Efficacy, Self-Derogation, and Alcohol Use Among Inner-City Adolescents: Gender Matters

Prior studies have found inconsistent relationships between measures of self-concept and adolescent alcohol use. The current study explored whether the link between various measures of self-concept and alcohol use depends on gender. In addition, earlier work suggested a focus on negative self-esteem (i.e., self-derogation) might be more useful in predicting alcohol use. Students (N = 1459) attending 22 middle and junior high schools in New York City completed surveys that included measures of efficacy, self-derogation, and alcohol use. Participants completed surveys at baseline, 1-year follow-up, and 2-year follow-up. Data collectors administered the questionnaire following a standardized protocol during a regular 40-min-class period. On the basis of a longitudinal structural equation model, lower efficacy was related to greater self-derogation a year later across gender. Increased self-derogation predicted higher alcohol use for girls but not boys. These findings are congruent with a literature highlighting the importance of negative thoughts about the self in drinking behavior for women but not men. The results suggest that the alcohol prevention approaches should include material to enhance girls' self-esteem.     

Endless Sex: The Gender Recognition Act 2004 and the Persistence of a Legal Category

This paper challenges a view of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 as involving an unequivocal shift from the concept of sex to the concept of gender in law’s understanding of the distinction between male and female. While the Act does move in the direction of gender, and ostensibly in an obvious way through abandoning surgical preconditions for legal recognition, it will be argued that the Act retains and deploys the concept of sex. Moreover, it will be argued that the concept of sex retained is not merely an anatomical understanding, but sex in a biological sense. In this respect the Gender Recognition Act can be viewed as embodying a tension between gender and sex. Further, it is contended that this tension is explicable in terms of irresolution of contrary legal desires to reproduce the gender order and to insulate marriage and heterosexuality from homosexuality in the moment of reform.     

The Peer Appearance Culture During Adolescence: Gender and Body Mass Variations

The purpose of this research was to examine gender and body mass, as factors linked to perceived experiences within the peer appearance culture. The sample included 215 girls and 200 boys who were either in 7th grade or 10th grade. Students provided self-reports on experiences in three domains: appearance culture among friends (appearance conversations and diet/muscle talk), peer evaluations (peer appearance pressure, appearance teasing, and vicarious peer teasing), and peer acceptance concerns (appearance-based acceptance, peer appearance comparison). The results indicated that although girls reported more appearance conversations, boys perceived more appearance pressure and teasing. Boys also admitted that they talked with friends about muscle building at a rate greater than girls talked about dieting. BMI showed distinct gender patterns. BMI was a key attribute that unified the experiences within the appearance culture for overweight girls. Among the boys, BMI was associated with differentiated experiences for underweight and overweight participants.Associate Professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Washington. She is a developmental psychologist specializing in the contributions of peers to body image and social-emotional well-being during adolescence. Research interests include body image during adolescence and gender differences.Doctoral student at the University of Washington in Human Development and Cognition. Her research focuses on the social-emotional development of adolescents, academic and appearance social comparisons, and issues related to gender and science. Research interests include body image during adolescence, gender differences, social comparison, and academic competence.     

Vulnerability to Friends’ Suicide Influence: The Moderating Effects of Gender and Adolescent Depression

This paper examines whether severity of depression reduces or intensifies the relationship between friends’ suicide attempt and adolescent's own attempt to commit suicide, and whether there are gender differences in this interrelationship. Using logistic regression and data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents studied at 2 points in time, this study yielded significant findings. First, friends’ suicide attempt and adolescent depression each predicts adolescent's own attempt to commit suicide, and these effects are similar for both boys and girls. Second, highly depressed adolescents are less likely than low- or nondepressed adolescents to attempt suicide when their friends attempt suicide, and this relationship is observed mainly among adolescent boys. Finally, for adolescent girls, depression reduces the relationship between friends’ suicidal attempt and adolescent's own attempt but this effect is not statistically significant. These results are discussed in light of their theoretical importance and policy implications.Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University. Has published in the areas of crime/delinquency, drug use/abuse, intergenerational processes, and psychosocial stress. Recent publications have appeared in Western Criminology Review, Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociological Inquiry, Journal of Adolescent Research, and Youth and Society.     

Interparental Conflict and Late Adolescents' Sensitization to Conflict: The Moderating Effects of Emotional Functioning and Gender

The present study examined the extent to which individuals exposed to frequent and intense interparental conflict (IPC) across childhood and adolescence are sensitized to conflict during late adolescence. Late adolescents' perceptions of their exposure to IPC while growing up were examined in relation to their self-reported emotional and social-cognitive reactions to simulated conflict. Emotional functioning and gender were expected to moderate the relations of IPC to late adolescents' reactions. IPC exposure had stronger effects on the negative emotional reactions of adolescents low in emotional functioning and males than on the emotional reactions of adolescents higher in emotional functioning and females, respectively. Moreover, IPC was positively related to females' negative beliefs about conflict implications but unrelated to males' beliefs. Results are discussed in terms of the sensitization hypothesis and gender differences in sensitivity to conflict.     

