Browsing by Subject "Gender"

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Advancing cycling among women: An exploratory study of North American cyclists
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2019) Le, Huyen T. K.; West, Alyson; Quinn, Fionnuala; Hankey, Steve
Past studies show that women cycle at a lower rate than men due to various factors; few studies examine attitudes and perceptions of women cyclists on a large scale. This study aims to fill that gap by examining the cycling behaviors of women cyclists across multiple cities in North America. We analyzed an online survey of 1,868 women cyclists in the US and Canada, most of whom were confident when cycling. The survey recorded respondents’ cycling skills, attitude, perceptions of safety, surrounding environment, and other factors that may affect the decision to bicycle for transport and recreation. We utilized tree-based machine learning methods (e.g., bagging, random forests, boosting) to select the most common motivations and concerns of these cyclists. Then we used chi-squared and non-parametric tests to examine the differences among cyclists of different skills and those who cycled for utilitarian and non-utilitarian purposes. Tree-based model results indicated that concerns about the lack of bicycle facilities, cycling culture, cycling’s practicality, sustainability, and health were among the most important factors for women to cycle for transport or recreation. We found that very few cyclists cycled by necessity. Most cyclists, regardless of their comfort level, preferred cycling on facilities that were separated from vehicular traffic (e.g., separated bike lanes, trails). Our study suggests opportunities for designing healthy cities for women. Cities may enhance safety to increase cycling rates of women by tailoring policy prescriptions for cyclists of different skill groups who have different concerns. Strategies that were identified as beneficial across groups, such as investing in bicycle facilities and building a cycling culture in communities and at the workplace, could be useful to incorporate in long-range planning efforts.
Advancing Equity in Accessibility and Travel Experiences: The Role of Gender and Identity
(Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2023-05) Song, Ying; Fan, Yingling; Zhang, Yaxuan; McDonnell, Ania
Gender can have a significant influence on people's behaviors and experiences. Hence, excluding gender diversity in transportation research and practices can result in biased or incomplete understandings of issues and perceptions about transportation and quality of life. This study examined whether and how gender, in a broader sense, can result in distinctly different activity-travel patterns and subjective well-being (SWB) outcomes using survey data. The study reviewed existing literature and found that gender was not binary meaning that some gender identities were not solely female or male. The literature also indicated a person's gender typically intersected with their other social identities such as race and family type and created unique needs and experiences. To address the complex nature of gender, the team collected new data using the Daynamica smartphone application and included specific questions concerning (1) participants' gender identities and attitudes toward gender roles, (2) their share of household-supporting tasks in 14-day travel diaries, and (3) their emotions during trips and activity participation. The team used 2021 Daynamica survey data and 2019 Travel Behavior Inventory data from the Metropolitan Council to extract activity-travel patterns before and after COVID-19. The team associated these patterns with participants' gender and other identities and SWB outcomes through visual explorations and statistical analysis. The findings suggested the importance of capturing the complex, intersectional nature of gender, confirmed the persistent existence of gender differences in transportation needs, experiences, and SWB outcomes in Minnesota, and supported continuous efforts and investments to advance gender equity in transportation.
Assessing the "goodness of fit" between scholarly assertions and audience interpretations of media images of Black male athletes
(2013-06) Houghton, Emily Jane
The purpose of this study was to examine the "goodness of fit" in sport media research, specifically how audiences interpret media images of Black male athletes and the ways in which their interpretations "fit" with scholarly assertions pertaining to racially marked media depictions. Participants in the study (n=36) were part of eight focus groups segmented by age, gender and race. They viewed and discussed mainstream media images of Black male athletes found on major American sport media websites (ESPN.com and SI.com). The images corresponded with five categories of representation found in the literature: highly competent/natural athlete, exotic savage, deviant, emotionally immature, and race transcendent. Although results were systematically compared across groups, race seemed to be the most significant factor in focus group responses. White participant responses provided support for some of the scholarly assertions (stereotype interpreted as reality, conditional acceptance of Black male athletes, perception of sport as upward mobility and the myth of meritocracy) while African American focus group responses were more likely to challenge some assertions (stereotypes interpreted as reality, perception of sport as upward mobility and myth of meritocracy), and confirm the existence of others (conditional acceptance of Black male athletes). Similar to the sport media study by Kane and Maxwell (2011), which utilized audience reception research, this project aims to generate knowledge and awareness that sport leaders could use to implement programs or practices which have the ability to transform sport and society into a truly equitable realm.
