understand economic phenomena’s impact on social
groups. Social representations (SRs) have the function to render familiar the
unfamiliar and usual the unusual (Moscovici, 1984b) as well as to provide
orientation in times of change (Moscovici, 1984a). Through capturing discourse
and knowledge-exchange in the social compound, social representations thereby allow delineating dynamic
processes of socio-economic adaptation (Kirchler,
2007; Vergès, 1994). For these reasons, in line with
the tradition of economic psychology, the study of social representations of
economics is crucial to identify different types of financial behaviours
(Roland-Lévy, & Adair, 1998). The objective of social representations
research in the economic area is to understand “how ordinary people perceive
economic phenomena” (Vergès & Bastounis,
2001, p. 25)
Social representations are generated by two main processes,
objectification and anchoring. Objectification consists of the transformation
of an abstract and unfamiliar object into an image or figurative scheme (Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1997; Moscovici, 1984). As Staerklé, Clémence and Spini (2011, p. 761) emphasize:
“Objectification refers to
the transformation of general or scientific ideas into concrete and useful
forms of knowledge. This process produces shared figures or symbols which
incorporate the meaning of the original ideas, but which can be more easily
used in everyday communication. […] However, this does not mean that all group
members would share the same knowledge. The objectified symbols must indeed be
incorporated in established and familiar beliefs which in turn depend on the
social group individuals belong to.”
The anchoring process, for its part, corresponds to the incorporation of
new elements of information into a more familiar, existing knowledge (Doise, Clémence, & Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1993). It allows to transfer something
unknown and potentially threatening into an established and working categorical
system (Galli, 2006) that depends on the specific positioning of individuals
and groups in the social structure. Individuals or groups, in fact, give weight
to different dimensions of representation because of their anchoring in
collective symbolic realities, in shared social psychological experiences, and
in their beliefs about social reality (Spini & Doise, 1998).
Doise (1992; 2010), focuses on
the social aspects of this process. He mentions three possible levels of
anchoring: the psychological, the psycho-sociological, and the sociological.
The latter one refers to the links between representations and individuals’
specific belongings into groups and to their shared social relations. It
assumes that different social insertions provoke different experiences and exchanges,
which influence their social representations.
To explore the correlation between gender differences—related to the
positioning of men and women in the social structure—and social representations
of the crisis, we also used the perspective of Social Role Theory (Eagly, 1987; 1997). Following Eagly's
work, these differences refer to masculine or agentic characteristics (e.g., dominant, assertive and boastful)
versus feminine or communal
characteristics (affectionate, gentle, and sensitive; see Wood & Eagly, 2010). The main idea of this theory is that gender
differences and similarities in behaviors mirror beliefs about men’s and
women’s roles in the society at large (Eagly &
Wood, 2012). In particular, communal traits assigned to women are considered as
low-status traits, whereas the agentic traits assigned to men are high-status
traits (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002; Ridgeway, 2001). Lastly, we
interweaved that approach with the “different voice” perspective asserted by
Gilligan (1982). Her standpoint distinguishes between gendered ethical ways of
being and reasoning. Women would be more oriented towards the care as well as a real and practical view
of life, whereas men would be more oriented toward abstract justice and rights
views.
In general, Social Role Theory
emphasizes social forces such as cultural norms, gender stereotypes and gender
role expectations, whereby Social Representations, according to Doise (1990), are structured around `organizing
principles', understood to be questions or topics leading to specific
viewpoints that depend upon the social positions of individuals. Interrelations
between these two approaches, in our opinion, are useful to emphasize
individual differences, assuming that these are larger than gender differences.
In this sense, as underlined by Malach Pines, Lerner
and Schwartz (2010), some researches have shown that working women, especially
in high positions (Diekman & Eagly,
2000) are a heterogeneous group, with different backgrounds, aspirations and
experiences and their similarities to men are at times larger than the
differences.
Aim of the study
With the aim of investigating the role of shared group memberships and
to search for patterns of individual differences—linked with them—we explored
how participants’ gender and status shape their social representations of the
crisis. More specifically, we examine how men and women, of different status
positions, anchor the economic crisis. In other words, the fact that females
are considered more “communal” and men more “agentic”, or that the rationality
of women is more “practice-oriented” than men’s “abstract” one, turns out to be
a socio-cultural construction rather than a dispositional orientation.