Europeanising Gender Mainstreaming: Constraints and Opportunities in the Multilevel Euro-polity

What are the conditions for empowering `gender mainstreaming' as a new policy frame beyond the supranational level in member states and regions of the European Union? This paper is premised on the following assumptions: that mainstreaming will reduce gender disparities in Europe only if it takes root at all levels of decision-making, but that some national gender regimes can be expected to resist mainstreaming more than others, especially because it does not command `hard' legal tools. The puzzle to be examined is how mainstreaming can become effective across the European multilevel polity. It is argued that vis-à-visthe resistance of domestic gender regimes, the Europeanisation of equal treatment norms in national, regional and local contexts over the past decades has generated a variety of mechanisms for the cross-border diffusion of new policy ideas that can help to promote mainstreaming. Drawing on comparative Europeanisation research, this argument is developed in three steps. First, the past performance of member states in the implementation of E.U. gender directives is explored, to identify patterns and dynamics and classify leaders and laggards. Second, current mainstreaming experiences in one of the most conspicuous laggard states – Germany – are examined closely. Finally, as a means of explaining the rather intense engagement of German federal and regional governments with mainstreaming, two factors are highlighted: elite learning, and new governance instruments developed by the E.U. Notwithstanding the steps taken to promote mainstreaming, the prospects for further institutionalization within the E.U. appear contingent on the outcome of the Convention on the Future of the Union and the Intergovernmental Conference planned for 2004, since the invigorating of the subsidiarity principle and the division of competences across the multilevel polity are key issues of debate. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Parity,Power and Representative Politics: The Elusive Pursuit of Gender Equality in Europe

In recent years the concept of parity democracy has rapidly risen up the European political agenda. Using a threefold typology of sex-quotas, this article undertakes a classification of the measures taken by the 15 old E.U. member states to improve the gender balance in representative assemblies. This is then used as the basis for an exploration of the advantages and disadvantages of the parity approach as a tool to promote gender equality, including the constitutional obstacles which stand in its way. The article goes on to present a comparative study of several national systems in which attempts to achieve parity democracy have been pursued, concluding that, in order to maximise their effectiveness, parity measures must operate within a system of unbiased political structures and be properly adjusted to suit the particularities of individual national electoral regimes.     

Gender mainstreaming and the framing of women's rights in Europe: The contribution of the Council of Europe

Drawing on published materials from the Committee of Ministers, Assembly and expert working groups of the Council of Europe, this paper investigates the distinctive contribution made to the framing of women's rights over the last two decades by this regional organisation, which recent studies of the `Europeanisation' of public policies have largely neglected. Elements of congruence are identified between the major mobilising themes of second wave feminism and the Council's emphasis on protecting individual rights, and its sensitivity to the incompleteness and shortcomings of `actually existing' democratic institutions and practices. The relative openness of its agenda-setting processes is also underlined. The Council's flag ship policies for women are shown to have centred since the mid-1980s on a `politics of presence' frame and the (contested) concept of `parity democracy', and the tensions between these and the more recent turn to gender mainstreaming are explored. But the paper also points to the Council's role in diffusing into the E.U. governance arena women's claims to equal participation and presence in the policy process, and notes recent French and U.K. legislation as testifying to the continuing salience of these claims at the national level. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Little Swans with Luxette and Loved Boy Pudding: Changing Fashions in Cookery Books

Cookery books are far from simple things: alongside the recipes we may find narrative, memoir, science, history, politics, travelogue and anthropology. The cookery book also reveals in a profoundly naked form the anxieties and paranoias of its precise historical moment. So the glamorous cookery books of the years between the wars try to persuade the newly servantless middle-class woman that the cooking she must now do herself is a creative and fashionable activity. And the postwar British, sick of the limited stodge of their still-rationed diet, clutched Elizabeth David to their collective bosom, unable to taste her pungent dishes, but in thrall to the sun-strewn fantasy of the good life her books offered. From Mrs Beeton, offering the mid-Victorian mistress of the house the instructions and routines she needed to hide the mechanisms of the domestic machine, to the potent contemporary fantasy of the Mediterranean peasant and his fabulously healthy lifestyle, Humble interrogates the cookery books of the last 150 years, asking what they can tell us about how changing attitudes to class, gender and domesticity intersect with the culture of food.