“Assimulation” in the Land of Ten-Thousand Iranian Communities: Public Assimilation Strategies, Private Preservation Identities
(2016-09) Zank, Tracy
Early research on Iranians in the global diaspora has demonstrated specific contexts in which Iranians express transnational identity. Much of this research presents and configures “the community” as a harmonious whole through narrow frames of reference, such as ethnic institutions, economic enclaves, majority-minority assessment based on discrimination and prejudice, and inter-generational and gender change. This study addresses the Twin Cities’ Iranian community as a dynamic, dispersed body of relationships and interactions characterized by an institutional fission-fusion pattern with consequences for ethnic group consciousness and individual identification with and expression of Iranianness. I employ a national and gender identity approach to underscore how Iran’s vacillating political history has crafted modern Iranian men and women, first, in alignment with the West, and then along Islamic ideals. Community, consequently, expands and contracts according to global, micro-macro occurrences. A waning sense of identity incites a centripetal “fusion phase” of institutional life, uniting Iranians through the public celebration of pre-Islamic heritage, privately with extended family, and attempts to teach Persian, a critical tool to navigate the complexities of communication in a hierarchal culture. Paradoxically, the “fusion phase” presents obstacles in intra-cultural interaction, leading to a “fission effect.” Fissioning eludes national camaraderie and community involvement as individuals assess each other’s location in the social hierarchy. The analysis of these identity patterns has been explained using transnational approaches with an emphasis on associations forged in power-vying activities aimed to displace authority and reconfigure national narratives. This dissertation explores these social dynamics in the context of the centripetal fusion and centrifugal fission pattern to explain how Twin Cities’ Iranians cultivate community, despite geographic dispersal, through a shared, intimate micro-history forged in a portable ideology that displaces monolithic assumptions of tradition, identity, and belonging.
Brokering Identity: Exploring The Construction Of Lgbt Political Identity And Interests In U.S. Politics, 1968-2001
(2016-08) Murib, Zein
This study introduces a theoretical framework grounded in intersectionality to the study of identity-based groups in politics, raising and addressing the following questions: how within group marginalization develops, why within group marginalization occurs, and to what effect? By focusing on the construction of the LGBT group and through discourse analysis of three bodies of archival evidence from 1968 through 2001 – the institutional records of several national LGBT interest groups and social movements, a variety of LGBT publications, and transcripts of germane debates from the Congressional Record – this study shows how political actors framed the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities as a cohesive and unified coalition by presenting LGBT people as a minority group defined along a single axis of identity: sexuality. The unity of this new LGBT minority group – organized exclusively around sexuality – was achieved by foregrounding the political interests of gender-normative lesbians and gay men, particularly those who are white, middle-class, able bodied, and gender normative. Consequently, issues such as marriage and second-parent adoption were elevated as the predominant political interests on behalf of the LGBT group, while others, such as the passage of gender-inclusive employment anti-discrimination legislation or political mobilizations to end the documentation of sex on state documents, were deprioritized. Throughout this study, attention is drawn to the ways in which this projection of LGBT group unity obscured intersecting identifications, such as race, gender, class, nation, ability, and immigration status, with significant political and material consequences for the most marginalized members of the LGBT minority group: people of color, people who are transgender, lesbians, people who are gender nonconforming, people who are poor or homeless, people with disabilities, and people who are undocumented.
Case studies in compassion: need interpretation, gender, and family in an era of faith-based provision
(2013-08) Docka-Filipek, Danielle E.