In particular, starting from Eagly’s theory
(1987), we expect that, representing and facing the crisis, men would express
more agentic meanings and women would
express more communal meanings. Thus,
following Gilligan's (1982) perspective, we expect that men should be more
oriented toward abstract ways of
reasoning, while women should engage in more practical ones.
Method
The data come from a large international survey (Galli, Geka, Liguori, & Fasanelli,
2014; Galli, Markova, Bouriche, Fasanelli,
Geka, Iacob, & Iacob, 2010; Liguori, Galli, Fasanelli,
& Iacob, 2014) on the social representations of
the economic crisis. The survey was carried out in
Sample
Four groups of participants (N=120 for each country; n=30 for each
group; gender balanced, aged 20 to 60 years old) were employed: university
students (second/third year; Faculty of economics), mid-level bank clerks,
shopkeepers, and laypeople. Strategies adopted to contact interviewees vary in
each group: students have been reached at university, between classes; bank
clerks were contacted and interviewed by making appointments at their work
place and choosing people from agencies in relations of collaboration or
geographical proximity; shopkeepers have been interviewed on appointment and at
their work place too; laypeople have been contacted in the street, next
to/inside shops.
Data collecting strategies
Studying a social representation, in the Structural approach (Abric, 2003) means, first of all, to find out the
constitutional elements of the structure. In this theoretical framework, to
reach the “significant elements” of the social representation of an economic
crisis, and to reconstruct the organization of these elements, it has chosen to
use the Method of Hierarchized Evocation. In the first part of the interview,
after an open question about the social definition of the “crisis”, the
participants were asked to answer to a free associations and consequent
hierarchisation task, as Vergès’ method provides (Vergès 1994; Vergès & Bastounis, 2001). Besides, the free association task was
completed by open questions about the subjective justification linked to every
associated term, with the aim to avoid lexical ambiguity, which is typical of
this kind of data (Fasanelli, Tuselli
& Galli, 2016; Galli, Fasanelli & Schember, 2018; Marzana, Pozzi, Fasanelli, Mercuri & Fattori, 2016). Vergès
(1994) states that with the interview it is possible, on one side, to reach the
SR’s structure and, on the other, to show how this structure can be translated
in argumentation. For that reason, in the second step of the whole research, to
access the content of the SRs of the economic crisis, a series of “questionnaires
of choice” and “questionnaire of characterization” (Vergés
& Bouriche, 2009, pp. 85-87) were constructed starting
from social descriptions and explanations of the crisis, identified in the
previous study made up by an intercultural team (Galli, Markova, Bouriche, Fasanelli, Geka, Iacob & Iacob, 2010).
Data analysis techniques
The terms evocated by the participants were firstly treated with a lexical
and categorical analysis. In the lexical phase, they were aggregated on the
basis of the synonymy criterion in order to obtain clusters of terms
substantially coincidental with the “manifest meaning” (Bardin, 2003).
Therefore, using a semantic criterion, terms have been further aggregated
starting from their justifications. Each of the obtained clusters was
associated with a new label. Every label was identified using, as a selective
criterion, the high semantic proximity and frequency of occurrence inside every
aggregation of terms. The obtained data was finally processed by specific software (Evoc2005, IRaMuTeQ). The hierarchized evocation analysis
was allowed to reach the elements, which constitutes the central core and the
periphery of the social representation of the economic crisis, for each group
of participants. Similitude analysis (Flament, 1962; Vergès & Bouriche, 2009)
supported by software like Simi2005 or IRaMuTeQ, has
the advantage to better show the organizational structure of the significant
elements of every SR.
Data from questionnaires of choices and characterization were treated by
using a Similitude analysis, not only in a traditional way, but furthermore in
a multidimensional procedure..
Moreover, a descriptive analysis (SPSS supported) was conducted on all
the variables to verify the presence of differences among the samples
(Chi-square test).
In the following, the ways Italian participants define the
socio-economic climate and the crisis, and the strategies they use to cope with
the crisis were addressed. Also responses to some of the “characterization
questionnaires” included in the collection data strategies were analyzed.
Participants were presented with 15 statements and were asked to choose the
five most important and the five least important. The statements were coded 1
(least important), 3 (most important), and 2 (not chosen). They covered every
sub-dimension of the “content” (complementary to the structure) of the social
representation of the crisis, such as: cognitive-evaluative aspects about the
structure of the representation (central and peripheral elements);
descriptive-defining aspects of the representation; informative sources and
interaction networks; level of involvement/implication with the object;
relationship between representation and social practices; perceptions,
attributions and categorizations (causes, responsibilities, duration/evolution,
solutions, positive implications, the EU’s
role).