As a result of provisions codified in the 1996 PRWORA, and later, through presidential Executive Order, many Americans now encounter the welfare state through small programs run by local churches. Both liberal and conservative worship communities in the US have embraced and maintained a `traditional' family ideology in which nuclear family ideals are normative--despite increasing levels of diversity in the way the majority of Americans organize their family lives. The central concerns of this dissertation revolve around whether and how programs receiving funds associated with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) are organized around the needs of families that do not fit the traditional nuclear male-breadwinner ideal. I pose three primary questions: 1) How do institutionalized models of family and gender in faith-based organizations inform service providers' interpretations of clients' needs? 2) Do the models of family circulating in faith-based organizations have consequences for the ways these organizations become gendered social spaces? 3) In environments where models for the "Ideal Family" exist in tension with other forms of family life, will organizational rhetorics about family and gender reflect this diversity? To answer the above questions, interviews and participant-observation in four case study organizations (one theologically liberal, two theologically conservative, and one "community-based"), as well as 39 interviews with program authorities in 27 different organizations (drawn across a Midwestern, metropolitan area) were conducted. Although the organizations profiled exhibited a good amount of practices accommodating family diversity, organizational rhetorics did not always reflect the full diversity of participants' family lives. Significantly, I observed a deep ambivalence surrounding non-nuclear family models, a pattern I argue is attributable to the way such family forms call into question dominant beliefs and practices related to the social construction of gender. Furthermore, I found that in settings of community and faith-based social service provision, rhetoric associated with the ideology of religious neoliberalism is pervasive, and extends beyond the discourse circulated by the theologically conservative coalition of elites with which it is normally associated. I argue the pervasiveness of religious neoliberalism is driven by structural conditions compelling organizations to resort to individualistic "moral resources" in the absence of material resources, which limits providers' capacity to promote and access alternative discursive resources that might otherwise reference structural inequality. Lastly, my data indicates that organizations' self-definition as either community-based or faith-based does not indicate "more" or "less" religion, as many other analyses otherwise presuppose. The boundaries between organizations with religious characteristics and those with "non-religious," or more secular, self-presentations are porous, in that they shift over time and in both directions (i.e., organizations become more explicitly expressive of their religious character, or they choose to consciously abandon elements of their religious identity as time passes and their structure develops).
Comics, curriculum and the classroom: the development and implementation of an arts-integrated Holocaust unit
(2014-08) Johnson, Jeremy Lee
Traditionally, the Holocaust has been taught to middle school students using a novel like Anne Frank: The Diary of Young Girl. However, with the recent adoption of the Common Core Standards many teachers must incorporate new ways of teaching content, including the use of graphic novels. This study examined how two teachers, an English teacher and reading teacher, worked collaboratively to create and implement a Holocaust unit that asked students to use comics to demonstrate their learning. While the premise of the study was to examine how teachers with no prior experience incorporated graphic novels into their classrooms, the study became something altogether different. I discuss how the teachers relied on me to teach students how to draw figures and explain the conventions of comics with the final goal of creating a research-based comic examining some element from the Holocaust. During this study I was present in the classroom four full days a week. Data collection methods included participant observation, interviews with staff and students and document collection and analysis. Findings could be categorized three ways and include resistance, gender stereotyping and the accuracy and authenticity of student-created comic narratives. Resistance occurred from both teachers and students. The English and reading teachers resisted use of the term "comic" because they considered it not serious enough for a discussion of the Holocaust. The art teacher resisted participation because he felt that comics were a lower form of art that had no place in education. Student resistance came in the form of a young man who, for example, did not believe that the school should be dedicating nine weeks to studying the Holocaust. A second significant finding focused on gendered stereotypes and how assumptions about gender were made visible through students' comments and perceptions of drawing. Interesting gender differences also existed in the ways students drew their final projects with male students' comics exhibiting depersonalization. Information was shared in an almost bullet-point manner whereas female students spent more time developing characters and exploring emotions. The final area of focus was on the ways in which accuracy and authenticity of narratives were brought into question through failure to emphasize citation of sources and inclusion of bibliographies as part of the students' research project, thus devaluing the factual value of their comic Holocaust narratives.
Complications and complexities in the schooling experiences of young Northern Nigerian women living in Zaria
(2010-07) Jatau, Phebe Veronica
The purpose of this research was to share and interpret the stories of young women in Zaria, an urban city in northern Nigeria, in order to illustrate how their unique positions framed their identity and their attitude toward schooling. There has been a huge concern about the increasing school dropout rate among women in the country, particularly in northern Nigeria. The gender gap and inequities that pervade the educational system have remained daunting challenges. Many stories have been told and are still being told about these women and their ability or inability to access formal education. Most of the literature that examines this phenomenon comes at the problem from a quantitative research approach which beclouds important nuances. As such, a one-size-fits-all approach has been used to promote women's education in Nigeria without recognizing difference. In my research, the complexities and complications involved in the schooling process of these women were uncovered in order to deepen understanding about the issues that they grappled with as they went to school. Qualitative research methods, particularly interviews and deep conversations, were used to elicit the seventeen young women's (between the ages of 18 and 30) experiences. I chose these women purposively using criterion sampling and snowballing. Some women self-selected themselves to participate. Postmodernism, postcolonial feminism, socio-cultural perspectives on literacy, and funds of knowledge were theoretical frameworks that helped me to understand the forces at work in these women's schooling. These forces included poverty, ethnicity, religion, and lack of proficiency in English language, which together informed their identity construction and in the end complicated their schooling processes.
De-emphasizing gender in talk about texts:literature response, discussion, and gender within a classroom community of practice.
(2012-05) Brendler, Beth Monica
Drawing on and reexamining theories on gender and literacy, derived from research performed between 1974 and 2002, this qualitative study explored the gender assumptions and expectations of 19 preservice and practicing secondary language arts teachers in a graduate level adolescent literature course. The theoretical framework was structured around a social constructionist lens, including reader response, gender, and communities of practice theories. The methodology employed ethnographic methods, as well as critical discourse analysis and conversational analysis techniques. This four-month study examined the ways the participants learned in a classroom community of practice and how that functioned. It also explored the ways class members identified with or resisted gender expectations in their book discussion groups and how their individual communities of practice may have influenced those expectations. It looked at the kind of discourses that were maintained and disrupted in the discussion groups, as well as the participants' responses to literature within the classroom community, and within their personal blogs and written responses. The group conversational dynamics provided an additional lens on gender beliefs and power relations. The participants showed diversity within gender that suggested that their varied communities of practice, including this classroom community of practice, most likely influenced their gender beliefs and their response to literature.
Descriptive Practices and Values in Endocrine Disruption Research
(2016-08) Powers, John
This work is a philosophical analysis of descriptive practices and values in endocrine disruption research. Chapter 1 provides an accessible overview. In Chapter 2, I develop a nonreductionist epistemology of research into the endocrine disrupting properties of the herbicide atrazine. I argue that criteria of adequacy governing descriptive practices in atrazine research serve to help organize and coordinate the activities and contributions of researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. In Chapter 3, I examine the influence of non-epistemic values on terminology choice in endocrine disruption research. Researchers face choices about whether or not to use gendered language to describe the harmful effects of atrazine. I argue that such choices are locations of “inductive risk.” In Chapter 4, I examine traditional “global demarcation” approaches for recognizing science that is problematically value-laden. I argue that global demarcation projects as currently undertaken are unlikely to meet their aims and suggest an alternative approach. This alternative approach reinterprets global demarcation projects as providing prima facie principles of good science. The prima facie principles resulting from such modest demarcation projects are to be integrated with appeals to local criteria of adequacy for scientific practices, and principles of inference for illicit influences of values in science. I illustrate this approach using a case of industry funded pesticide research. In Chapter 5, I argue that choices about whether to be a monist or pluralist about scientific terms depend on the epistemic and nonepistemic goals and values of debate participants. I illustrate by analyzing monism and pluralism about the terms ‘potency’ and ‘endocrine disruptor’ in recent endocrine disruption debates.
Después del arresto: Una aproximación interdisciplinaria a la criminalización de las madres inmigrantes
(2015-10) Hernandez, Luz
Keywords: Immigration, Deportation, Discourse Analysis, Gender, Social Identity, Agency This research presents a comparative discourse analysis of the discourse of Guatemalan and Mexican women who changed their immigration status from undocumented to documented or from undocumented to deported due to an immigration raid in 2008. The corpus data analyzed consists on fifteen interviews, eight interviews with deportee women and seven interviews with women who regularized their immigration status. The analysis focuses on identifying the discursive strategies that these women use to make sense of the experience of changing their immigration status. The interviews are analyzed using discourse analysis as a method along with an interdisciplinary approach using Linguistics, International Migration, Migrant Rights and U.S. Immigration Law. Data analysis demonstrates that deportee women and women who regularized their immigration status use the same discursive strategy, utilizing the pronoun one to talk about changing their immigration status. Deportee women express how they endure this legal punishment and the resulting lack of employment and basic goods. Women who regularized their immigration status explain how their labor rights were denied while undocumented but are granted to them as documented workers. Both use the pronoun one, which reveals that they view and present the experience as a collective experience that they have undergone as part of a social group. This discursive strategy of using uno also discloses how identity is constructed socially. Immigrants are defined and identified as part of a group in society: undocumented, documented or deportee. Contrasting this similarity using uno, women who regularized their immigration status also utilize the pronoun I as a linguistic strategy to indicate that they have more agency in their daily life. In addition, they employ narratives to explain how they solve difficulties and problems that affected them while they were immigrants without proper documentation. The discourse analysis of the discourse of these immigrant women shows how immigrants experience the immigration law that penalizes them. As well, it exhibits how migration and deportation are collective activities, and how migrant rights are granted based on the immigrant’s immigration status. Further data and conclusions are discussed.