In this paper, were only considered the answers related to the following
dimensions: crisis definitions, strategies to tackle the crisis and social
practices related to the crisis. Analysis of these data was carried out using
multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). In this analysis, we considered the
interaction between status and gender as an illustrative variable. Based on
previous evidence of a relationship between education and social class (e.g., Braveman et al., 2005; Weiss, & Fershtman,
1998), we used participant educational level as a proxy for participant social
status (see Stephens, Fryberg, Markus, Johnson, & Covarrubias, 2012).
Participants with a university background were considered of high status (HS),
and participants with a primary or secondary school diploma were considered of
low status (LS). The sample (N= 120) was thus split into four groups (28 LS
men, 28 LS women, 32 HS men, and 32 HS women). MCA is a suitable statistical
approach to uncover the objectification and anchoring processes (see Doise, Clémence, & Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1993). It is particularly useful when the
complexity of relations between responses makes the overall structure difficult
to appreciate. The technique not only detects links between components of the
social representation, but also sheds light on the relationships between these
components and the respondents' group memberships, in the present case on the
basis of gender and social status. Indeed, illustrative variables (social
positions) are placed by MCA at the center of the subset of the social
representation’s components to which they are closest. In this way, the
membership groups of the respondents are projected into the space of responses
and thus, in a way, of the representation. In sum, this procedure is similar to
a two-steps method that consists of factor analyzing the data, then computing
individual positions on factors (factor scores), and performing analysis of
variance of these positions according to variables external to the analysis.
But MCA offers the advantage of providing a simultaneous depiction of responses
and respondents’ characteristics.
Results
We used Eagly’s (1987) and Gilligan’s (1982) theoretical frameworks
to interpret the MCA dimensions. Both approaches distinguish between men’s
agency (autonomy and separateness) and women’s communion (connection to others and
relatedness). But whereas for Gilligan men and women evolve in rather different
spheres, for Eagly’s social role theory the status
dimension is essential in building gender representations. Indeed, the agentic
and communal qualities typically attributed to men and women are rooted in the
gender division of labor. Sex differences and similarities in behavior reflect
people’s observation that most men fulfil professional roles that require
agentic qualities (e.g., managers, engineers, etc.) and that most women fulfil
professional roles that require communal qualities (e.g., caregivers,
elementary school teachers, etc.). In this process, people construct gender
roles that appear to be stable, inherent properties of men and women.
The MCA findings are shown in Figure 1 (39 active variables, and one
illustrative variable consisting of the interaction between gender and status).
The two dimensions show eigenvalues of 3.98 and 2.88 and explain 10.21% and
7.38%, of the total inertia respectively. To interpret the dimensions, we
considered the most important variables, that is those reaching at least .026
(that is, 1/39) of contribution to the inertia of the dimension. The first
dimension (horizontal) opposes an abstract
to a practical pole, that is a
“macroeconomic” to a “microeconomic” image of the crisis. Toward the
abstract-macroeconomic pole there are various technical and macroeconomic
definitions of the crisis (phase of
economic cycle; offer excess/supply reduction; unemployment increase; saving
and investments reduction; banks and finance dysfunction; conspiracy), and
the most ideal strategies to face it (I
participate more in the political life; I help the weakest materially and
morally; I get more informed on politics, economics and finance; I wait for
market equilibrium coming back; I save more; I share what I have with others; I
privilege public transports). On the practical-microeconomic pole appear
definitions oriented towards individual-level behaviors (Reduction of consumption and sales, Stress and frustration, General
distrust, Uncertainty of future, Prices increase, Slump of purchasing power,
Salaries reduction), and a cluster of strategies related to daily ways to
react to the economic crisis (I keep more
engaged in my work, I bet, I do more than one job, I stay more often at my
place watching TV, I buy just low quality brand products, I find alternative
ways to have fun).
On the second dimension, a proactive
and coping oriented image of the crisis opposes a resigned and negatively defining image. On the coping pole there is a prevalence of strategies to cope with the
crisis, while on the defining pole
negative descriptions of the crisis prevail.
The location of the gender × status modalities of the
supplementary variable shows a status effect along the abstract (HS men and women) versus practical (LS men and women) dimension. The gender effect, instead,
shows up only on the residual second dimension, going from the coping and strategic (men) pole to the
resigned and negatively defining (women)
pole. Consequently, the abstract versus practical continuum can be considered
as a status dimension, while the coping versus defining continuum can be
considered as a gender membership dimension. Besides, we can advance that men
(vs. women) are more often proactive (vs. resigned), and that HS participants
(vs. the low status) are more often idealistic and macroeconomic oriented (vs.
practical and micro oriented).