Differences in ride-hailing adoption by older Californians among types of locations
(Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2021) Shirgaokar, Manish; Misra, Aditi; Agrawal, Asha Weinstein; Wachs, Martin; Dobbs, Bonnie
Ride-hailing services such as Lyft and Uber can complement rides offered by family, friends, paid providers, and public transit. To learn why older adults might wish to use ride-hail, we conducted an online survey of 2,917 California respondents age 55 and older. Participants were asked whether they would value four features hypothesized to be benefits of ride-hailing. We specified binary logit models and used market segmentation to investigate whether there were location-based differences in the use of ride-hailing. Our analysis showed that women, city dwellers, persons with disabilities, and those who rely on others for rides were more open to ride-hailing. Women in suburbs or small town/rural settings were more likely to ride-hail than their male counterparts for reasons of independence, fear of being lost while driving, or getting help with carrying bags. Urban women, in contrast, were less likely than their male counterparts to ride-hail for these reasons. High-income individuals in suburbs or small town/rural locations were more likely to ride-hail than low-income respondents, while high-income urban residents were less likely to ride-hail. Adoption of ride-hailing services and the reasons for doing so showed strong variability by location even among respondents with similar socio-demographic attributes.
Disciplining Latino/A Youth In Greater Metro Atlanta: A Mixed Methods Approach
(2020-06) Cuthbert, Jessica
Since the 1960s more police and security measures have been used to monitor youth. Today 42 percent of schools have a school resource officer (SRO) stationed inside their buildings; 26 states allow schools to expel students for “willful defiance”; and 91 percent use surveillance cameras. These policies and practices are more prevalent in predominantly Black and Brown schools, and serve as race-based social control mechanisms. This dissertation explores school criminalization in greater metro Atlanta, Georgia, using panel data from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and Georgia’s Department of Education (GaDOE) to identify school trends from 2009 to 2015. It has two primary aims: first, to expand racial threat theory beyond the black and white model by exploring how Latino/a students are criminalized in comparison to Black students; and second, to investigate how school resource officers contribute to racial and gender bias in school discipline. In the quantitative portion of this study, I analyze data using a mixed-methods approach, including linear fixed effects estimates of the racial composition of school and school discipline rates. In the qualitative portion, I report the results of my yearlong ethnographic study of one SRO’s relationship to staff and students in a predominantly Latino/a high school. The quantitative findings show that increases in the Latino/a population schools do not yield higher discipline rates, except for expulsion rates. Meanwhile, the qualitative findings demonstrate that the criminalization and racialization of Latino/a and Black students take different forms, especially when viewed through the lens of gender as well as race. I hope that the conclusions of this and similar studies will influence the decisions of policy-makers and key stakeholders in the educational and criminal justice systems at this pivotal moment in U.S. history, when the nation is collectively confronting the ugly truth of how state punishment shores up systemic racism.