Figure 1. Multiple correspondence analysis. Definitions
(DF), Strategies (ST), Behaviors (Shopping; Debt; Savings; Holidays) of high
and low status men and women on two dimensions.
Testifying to this stronger effect of status and complex interaction
between status and gender, a further Discriminant analysis on the same
variables, with the status × gender interaction as a
discriminating criterion, produced a single significant discriminant function
(Wilk's Lambda = .22, p < .02). This function opposed LS men (centroid =
-1.36) to HS men (1.47), with women laying less markedly on the corresponding
poles (LS = -.60 and HS = .24). A Discriminant analysis using only participant
gender as a discriminating criterion did not produce a significant discriminant
function, whereas the one using participant status did (Wilks's Lambda = .53, p
=.005).
In sum, by considering the positioning of the participants on the two
MCA dimensions we can delineate four distinct social representations of the
economic crisis. The abstract, coping oriented representation consists of HS
men who define the crisis as a phase of the economic cycle, and in terms of
excess offer and supply reduction. They emphasize an increase of savings, but
no modifications of other practices like holidays and shopping. In concert,
they claim they would wait for better times (the market equilibrium). These
participants also endeavor to keep informed, to save more money, to increase
participation in politics, and to help the feeble.
HS women hold a more abstract but negatively defining representation.
They envision the crisis in terms of unemployment, savings and investment
reduction, and malfunctioning or banks conspiracy. They further claim a
decrease in shopping and react to the situation by privileging public
transportation and sharing more with others.
In opposition to HS men, there is a coping oriented but practical
representation among LS men, who define the crisis as stress and frustration,
consumption and sales reduction, general distrust, and uncertainty of future.
These participants claim a huge decrease of shopping and holidays, and react
with more work and more jobs, buying discount products and proactive betting.
Instead, a practical and resigned representation of LS women defines the
crisis as prices and salaries reduction, and slump of purchasing power. In
their opinion, crisis is something inevitable. It hampers holidays and savings
and brings them to react finding alternative ways of fun and changing their
value systems.
Discussion
The representational field of the economic crisis is organized along two
main dimensions: the abstract/practical
dimension, and the coping/defining
dimension. It appears that the objectification of the crisis fits quite well
with Gilligan’s and Eagly’s models, but with some
differences according to the model. While Gilligan’s opposition between abstract and concrete emerges quite clearly as an abstract versus practical dimension, Eagly’s
construct of the communal and the agentic emerges on a further dimension
as a defining (not a communal) versus
a coping pole. The two identified
dichotomies differently objectify definitions and strategies related to the
crisis, creating four different profiles: idealistic and agentic HS men;
idealistic and negatively defining HS women; agentic and practical LS men; and
practical and negatively defining LS women. Overall, then, the MCA findings
complement the Discriminant analysis findings to portray a strong social status opposition, and a gender opposition of lesser magnitude.
The structuring of these dimensions allows us to infer some other
important differences between crisis SRs related to Gilligan’s and Eagly’s frameworks. First, although the first MCA dimension
(as does the single significant discriminant function) appears to objectify
Gilligan’s opposition between abstract and
practical. At the same time, it does
not generally oppose men to women, as one would expect, but HS participants to
LS participants. Because the opposition seems to be stronger when considering
the status combined with gender rather than the gender of the status alone,
this suggests that social status interacts with gender in the production of the
representations of the crisis, coherently with the role of status in the model
proposed by Eagly and Wood (2012).
Referring to the proactive
versus defining dimension, instead,
we observe a gender-membership polarity that is coherent with the general
stereotypical idea of men as more agentic than women (Eagly,
1987), but not completely coherent with the communal character generally
attributed to women. The agentic dimension of stereotypic beliefs about
personal qualities, that describes primarily an assertive and controlling
tendency associated with men (Roberts, 1993), is shown by the prevalence of the
masculine strategies to cope with the crisis (LS men as well as HS men). But
the dimension of communion as opposed to agency is associated with HS women in
opposition to HS men. While HS men react to the crisis by keeping more informed
and participating in political life, HS women are more focused on sharing behaviors.
At the same time, we cannot find the same relevance of the communal dimension
for LS women, although they are positioned, as HS women, on the negatively
defining and resigned pole.
It should be noticed that HS men are associated with the strategy of Helping the weakest, materially and morally.
Even if this represents a sort of “caring” strategy, it is less involving than Share something with others. In fact, as
reported by Eagly (1987) in this regard, women are
more compassionate and more empathetic than are men. Men’s conception of involvement with others is instead more tied
to a qualification of identity rather than its realization (Gilligan, 1982).
Helping distant others (the weakest) instead of share something with them, is a
strategy probably more functional to the personal identity construction than a
real involvement towards others' condition.
This opposition between being, more or less, compassionate and more or
less involved in the relationship with the other also reminds of the collective
versus individualistic norms dichotomy that characterizes cultural as well as
gender representations (Harding, 1986; Lorenzi-Cioldi,
2009; Lorenzi-Cioldi, & Dafflon,
1998; Markus, & Oyserman, 1989). Here, in fact,
HS men are more involved in acting, getting informed and involved in the
political dynamics, coherently with the idea that individuals in western
cultures, as well as men, perceive themselves as full-fledged persons who can
contribute with their idiosyncrasies to the good functioning of the society at
large. Instead, HS women are more engaged in sharing with others. According to
this idea, in fact, individuals in non-western cultures, as well as women,
perceive themselves and are perceived by others as persons who occupy
well-defined places in a community, where they are in the condition to bring
their contribution to its harmony and good functioning. This opposition can
thus be found in a western country (as is
Moreover, according to Gilligan (1982), HS women (on the macro and
abstract side) show values that, in contrast to men, are more oriented toward
collective responsibilities in an ethic of care, although these women position
themselves on the same abstract level of thinking. Their ethic, in fact, does
not consist of a responsiveness to others that impedes a recognition of the
self, but it corresponds to the “realization that self and other are
interdependent and that life, however valuable in itself, can only be sustained
by care in relationship” (Gilligan, 1982, p. 127).
Nevertheless, while this kind of ethic of care is generally associated with a concrete or contextual moral way of thinking (Gilligan, 1982), it
appears to be split between LS women, on the micro and practical pole, and HS
women, on the abstract and sharing pole.
In summary, HS men reveal themselves as the most stereotypically
coherent group, proactive and idealistic. They oppose on the one hand to HS
women, who are more communal but idealistic, and on the other hand to LS women,
who are more practical but not communal.
These fluctuating positioning, maybe could be explained by the typical
configuration of the context of data construction: in the last decades, in
Starting from the nineties, compared to a stable male employment rate,
there is a more substantial increase in female participation in the labour
market.
“The reflection of the
social sciences on the "feminization" of work has produced concepts
through which to interpret the data, which show how the participation of women
is marked by a vulnerability due to both to segregation phenomena rather than
to discontinuous workplaces, in a labor market structure not very permeable to
women's needs, bound to keep family and work life together. The crux of
conciliation and the ways in which it has been dealt with, are the mirror of
the stickiness of a labor market that continues to represent female
unemployment as less serious than male unemployment. Here with the outbreak of
the crisis reappears the idea that women still have an exit strategy, instead
denied to men whose role as breadwinner is still firmly part of a shared
imagination that shapes the choices of public policies since 2008, [in our
Country]. There is a dominant rhetoric about the economic crisis that wants the
male labor force more penalized than the female one. Recent data on the national
labor market trend reinforce this assumption, underlining the increased work
participation of Italian women from the principle of the crisis. The expulsion
of men would therefore seem to have benefited women. In fact, if overall in the
period 2008-2014 Italian employment fell more than the European average
(respectively -2.9% and -0.8%), the data by gender clarifies that this decrease
is mainly attributable to male employees (- 5.5%), more present in the sectors
most affected by the crisis.” (Farina & Vincenti,
2015, pp. 100-101).
The interpretation of these data leads to focus on one of the main
effects of the crisis, that of having strengthened the function of reserve
labour or replacement that women perform on the national labour market, as a
segment of labour that maintains with the market a more labile link. Together
with female employment, the percentage of families in which women are the only
bearer of income has increased. Despite everything, the activity rates of
Italian women still remain extraordinarily low, with a gender differential
which, although decreasing from 2009, measures 20 percentage points in 2014 at
national level, tending to widening from North to South. More than a real
change seems to emerge an overlap between old and new structural disparities
determined by the economic crisis, which ends up maintaining a high gender
disparity in the country (Bonomi, Brosio & Di
Tommaso, 2013; Piazzalunga & Di Tommaso, 2015).