Educating The Elite: Ethics, Economics, And Inequality In America’S Most Prestigious Business Schools
(2019-10) Shamash, Rebecca
Today the distribution of wealth in the United States has diverged to mirror levels of inequality not experienced since the early 20th century. In addition to overall wealth, the distribution of income has also become increasingly unequal. This trend has resulted in the rise of what Thomas Piketty (2014) calls supermanagers—top executives of large firms who have managed to obtain unprecedented compensation for their labor; and members of the economic elite are now much more likely to be members of the professional elite who tend to eschew a class narrative in favor of identifying as the best and brightest (Ho, 2009; Khan, 2010, Khan, 2012; Rivera, 2016). This explanation for their success, which relies heavily on notions of meritocracy and specific ideas about fairness, reflects a change in the way society determines winners and losers (Guinier, 2015). Institutions of higher education, particularly those that are most elite, play a prominent role in elite reproduction (Khan, 2012a; Khurana, 2010) as well as in the selection of members of the professional elite. This dissertation uses ethnographic methods to explore how prestigious business schools reproduce culture and social class, and how the MBA experience provides students with a worldview that justifies the existence of severe inequality. I draw upon data collected over 14 months, including 34 semi-structured interviews with students and graduates of prestigious business schools, 10 informal but in-depth conversations with business school professors, field notes related to the attendance of MBA class sessions and social events, and promotional and curricular materials. Results provide insights into the ways prestigious business schools train students to explain and justify decisions about business and ethical issues in specific ways through institutional norms related to curriculum and pedagogy; how the institutions understand and deal with diversity; and how the MBA experience beseeches students to value certain professions and lifestyles over others, despite inherent contradictions in this value system. I find that prestigious—and particularly elite—business schools meet student expectations by providing them with clear paths to high-prestige, high-paying jobs through the assignment of credibility via association with a prestigious university, as well as through access to a powerful alumni association and on-campus corporate recruitment. In addition to these transactional benefits, students typically experience a marked increase in self-confidence and make friends who come to comprise a close social network of similarly high-earners that helps to normalize the wealth most MBA graduates acquire and the lifestyles associated with high compensation. I also discuss how diversity is understood in prestigious business schools (typically as centered around national origin and prior professional experience), and how women and students of color experience MBA programs as gendered, raced, and classed individuals. Finally, I examine barriers to critical education and address curricular and pedagogical norms and their implications. Further, I find that the MBA students and graduates I spoke with referred to competing ideas about what it means to be successful; several were particularly ambivalent about the meaning of money, its relationship to their self-worth, and its significance to their professional trajectories.
Embodying Empowerment: Gender, Schooling, Relationships and Life History in Tanzania
(2016-05) Willemsen, Laura
This dissertation explores the interplay of education and empowerment as it is lived by seven young Tanzanian women and developed at a unique all-girls’ secondary school in Tanzania. Drawing on interviews and participant observation from eight trips over four years, this study offers a longitudinal, ethnographic exploration of the school, Sasema Secondary School for Girls, to explore the rationale and production of curricula, pedagogies and practices that draw on global, national and local notions of empowerment and education. This study illuminates the tensions, vulnerabilities, feats and aspirations in young women’s lives through employing a life history approach focusing on three young women’s complete life histories. It examines the role that schooling has played, and has not played, in what these women describe as a contingent movement from vulnerability toward increasing security and well-being. This dissertation advances two main arguments: First, by exploring the practices and pedagogies at Sasema that young women have found to be valuable in their lives both at and beyond school, it demonstrates the significance of, and possibilities for, emotional and social learning through schooling while underscoring the importance of care in schools. As such, this research reinforces calls to conceptualize educational quality beyond the metrics of academic knowledge or vocational skills, traditionally thought of as schooling’s raison d’être, toward more holistic notions of education for the whole person. Second, this study complicates and adds nuance to accepted notions of empowerment through education by offering deeply contextualized portraits of young women’s lives as they understand them to be unfolding. Although empowerment is frequently analyzed in economic or political terms, this work reveals that, for these young women, empowerment is also profoundly psychosocial and even corporeal. Furthermore, additional forces, such as family, religion and community, are at play in their notions of processes that advance their well-being and the well-being of others. As such, this study reveals disjunctures between empowerment through education as it lived by young women in Tanzania and as discussed by scholars of international development, education and gender.
Episode 14: Sex Trafficking and Community Wellbeing
(2018-01-26) Martin, Lauren; Conners, Kate
In this podcast, Lauren Martin, director of research at the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC) and affiliate faculty member of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, addresses sex trafficking and commercial sex, defining their differences and dispelling myths. When it comes to the relationship between sex trafficking and mega sporting events, an issue that drew increased attention as Minnesota prepared to host the big game, Martin notes that "it's not that there's no impact, it's that the impact is akin to any large event."