Final remarks and future
developments
We have illustrated that, facing a complex, crucial, but unfamiliar
phenomenon, as the economic crisis, men and women define the crisis and react
to it in different ways. Social representations theory offers the opportunity
to see how gender stereotypes are activated and represented by common sense in
facing this new and disturbing phenomenon. But this common sense is also in
some way filtered by status belongings, as theorized by gender role theory (Eagly, 1987).
In our study, the classical Eagly’s and
Gilligan’s oppositions govern the objectification of the social representations
of the crisis. Men appear more proactive than women, but women do not appear
more communal than men. At the same time, although our findings provide some
support for Gilligan’s opposition, men are not associated with the more
abstract thinking, and women are not associated with the practical one.
However, in coherence with this model, HS women are associated with the care
dimension of women's ethic, activating the communal stereotypical way of acting
but in a macro and idealistic way to define the crisis. LS women, instead,
appear to be coherent with the contextual, concrete part of the woman's
“proclivity to reconstruct hypothetical dilemmas in terms of the real”
(Gilligan, 1982, p. 101).
Thus, it seems that the social anchoring of social representations of
the economic crisis is influenced by gender and social status. Nevertheless,
the difference in status modifies the stereotypical dimensions, also coherently
with predictions derived from gender role theory about the reduction of the
impact of gender stereotypes when men and women occupy similar social positions
(Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1997). The idea that social status
overrides or accounts for gender effects is testified by the fact that the most
congruent roles, HS men on the one hand and LS women on the other hand,
produced the strongest contrast.
In sum, the main findings of the present survey show gender and status
differences in the ways participants define and foresee strategies to face the
crisis, providing some insights into the social psychology of gender dynamics
as related to economic phenomena.
Maybe it would be better, in this regard, to refer to other constructs
like gender traits activation. We could verify how a specific set of traits
masculine/feminine really fits with the tendency to be agentic/resigned or
abstract/practical economic definitions and strategies, and how they interact
with social status (both educational and economic). We could finally obtain new
evidence beyond the traditional stereotypical expectation about women as having
a communal/practical tendency versus the agentic/abstract men one, in facing
economic phenomena. Being a woman does not necessary mean just being more
oriented to others or being practically functional, those seem to condemn women
to be mother and housekeepers. These characteristics, differently combined with
status conditions and specific traits, could show up the particular and
strategically different way women use to face with economic phenomena. So not
only a different “voice”, as identified by Gilligan, but a different
“savoir-faire” to be scientifically legitimated with reference to economic
behaviors. Political actors as well as employers, but also husbands, fathers
and women themselves, could have proofs of how women can represent an active
and creative resource in their managing of large scale economic phenomena. The
“homo oeconomicus” probably has a “mulier oeconomica” that can have different strategic thinking and
consequent behaviors, which could enrich finance as well as economics and
political fields. The integration of finance and economics with social
psychology, and social representations in particular, in studying such complex
economic phenomena could shed light on how these common “mulieres
oeconomicae” think, act, represent their selves, and
are represented by others related economic phenomena. If actually
neuroeconomics seems to refer mostly to the biological activation of parts of
brain, we believe that the activation of parts of culture, by common sense
working, is equally crucial in investigating social behavior and ameliorating
the scenario in which it takes place.
Considering the limitations of the research, it seems important to
underline that our status measure was based on participant education, exclusively.
More direct status measures should also be considered, notably professional
status, income and economic literacy (Sepúlveda Maldonado, Denegri Coria, Orellana Calderón, Criado,
Mendoza, Salazar, & Yung, 2017). The economic standing of people, crossed
with their educational level, could be helpful to devise more precise
hypotheses on the impact of gender on both the agentic/resigned and
abstract/practical dimensions. It would be important to verify the effective
moderating role of social status in this relation, to supply further evidence
to the practical implication of social role theory, which states that weaker
differentiation between men and women’s occupational roles and status, across
societies, would be associated with a decrease in gender differences (Guimond, Chatard, & Lorenzi-Cioldi, 2013).
According to the European Commission Report (2013), devastating
phenomena like the economic crisis offer opportunities for radical change,
including a potential to advance equality for women and men. But our findings
show that gender should not be the exclusive focus of interventions. In fact,
demonstrations of the moderating role of social status have the potential to
disconfirm stereotypical expectations about the sexes. They substantiate the hypothesis
that differences between men and women are not just a matter of gender
membership.
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Receipt: January 11, 2018
Accepted: October 21, 2019
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