Episode 18: Abortion Reform Under Latin America's Leftist Governments
(2018-07-19) Ewig, Christina; Conners, Kate
Research in the United States and Europe has found that when leftist governments come to power there tends to be a liberalization of policies around reproductive rights. But is this true in other parts of the world? Work by Christina Ewig, professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and faculty director of the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy, investigates how the rise of leftist governments during Latin America's "pink tide"(1999-2018) influenced abortion policies in the region. Unlike in the US and Europe, Ewig's findings suggest that the success of progressive reform under leftist governments in Latin America also depends on the type of political party in office.
Episode 7: Intimate Partner Violence in Colombia
(2017-04-25) Friedemann-Sanchez, Greta; Conners, Kate
In 2008, Colombia expanded legislation addressing women's human right to live a life free from violence. The prevalence of intimate partner violence in Colombia is one of the highest in Latin America. In this podcast, Greta Friedemann-Sanchez, associate professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, explores the complexity of implementing the 2008 legislation given Colombia's institutional organization and the context of the conflict.
Essays in Inequality and Gender in Developing Countries
(2015-10) Lovaton Davila, Rodrigo
This dissertation is comprised of three essays: two of which focus on the impacts of changes in maternity leave legislation on women's employment status and fertility, and the third concentrates on aggregation methods for the construction of asset-based proxy measures for household socioeconomic status in developing countries. In the first essay, I explore the effects of maternity leave on labor market outcomes in six countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela). The evidence shows that maternity leave has a positive effect on the labor force participation and unemployment-to-population ratio of women of childbearing age. In the second essay, I investigate the impact of maternity leave on fertility for the same set of six countries. Results suggest that maternity leave has small negative effects on higher order births for young adult women (18 and 30 years old), while it has small positive effects on fertility for older adult women (31 and 45 years old). If we consider these two effects, the evidence indicates that increases in maternity leave duration are associated to postponing some additional births. Finally, the third essay analyzes the performance of alternative methods to aggregate data for an asset-based wealth index using ordinal variables. Despite recommendations given by previous research, results suggest a relatively similar performance of principal components analysis on dichotomized data with respect to other methods that work with ordinal variables.
Evaluation of gender differences in endothelium-independent dilation in healthy adults using peripheral arterial tonometry
(2012-12) McCue, Meghan Cameron
Peripheral arterial tonometry (PAT) is a non-invasive method used to evaluate vascular function. PAT is often used to measure digital pulsatile volume changes in response to reactive hyperemia, which provides a measure of endothelium-dependent dilation (EDD). Reactive hyperemia does not allow one to quantify endothelium-independent dilation (EID), which is typically measured using sublingual nitroglycerin (NTG) mediated dilation. Though most research examining vascular function and cardiovascular disease has focused on EDD, there is evidence that cardiovascular risk factors may impair EID. To our knowledge, PAT has not been used with NTG to determine EID. The purpose of this study was to examine the microvascular vasodilation response to nitroglycerin (NTG) in healthy adults using PAT. Microvascular responses to reactive hyperemia and NTG were evaluated in 86 (41 F, 45 M) healthy subjects (age 37±5 yrs). Beat-to-beat plethysmographic measurements of finger arterial pulse waves were recorded for 5-min following reactive hyperemia. After a 10-min rest period, sublingual NTG (0.4 mg) was administered and PAT signal changes were measured for 10-min. Peak reactive hyperemic index (RHI) and peak NTG-mediated index (NMI) were determined in all subjects. Though there were no significant gender differences in peak RHI (2.07±0.56 F vs. 1.91±0.58 M, P=0.20), peak NMI was significantly greater in females (3.11±1.59 F vs. 2.50±1.34 M, P=0.05). Time to peak NMI was not significantly different between genders (7-min, 28-s [±1-min, 47-s] M, vs. 7-min, 14-s [±1-min, 49-s] F, P=0.58). In this population of healthy adults, RHI did not differ by gender. However, we observed a significantly greater microvascular vasodilation response to NTG using PAT in females than in males. Significance of this finding is unclear, but may indicate the beginning of cardiovascular changes in adult males, as detected with lower peak NMI at the microvascular level. Future studies are needed to determine the exact mechanism underlying the reported gender differences in EID.

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